Careers Education, Information, Advice and Guidance
At St Cuthbert Mayne our Careers Education, Information, Advice and Guidance (CEIAG) is a cornerstone of our vision for Educating for Life in all its Fullness
We embrace the uniqueness of each student and strive to offer them high-quality support on both personal and academic levels. It is our goal is to achieve a perfect score of 100% on the Gatsby Benchmarks, a crucial measure for careers education in secondary schools; further details on this can be accessed in the Important Links section.
Additionally, all students receive personalized lessons as part of their Personal Development curriculum, aligning with the CDi framework. To facilitate this, we utilize UniFrog, a website where each student has an account linked to their school email. UniFrog helps students with exploring their interests, creating applications, finding education and training opportunities and recording their career activities.
Measuring Success
Gatsby Benchmarks
Every young person needs good career guidance to make informed decisions about their future. Good career guidance is a necessity for social mobility: those young people without significant social capital or home support to draw upon have the most to gain from a strong career guidance system.
Yet, despite its importance, career guidance in this country has previously been criticised for being inconsistent and patchy. With the current transformation of technical education in England ensuring high quality technical pathways into rewarding career options, it is vital that good career guidance is embedded in education, so that young people will be better equipped to take their next step
In 2013, Gatsby commissioned Sir John Holman to set out what career guidance in England would be like if it were good by international standards, resulting in the Good Career Guidance report. The eight Gatsby Benchmarks defined in the report serve as a framework for world-class careers provision and have been adopted as part of the Government’s Careers Strategy, statutory guidance for schools and guidance for colleges. In addition, The Careers & Enterprise Company now supports the implementation of the Benchmarks in education with a national network of support, resources and targeted funding.
Read More about the Gatsby Benchmarks
Quality Assurance
We believe that rigorous quality assurance is ongoing and that it involves a range of stakeholders. We also believe that it should be underpinned by an externally accredited framework. STCM will quality assure its provision in the following ways:
- An annual review of careers provision and impact that is reported to governors
- Feedback from parents, pupils and staff regarding both provision and impact
- Governor evaluation visits
- Termly evaluation by our Enterprise Co-ordinator
The external framework that we have elected to use to quality assure our provision is the Quality in Careers Standard. This is a national framework that assesses schools against the Gatsby Benchmarks and that formally accredits their delivery. It is carried out by independent assessors. The review process, once complete, leads to an award. This is then reviewed every three years.
Measuring Impact on Students
We will measure the impact of our careers provision on students by engaging with them to review events, guidance and visits.
Since the aim of our careers provision is to ensure that all students are able to transition to the next stage of employment, education or training, the percentage of students not in education, employment or training (NEET) at the end of KS4 to KS5 will also be used to demonstrate impact.
