Levelling up requires careers advice for all pupils, not just academic high-fliers.

By Matthew Greenwood

It’s been several months since Gavin Williamson announced that the government, quite rightly, intends to scrap Tony Blair’s target to send 50% of young people to university. It may seem a little hypocritical, a university student saying that not all people need to go to university, but it is true. Not all degrees offer good value for money, and some are hardly worth the paper they’re written on, but the assumption nonetheless remains that if you don’t go to university, you have failed. This is not true: people only believe it to be true because we have made it so. Years of directing all our focus solely on getting pupils into university have devalued the equally valuable alternative pathways available to young people, and this has to change. We can start by giving young people the right advice that enables them to make the best choices for their post-18 future.

Good-quality careers advice is often non-existent in schools, and this is holding lots of pupils back. Over 80% of the most disadvantaged secondary schools lack a dedicated access officer, and most of those schools cite insufficient resources as the reason for this. Whether pupils want to go into higher or further education, they need the right advice to be able to make an informed choice about what is best for their future. We could ask teachers to provide the advice, but they are already overburdened, and sixth forms will be bursting at the seams after this year’s results fiasco – more students mean more exam scripts, and more marking, you get the picture. Additionally, the increasing fragility of the job market means advice is harder to give; it isn’t a role that teachers can fulfil in their non-existent spare time, but one that needs full-time members of staff who can focus on pupils’ skills and point them in the right direction. Therefore, if the government wants to publicly affirm its belief that going to university isn’t the only pathway, then it needs to help pupils access other opportunities, and it can do so by creating new advisor hubs. 

Advisor hubs should comprise 3-4 members of staff who are specialised in different post-18 education routes in order to tailor support to pupils regardless of their pathway, and each hub should cover a group of schools. While we could just give each school an access officer, we know from widespread anecdotal evidence that where access officers are present they often spend more time focussing on those pupils which the school believes can progress into higher education, rather than those who are less likely to do so, another symptom of our “university or nothing” approach. By creating hubs that spread their resources across multiple schools and pupil types, we can reduce the impact of this approach by providing a member of staff that is dedicated to a pupil’s pathway and has a suitable network to support individual pupils, regardless of ability or type, rather than grouping all pupils together and hoping for the best. This way, one member of staff can focus on supporting pupils with their university applications, advising them on student finance and the funding streams available, while another can focus on helping pupils access good-quality apprenticeships that equip them with the skills they need. 

In addition to these duties, advisor hubs could be used to supply all sorts of other services to improve pupils’ chances. They could provide a valuable network for cross-school co-operation, and offer other aspiration-raising activities, such as after-school activities and regular interview sessions, enabling the next generation to put their best foot forward when they leave school. 

Although this should be piloted in the first instance to gain a greater understanding of the optimal staff/student ratios for the hubs, they should be rolled out across the country, if successful. These hubs can provide more advice than schools are currently able to, and they can do so in a way that avoids all the focus being pooled into just those who want to go to university. It is about time we jettisoned our deeply engrained preference for a bloated university sector and turned more of our attention to those with skills that have thus far been ignored.