Now Is The Moment To Rebuild Access To Professional Careers Guidance

Today’s announcement from the Prime Minister is significant structural reform. Technical education pathways from age 14, combining core academic subjects with employer contact and workplace experience. Local design led by mayors, Strategic Authorities, schools, colleges and employers rather than Whitehall. Ofsted asked to recognise how well schools prepare young people for work.

The direction is right, and it responds to what young people said. The Government heard from 14,000 of them last year: they asked for better careers advice, more practical skills training and clearer routes into good jobs. The last two are addressed today. The first is not.

Search the announcement for “careers adviser” and you will not find it. “Careers guidance” appears once, in the TUC’s response, where Paul Nowak notes these reforms need funding for schools and FE to deliver guidance alongside the new routes. He is right.

Why this matters, on the evidence

We are about to ask fourteen-year-olds to make a consequential, locally-shaped choice at the age when they know least about themselves and about the labour market. The international evidence is not ambiguous. Analysis across OECD countries finds teenage career certainty, alignment between aspiration and qualification, and repeated employer contact all associated with better employment outcomes and lower NEET risk in early adulthood. Misalignment predicts poorer transitions, and personal guidance from someone trained to deliver it is what reduces misalignment. That is why guidance sits as its own Gatsby Benchmark – and it is the benchmark schools have most consistently struggled to meet, for reasons of capacity rather than will.

The distributional point matters more. Young people with well-networked families navigate reformed systems successfully; they always have. Those without rely on what the institution provides. Adding choice points without adding guidance capacity widens the gap.

Two defaults that will not hold

If professional guidance is not designed in, two things happen by default.

It lands on teachers – who are not careers advisers, not trained or resourced as such, and already carrying substantial pastoral load. Asking them to absorb impartial careers guidance for decisions at 14 is asking them to do another profession’s job in the margins of their own.

Or it lands on Jobcentres, at the point of failure rather than the point of decision. Work coaches do valuable work, but the model is caseload-driven, benefit-conditioned and reactive. By the time a young person arrives, the transition has already gone wrong. Milburn’s interim review counts over a million 16 to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training – the cost of intervening at the wrong end.

Neither default is one anyone would defend if stated openly. Both are what happens when guidance capacity is assumed rather than funded. Advisers are scarce after fifteen years in which the statutory duty was devolved to schools without dedicated funding and the national service capacity preceding it dismantled. That is a policy outcome, not an accident – which also means it is reversible.

What rebuilding could look like

The honest constraint is that a qualified careers guidance professional in every school, at the pace this reform requires, is not achievable on current budgets or workforce numbers. Arguing otherwise is wishful rather than evidence-based.

So the question is how to extend the reach of a limited workforce without diluting what makes it valuable. That is what we have spent six years on at CareerChatUK. CiCi is a curated careers chatbot, built with humans in the loop rather than as a substitute for them. The underpinning principle, from the SECURE framework Dr Chris Percy and I developed, is complementarity: the system is designed to hand over.

A young person can ask the questions they are reluctant to ask a teacher, at eleven at night, in over fifty languages, with safeguarding alerts underneath and a warm handover to a qualified adviser when the conversation needs one. Advisers see what their cohort is actually asking about. That is triage sending scarce professional time where it changes outcomes. Technology can extend a guidance workforce. It cannot substitute for one that does not exist.

The timing

The pathways are being designed now for 2028. Guidance capacity built into that design is infrastructure. Added in 2029, after the first cohorts have chosen without it, it is remediation – and remediation is what the NEET figures already represent.

Mayors and Strategic Authorities now hold real influence over education for 14 to 16-year-olds. That is where this can be solved, region by region, before it is solved nationally. We all need to think and talk seriously about the careeers guidance layer of this reform.

By Associate Professor Deirdre Hughes, University of Warwick’s Institute for Employment Research, CiCi and founder of DMH Associates