Funding needed to end careers advice shambles

Is there a light at the end of the dark tunnel that careers advice services for England’s young people has become?

Education secretary Nicky Morgan has at least been more positive than her predecessor and certainly seems more willing to accept that there is a problem.

One cannot argue against her plans, unveiled last month, for a £5 million investment fund to be operated by a new careers and enterprise company. This is to support schools and colleges, increase employer input, and to “stimulate” school-business partnerships (for more, see http://bit.ly/1BL1tex).

Appearing before the Education Select Committee last week, Ms Morgan said, however, that she would not mandate schools to provide professional careers advisors and that it was for individual institutions to commission the services they need – continuing to perpetuate the government’s long-standing myth that it is giving all the powers back to schools.