Celebrating Full Compliance with the Gatsby Benchmarks

Introduction

Careers Education, Careers Guidance and Work Experience are integral to a students’ development and growth at Haberdashers’ Hatcham College and serve as a preparation for their transition to adulthood.

How we measure and assess the impact of the careers programme on pupils?

Haberdashers' Hatcham College works closely with the Careers and Enterprise company. This is an external organisation that supports schools to ensure they are following the DFEs newly devised Careers Strategy. 

“The careers strategy sets out that every school and academy providing secondary education should use the Gatsby Charitable Foundation’s Benchmarks to develop and improve their careers provision. This statutory guidance has been restructured around the Benchmarks with information on what schools need to do to meet each one. The Gatsby Benchmarks are not a statutory framework but by adopting them, schools can be confident that they are fulfilling their legal duties: the existing duties to secure independent careers guidance and provide opportunities to a range of providers to inform pupils about technical education qualifications or apprenticeships and the new duty to publish information about the careers programme on the school website.”

As an education establishment we ensure we use the 8 Gatsby Benchmarks as a foundation when planning and implementing our Careers Strategy. The effectiveness of our provision is inspected and audited by the Careers and Enterprise Company using the Compass Careers Benchmark Tool.

We review the programme through Compass + Evaluation to benchmark our provision against the eight Gatsby benchmarks. We also analyse our destination data, conduct an aspirations and ambitions survey,  monitor Unifrog usage and gain feedback on events and interventions through student questionnaires.

What Are The Gatsby Benchmarks?

Good career guidance is critical if young people are to raise their aspirations and capitalise on the opportunities available to them, every young person needs high-quality career guidance to make informed decisions about their future.

The Good Career Guidance Report identified a set of eight benchmarks which schools can use as a framework for evaluating their careers provision, the eight Gatsby benchmarks of Good Career Guidance are:

1. A stable careers programme
2. Learning from career and labour market information
3. Addressing the needs of each pupil
4. Linking curriculum learning to careers
5. Encounters with employers and employees
6. Experiences of workplaces
7. Encounters with further and higher education
8. Personal guidance