In the last ten years there has been a considerable shift in the role of Careers Advisers along with being expert career planners, and advocates. Careers Advisers today play a significant part in raising aspiration. Good careers advice is integral to supporting young people’s mental stability and helping them become more resilient. Although not trained as mental health professionals, I believe there has been a shift happening that has had an impact of the work that careers advisers do, that is relevant, current and necessary in this day and age.

... a legacy for which society will eternally be thankful What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others. Legacy is an interesting concept, especially for a teacher; for many of us, we never see what happens in the long term for our students. As a primary school teacher, the young people I taught, left at eleven years old and remained frozen in time in my head, but every so often, I would hear stories about where they had gone and what they had done; Occasionally, I see pictures of them on social media with families of their own, with careers and lives carved out of their childhood experiences.

IT is an essential part of our business lives with ever-changing technologies and the desire of some to always have the latest and the best. Yet, affordability and fitness for purpose must be considerations for everyone in the Education Sector, especially as resources are tight.

We have finally seen the launch of the new non-levy Apprenticeship scheme that is a great new year’s present for many small providers in the sector. For those that want too, and not everyone will, they will now be released from the burdens of sub-contracting and be in a better place to control their own destiny. It will be an interesting few months as the scheme settles down and many more thousands of businesses start to use Apprenticeship Service with the help of their providers. 

We have had a number of apprenticeship providers request information pertaining to ESFA audit requirements on the evidence that is accepted for use where apprentices have ‘undiagnosed’ LDDs (learning difficulty or disability) or where apprentices do not have an LDD, but require additional support in order to meet the learning requirements of the apprenticeship. According to Mencap ‘Mental health problems can affect anyone at any time and may be overcome with treatment, which is not true of learning disability’.