Heather Jackson and Tony Watts resign from the National Careers Council
3 May 2013
Heather Jackson and Professor Tony Watts have resigned from the National Careers Council. The resignation statement explaining the reasons for their decision is given below and is also available by clicking here.
Resignation Statement
With great regret we have resigned from the National Careers Council. We disagree fundamentally with some of the recommendations presented by the Council to the Minister for Skills (Matthew Hancock) on Wednesday 1 May. We also have strong concerns about the process through which these recommendations were arrived at.
This Government came to power with a Conservative Party promise to create an all-age careers service. This intention was elaborated in a speech by the Skills Minister in the Government's first year. The establishment of the National Careers Service (NCS) was an important step in the right direction. However, a number of grave mistakes were made, notably the decision to close existing careers services for young people (Connexions) without any transfer of their funding. We joined the NCC to support the development of Government policy on career support, with a genuine belief that a strong, independent and evidence-based report could help the Government to positively reframe this policy. The recent Education Select Committee inquiry into career guidance demonstrated that it is possible to work within the frame of current Government policy and yet make robust evidence-based proposals.
Our main disagreement with the NCC recommendations is the proposal that the funding for the NCS should be 'rebalanced' to provide greater emphasis on services that support young people. The explanatory paragraph for the recommendation starts 'Tough times demand tough choices' and goes on to argue that young people should take precedence over adults in terms of resources. This proposal allows DfE to escape its responsibilities (1) by proposing that the BIS budget fill some of the gaps in services for young people, thus selling the pass on the existing services for adults.
Other aspects of the report to Matthew Hancock with which we strongly disagree are:
- The lack of any reference to Education Select Committee report, with its strong recommendations on steps to be taken to address the current crisis in such provision within schools, including the urgent need for enhanced accountability and quality assurance.
- The lack of any proposals on extending the current very limited marketing of the NCS (as a result of which the current volumes of overall usage are much lower than in the recent past). There is clear evidence of the massive extent of latent demand that can be elicited through national media marketing, and of the relationship between marketing spend, brand recognition, and service take-up. It does not make business sense to fund a service and then refuse to market it effectively. To duck this issue is to ignore one of the major issues facing the NCS.
On these as on other issues, the objections we were given within the Council were based not on reasoned argument or evidence, but that 'the Government would not like it'. We ultimately view this as a craven argument for a purportedly independent council to adopt.
We are also deeply concerned about the way in which the report has been produced. The 'rebalancing' proposal, for example, was never discussed in any meetings of the Council, and only emerged in a draft circulated three days before it was due to be submitted to the Minister. We immediately made it very clear this was a red-line issue for us (for reasons outlined above). We asked the Chair (Deirdre Hughes) and other members where the proposal had come from, and with what remit (2) : no reply has been provided. We asked for a postponement of the meeting with the Minister, to enable the Council to discuss the proposal in a considered way: this was refused. In our view, this is a totally inappropriate way for an independent council to operate.
We have had concerns about a number of aspects of the NCC processes from the outset. We have voiced these clearly. At the same time, we have done our utmost to support and participate in the NCC's work, in every way we could.
We have tried hard to avoid taking this final step. We indicated to the Council our decision to resign, but - following responses from some members of the Council - offered to meet prior to any public announcement, to see whether these issues could be resolved. No response has been received to this offer.
We are accordingly now making our resignation public. We hope that the Council will be able to play a positive role in the future, and we urge it to address the issues we have raised in this statement.
Heather Jackson
Professor Tony Watts
3 May 2013
Footnotes
1) The funding provided for the careers guidance element of the Connexions Service totalled around £196 million. The responsibility for providing careers guidance to school pupils has now been transferred to schools, but none of this funding has been transferred: it has been allowed to disappear. The only DfE funding provided to the National Careers Service for services for young people has been the £7 million it has provided for a helpline. This has contrasted with the £83 million provided by BIS to the NCS for services for adults.
2) The draft discussed at the final meeting stated: 'The funding allocation for the National Careers Service needs to be amended by the reallocation of resources from elsewhere in the overall government budget in order to be more equitable in serving the needs of young people within an all-age service'. The draft circulated three days before being sent to the Minister removed the crucial words 'from elsewhere', so completely changing the meaning.
