The NAO found that, as of November , the proportion of young people not in education, employment or training had been reduced by eight per cent where the service had been established the longest. Nationally a three per cent reduction had been achieved by this date and the Connexions Partnerships were confident that the 10 per cent target will be achieved by November The Connexions Service is well-regarded by its partners and clients.
The majority of 16, young people surveyed who had been in contact with a personal adviser said that Connexions had a positive impact on their lives, with 68 per cent saying it had helped them make a decision about their future. Ofsted carries out inspections of Connexions partnerships and has rated the quality of service as good.
The NAO found that Connexions was working well in partnership with other organisations. There is a risk, however, that Connexions may not be reaching all of the young people it is meant to assist. Far fewer Personal Advisers are in post than had been originally envisaged, a consequence of Connexions operating with less resources than originally anticipated.
Connexions is meant to provide a broad range of advice and services to all young people; however, it does not always cater for the needs of young people who are not at risk of dropping out of education and training.
Although the majority of Personal Advisers already hold professional qualifications, at the time of the study, only half had started their Connexions specific training. There is also a lack of clarity regarding the respective roles of schools and the Connexions Service in providing careers advice to young people.
Publication details:. Published date: March 31, The PDFs on this page have been archived. Links will take you to documents on The National Archive website.
Elsewhere on these pages we discuss the overwhelming evidence emerging from US studies that health, happiness , educational achievement and community safety are significantly increased by addressing questions of social capital rather than focusing strongly upon individualistic interventions.
One consequence of this is that resources may be better directed towards encouraging people to join groups, clubs and associations whether these are enthusiast groups, churches, political parties, social clubs…. This entails working with those people likely to sustain the life of groups and networks — and a large proportion of these were not be in the priority groups identified by the English government.
On the basis of these plans, the National Unit apportioned funding. If the National Unit was not satisfied with the plan or the work of the Partnership, it could withhold funding or contract directly with private or voluntary sector organizations. The Partnership was also be responsible for ensuring that a database of young people was created and maintained.
A local manager will be responsible to the committee for day-to-day management. The committees will be responsible for ensuring the Personal Adviser service works to uniform standards and reaches all young people without duplication of effort. It will also be responsible for managing the relationship between the personal advisor service and important specialist support services on which Personal Advisers will need to call to help young people enter or stay in learning and play a positive role in their local communities.
When thinking about the areas to be covered by the local management committees, local partners will take into account the configuration of existing partnership areas, such as those for Learning Partnerships , so that there are effective links with services such as the adult information, advice and guidance service.
This included staff seconded to the service, and staff working under formal or informal partnership agreements DfEE These arrangements were phased in over a period of two to three years. Early evaluations indicated a number of problems including issues arising out of bringing together workers from very different occupational cultures part of this arises from resistance to the dominance of one occupational group in senior management ; questions concerning what the most effective structures and organizational arrangements may be; and the inevitable problems of sorting out what a personal adviser might be expected to do see above.
Besides this there was a fundamental issue with regard to schools. From the start there was a failure to properly address the relationship of the Connexions Service and personal advisors to schools —and a number of problems flow from this.
Reference was made to learning mentors in schools these were introduced as part of the Excellence in Cities initiative in certain selected local education areas — and this generated a great deal of confusion. There seemed to be some threat to the relative freedom enjoyed by schools and mentors to develop the role. The linking of the personal adviser and learning mentor role was problematic in these respects.
The imposition of a fairly rigid caseload requirement would not allow for the space that mentors require to respond in the best way to the experiences of students. But equally, the pilot projects have shown there is no single blueprint.
Because the role of Personal Advisers pre was focused largely on combating disaffection from learning, there appeared to be a strong case for basing them in schools… This immediately raised concerns about the long-standing issue of the impartiality of advice offered on post options in schools which had a financial interest in persuading their pupils to stay on rather than move elsewhere.
The main assurance of impartiality of advice was access to careers advisers based outside the school: this was the rationale for mandating such access in the Education Act But if many Careers Advisers were to be replaced by Personal Advisers appointed and managed by headteachers, the extent of this access seemed likely to be severely reduced; and insofar as career guidance was in future to be offered by these Personal Advisers, the likelihood of overt or subtle pressures being placed on their impartiality was significantly enhanced.
The government stressed the impartiality of advice in its guidance to schools — but the substantive points raised by Watts stand. Heads had and retain a strong influence over the way the role emerges and the direction it takes. It became abundantly clear to Ministers that the flagship, or at least most prominent, New Labour policy initiative in the youth field — Connexions — was deeply problematic.
Although obvious to many commentators at the time of its announcement in see the critiques on these pages flaws in its organization, execution and focus became a political issue. A Green Paper for Youth seemed like a good mechanism for dealing with this. Some of the flak headed for Connexions was down to a basic political mistake.
The original Connexions strategy was bulldozed through and in the process alienated key stakeholders. Perhaps the most significant of these was head teachers.
A number had become vocal critics of the new service as were many parents and young people — despite what Connexions-funded research may have reported. Second, there were strong grounds for believing that the quality of general and specialized careers guidance for young people had dropped with the onset of Connexions.
