In 2015, when the Careers and Enterprise Company started, we identified 18 areas that were “careers cold spots”. These were places where careers provision was particularly needed, identified based on measures including disadvantage and employer engagement in schools.

Now, four years later, seven of the 10 areas that perform best on careers education across the country were originally cold spots. 

To bring this statistic to life, it is worth exploring what we mean by careers education: we use the Gatsby Benchmarks as our measure. These benchmarks require young people to have a set of experiences that broaden their horizons and help them to make more informed career decisions. Young people are able to try things out, see what they like, try other things, and form a plan for their lives beyond education.

Background: Are you meeting the new careers education guidelines?

Opinion: ‘Improving careers guidance takes time and effort’

News: Careers education is variable but ‘improving’

Central to this is employer interaction: we know young people cannot be what they cannot see. Taking children out of their typical context and immersing them in new and engaging experiences with a range of employers helps them to imagine a different type of future for themselves. The impact can be particularly powerful for young people with less broad networks. The evidence shows this type of engagement increases both motivation at school or college and long-term earnings. The Gatsby Benchmarks require every child to meet an employer at least once a year and have two workplace experiences through their education.

As well as employer interaction, the Gatsby framework requires young people to have a wide experience of later education and work options (further education, apprenticeships, universities), access to good Labour Market Information and good one-to-one careers guidance. The careers education needs to be integrated into the school or college’s overall programme of work by a senior careers leader who either sits on or reports to the senior leadership team.

Among the former cold spot areas now doing well on the Gatsby Benchmarks are Tees Valley, Lancashire, Worcester and the Black Country. Tees Valley has a pool of 600 employers working with the 60 schools and colleges in the region’s careers hub. In Lancashire, Worcester and the Black Country, the proportion of young people meeting an employer every year is now over 70 per cent - an increase of a third in just the last year. In Blackpool, it is over 90 per cent. On other measures, such as linking careers to the curriculum or helping young people learn from Labour Market Information, there has also been substantial progress.

The question this raises is why - why is careers education bucking the typical trend of disadvantage correlating with lower performance?

Investment

Clearly one reason is investment. The majority of these areas are now careers hubs. They benefit from strong support from lead schools and hub leads, training for careers leaders, modest shared funding and, in some cases, “virtual wallets” to spend on careers activities. Even before the introduction of careers hubs, our annual investment funds at the Careers and Enterprise Company went into these areas.

However, the scale of funding is still modest compared with previous careers systems. The pace of change and the fact it is so consistent across schools and colleges in these areas suggests investment cannot be the full story. 

Regional leadership

The second factor has been regional leadership. Our research on what makes the difference shows that local leadership is crucial. This leadership can come from a range of places: the local enterprise partnership, the mayor, lead schools and colleges, local businesses. However, without someone grasping and pushing it as a regional priority, it is hard to make it work.

We have been fortunate that, in many of these areas, all these different local leaders take this agenda seriously and are working to drive progress, bringing together the many people needed to successfully support local young people. In this case, it really does take a village.

Which leads me to the final factor: individuals.

Individuals in schools, colleges and employers

It is very striking when you talk to individual school, college or business leaders in these areas how committed they are to this agenda. They are clear this work matters. They know their young people won’t necessarily trip into easy jobs when they leave education - and won’t necessarily have a wide range of immediate role models. They know if they invest in careers, it will have concrete impacts on the young people they are seeking to help. And so, they are making the investment.

Delivering on this agenda takes the commitment of a huge number of individuals. School and college heads, careers leaders and classroom teachers, thousands of employer volunteers. Many of the careers leaders who work on this spend beyond the time allocated to deliver on the programme of work, and report high levels of motivation and conviction. 80 per cent of the 2,500 employers we support to volunteer a day a month in schools and colleges across the country plan to continue the work next year. 

Careers education is proven to improve engagement in education and employment outcomes for young people, so perhaps it is no wonder that this commitment is being made.

However, it is nonetheless a tribute to the work and efforts of schools, colleges and employers around the country that the results are so quick and particularly powerful in some of the most deprived communities in the country. 

There has been considerable progress but we are only four years into the journey and there is much more to do. The key question to consider now is where we might be in another four.

Claudia Harris is chief executive of the Careers and Enterprise Company