Success for Opportunity North East Careers Pilot

A ground-breaking pilot has demonstrated the importance of targeted and personalised Careers Education, Information, Advice and Guidance (CEIAG) in improving post-16 destinations for young people.

The two-year pilot project, led by the North East Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), was part of the Department for Education’s (DfE) Opportunity North East programme and commitment to improve education and boost productivity in the North East.

Overall, 28 schools were involved – 16 in the North East LEP area. Each school identified up to 30 pupils identified as having an increased risk of becoming NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training).

Many of the pupils involved were from a disadvantaged background or had special educational needs, both indicators of being at higher risk of becoming NEET at the end of Year 11.

The LEP developed and commissioned an intensive and targeted offer of personalised advice and guidance for young people in each ONE Vision school to help them to make the best of their strengths, interests and aspirations, aiming to improve the destinations of these young people at the end of Year 11.

At the end of the project, the young people involved knew more about how to find a good career; they had a greater focus on their chosen sectors; and they had clear plans on how to achieve their goals.

The project saw a 113% average improvement across the 12 key areas of underpinning careers-based knowledge, while the percentage of students with no “vision” of their future career sector fell from 13% to 6%.

An increase in the number of pupils with a post- 16 plan increased from 75% to 98% and some 97% of students are predicted to be in education, employment or training.

In addition, an overwhelming majority of the young people involved in the project reported being happy in their chosen post-16 destination.

Neil Willis, Regional Lead for Education Challenge at the North East LEP, said: “One of our underlying aims was to show that CEIAG needs to be targeted and personalised which is particularly important for pupils that are associated with being at risk of becoming NEET. Pressures on the current system can make this approach challenging in schools.

“For many students, if they don’t get on the right footing at the end of Year 11, it can impact on their progress in future life so ONE Vison enabled us to test an approach to address this.

“We have demonstrated that regular contact with a careers adviser, coupled with accurate data recording and highly-personalised interventions, leads to significant increases in a student’s capacity to make the informed decisions needed to secure a good career pathway.

“As well as improving destinations for young people, this also delivers considerable wider economic and social benefits.”

Nationally, young people who become NEET are likely to experience a range of other negative outcomes, triggering wider economic costs over £77,000 each in direct lifetime costs to public finances and over £144,000 in wider lifetime costs to the economy and wider community.

Every percentage point reduction in NEET pupils across the 15 ONE Vision secondary schools has the potential to save public finances £1.85million and over £3.46million in wider lifetime costs to the economy and community.

The findings of the pilot, which was supported by the Oxford University Careers Service, will be shared with the DfE, local authorities and careers education leaders.

The Opportunity North East report can be viewed here.