According to a Public Accounts Committee Report , 50 per cent of schools are apparently failing to fulfil their current duties under the Education Act for careers education and guidance. Third, there was a basic problem with the way in which Connexions was supposedly established as both a universal and a targeted service. This conclusion has been supported by research by Hoggarth and Smith which concluded that Connexions looks more like two services than one, and is not adequately resourced to meet the demands of both universal and targeted youth provision.
Fourth, there were growing doubts about the claims made for Connexions with regard to its reducing the numbers of young people classified as NEET not in employment, education and training.
Figures published covering the first full two years of the Connexions partnerships showed a reduction of the proportion of young people designated as NEET from 9 to 7. This was, on the surface, a 14 per cent reduction that comfortably exceeded the 10 per cent target set for Connexions.
However, departmental ministers were reported as coming to believe that it was other policy initiatives such as those within schooling itself that were main contributors to the reduction in youth labelled as NEET Times Educational Supplement March 4, The Public Accounts Committee Report had also drawn attention to the impact of sustained economic growth on such figures. It had, further, drawn attention to the extent to which socio-economic factors outside the control of Connexions and other government institutions make it hard to sustain long-term and continuing reduction in the percentage of NEETs ibid : If we break down the the figures provided by Connexions then the 14 per cent claimed reduction in young people classified as NEET actually translates into 21, young people.
If other factors were significant see above then the cost per person would rise significantly. Sixth, there were questions about the abilities of some front-line personnel. In areas like London, personal advisers appear to have had no other relevant professional qualification, and the hastily put-together training for personal advisers was short-run and contained no supervised and assessed practice element.
Significantly, the rush to impose the personal adviser role on careers officers led to a number quitting the new service and many being pushed into more generic roles where their careers expertise was under-utilized. Furthermore, some careers officers did not have the orientation and range of skills that was necessary for the generic personal adviser role.
Finally, the impact of the Connexions strategy on youth work was unpopular in some sectors — especially in the way it had driven moves toward targeting and accreditation — and undermined informal educational character of youth work. The Transforming Youth Work agenda was specifically designed to align state-sponsored youth work with Connexions targets and concerns.
While state youth service institutions such as the National Youth Agency, and voluntary organizations dependent on state-sponsorship such as UK Youth may have gone along with this agenda — there was much muttering amongst local groups and projects about the impact on the work — and this did feed through locally to politicians and then nationally.
One route was through to the UK Youth Parliament where some members were growing alarmed at the closure of open provision and its replacement by outcome-oriented work Young People Now November 10, The Conservative Party picked up on this and came out against a strong emphasis on outcomes.
Introducing a new service is difficult enough. However, when it is built upon such flawed thinking the potential for problems was greatly enhanced. As we saw when discussing the Connexions Strategy the notion of social exclusion that runs through the Service is not built on solid ground. The Connexions Service reflected a further move towards ways of working that pathologize and individualize young people. There was an overriding concern with personal troubles rather than public issues.
Unfortunately, this has been combined with the extension of the surveillance of young people and mechanisms by which they can be tracked and controlled. It can work to cut back of the range of choices they have, and allow for sensitive information including medical details to be spread among an increasing range of people.
It was not uncommon to find senior managers within the new services talking very pessimistically about the future and direction of the Connexions Service. Some did not expect it to work in any very meaningful way meaningful, that is, in terms of achieving the targets that have been set for it. Others bemoaned the bureaucracy involved. Yet others were worried about the sort of business models involved and the extent to which these may work against the giving of a proper and appropriate service to young people.
The paper continued:. The advice should be impartial, comprehensive and free from stereotyping. It should be available in ways that young people want — for example, face-to-face support and advice from people who know them and their abilities; but also on demand and interactively via the web, text and telephone.
HM Government [Youth Matters], para 5. However, there may well be a significant amount of smoke and mirrors here. In the Youth Matters framework the actual shape of provision can differ from trust to trust depending on local circumstances. There are some very significant questions around the current proposals in Youth Matters for the organization of careers guidance and how its quality will be enhanced.
Hopefully, the proposal to move substantial resourcing into schools for careers guidance and advice will later be matched with money to establish a specialist external service perhaps along the lines of Careers Scotland and Careers Wales at some point.
This is precisely the model that the UK has had in the past…. The issue when information advice and guidance moves into schools is whether the proper degree of independence and expertise can be ensured.
For the moment it is difficult to see how it can. Alexander, R. International comparisons in primary education , Oxford: Blackwell. Bentley, T. Castells, M. Hutton and A. Giddens eds. On the Edge. Living with global capitalism , London: Vintage.
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Department for Education and Skills b Extended schools: Access to opportunities and services for all. A prospectus, London: Department for Education and Skills. Department of Health Independence, well-being and choice: our vision for the future of social care for adults in England , London: Department of Health. Hoggarth, L. Jeffs, T. Conversation, democracy and learning, Ticknall: Education Now. Johnston, L. Mason, P.
Young people, transitions and social exclusion , Bristol: The Policy Press. Killeen, D. Coleman and C. Warren-Adamson eds. Youth Policy in the s. The way forward , London: Routledge. Labour Party, The Britain forward not back. Miliband, D. Morris, M. A report prepared for the National Audit Office. September , London: National Audit Office. Moulson, R. Accessed March 22, Accessed March 18, Sennett, R.
Personal identity and city life , London: Pelican. Smith, M. Staples, W. Stewart, J.
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