In 2015, the North East had the highest level of young people not in employment, education or training of any region in England. Half of the schools in the area did not fully achieve a single one of the eight Gatsby Benchmarks of excellent careers education.

Since then, a transformative new pilot “Careers Hub” has established a regional network of schools, colleges and businesses to identify common challenges and develop solutions.

We shared advice, resources and best practice, and worked to build careers education across the curriculum. After two years, 85 per cent of schools fully achieved six or more of the eight Gatsby Benchmarks, establishing real expertise in the region to support excellent careers education.

Building on the Gatsby pilot in the North East, this supportive Careers Hub structure is now being rolled out across the country. The Careers and Enterprise Company today has announced 20 new Career Hubs across England and with these, we will rapidly raise aspiration.

With the new Careers Hubs and the publication of the National Careers Strategy, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to support all students in all schools and colleges across the country, to secure excellent careers education and guidance that inspires and supports them to achieve their ambitions.

All of this makes me reflect on the journey we have been on at Churchill Community College over the past three years. The North East Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) was chosen to pilot the Gatsby Benchmarks in 13 secondary schools and three colleges in the North East, including Churchill Community College.

Careers Hubs

We were excited to be part of the pilot and felt that we would be able to support other schools, based on the standard of our own provision. It was only when we looked seriously at the eight benchmarks that we realised that we did not fully meet any of them. We were doing some amazing things for many groups of young people but I simply could not say that we met the needs of each and every young person.

Suddenly, we had a framework that both defined and raised the bar. There was nothing in the Gatsby Benchmarks that we didn’t agree with and nothing we wouldn’t want for every child. The challenge for us was how we would achieve these benchmarks within our existing resources.

The North East pilot ran for two years and had four important ingredients that ensured we were successful as a group of schools and colleges:

Leadership

Our facilitator, Ryan Gibson, had the skills and experience to bring an understanding of how schools work, in-depth understanding of the benchmarks and experience of business that would support and challenge us.

School level leadership 

Identifying the right person with the right skills that we could invest in to lead this work. For us, this has been Marie Jobson, our careers leader, who has embraced the opportunity and immersed herself in the training and development opportunities. We realised that our leader needed to be on the senior team to drive this forward and make sure, long-term, we could make connections with all of the other aspects of the curriculum that would make this work a success.

Regional coherence 

The North East LEP were able to rapidly support our understanding of the regional economy, making labour market information accessible and useful whilst at the same time linking us to a wider range of employers and aligning all work to the regional strategic economic plan and the national agenda.

Support

The network of schools in the pilot became a mutually supportive structure, developing and sharing good practice. The diversity of the schools in the pilot meant that we had a wide range of ideas and experiences that helped all of us develop. Support also came from our enterprise coordinators at the North East LEP, who connected us to local employers, accelerating our understanding of the business world.

We were careful to make sure the pilot did not involve staffing commitments that would not be available to support us long-term; we reallocated existing resources and built sustainable structures so that careers could become embedded into the fabric of the school. In short, we needed to make this work in a way that could be scalable and replicable in every school in the future.

The pilot gave us the space to stop and think and to use the benchmarks to raise levels of expectation. We spent a long time thinking about the word “meaningful” and how we embed this in the central work of the school through teaching and learning.

We rapidly realised that some of the things we were doing would never be meaningful without building in the opportunity to allow students to reflect and learn. We also spent time thinking about what meaningful work experience might look like. We reached the decision that it had to enable all students to thrive in unfamiliar situations. Therefore we needed to structure the experience just like a good sequence of lessons. This has led to a really innovative experience that students and employers tell us works and is scalable.

Here at Churchill Community College we are proud to now achieve all eight benchmarks. A year on from the pilot, we continue to develop our work and ensure our provision adapts to the changing needs of our students and the economic developments regionally. It has been a real honour to go out to other schools and other regions to share our experiences and help people learn from our approach.

Ofsted has already said careers education is improving. If the 20 new Careers Hubs across England can replicate what happened in the North East, there is huge potential for another step change in careers support. I am excited by this and ready to support schools to seize the opportunities that this brings and help them to learn from our experiences.

David Baldwin is the headteacher of Churchill Community College