When was connexions formed




















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Links will take you to documents on The National Archive website. Share this page. The NAO found that in order to improve the service: Partnerships should be encouraged to set local and regional targets for reducing the number of young people not in education, employment or training. These targets would feed into the national target and would allow partnerships to be more responsive to local conditions.

The Department needs to set a clear target date for the majority of Personal Advisers to have completed Connexions-specific training. Better analysis of the results of interventions is required so that resources can be allocated more effectively. The Department needs to develop performance indicators for the full range of services provided by Connexions partnerships to ensure that all young people get the support they need. The Department needs to ensure that schools have the capacity to work with Connexions to provide support for all young people and that school staff are fully aware of the services offered by Connexions.

The new service will play a central role in helping to deal with problems experienced by young people, removing any wider barriers to effective engagement in learning that young people are suffering. It will do this by providing high quality support and guidance, and by brokering access for young people to a range of more specialist services. The Connexions Service will ensure that all young people have access to the support and guidance they need, when and wherever they need it, irrespective of their circumstances.

The Service will be universal and comprehensive, and will ensure that no young person falls through the net of support. It was problem-oriented and individualizing. It was also outcome driven — and this was a particular worry.

As we know at the time from the experience of careers companies and some youth work initiatives, a narrow concern with outcome leads to an inability to follow-up on significant areas of interest and learning. Perhaps most significantly, the injunction to fulfil targets , for example around sexual activity, meant that the Connexions Service was fundamentally concerned with moulding and directing behaviour — rather than with education.

A further, significant, aspect of the Connexions Service was the extension of the surveillance of young people. A comprehensive record system that operates across area boundaries was instituted in order to track progress and assess outcomes.

We discuss issues around this extension of surveillance within the Connexions Service when looking at the strategy overall. As Watts has pointed out there were two crucial design flaws. The first was linked to the claim that the Connexions Service is designed not just for young people at risk of social exclusion , but for all young people.

It was supposed to be both a targeted and a universal service. The conventional and logical way to reconcile these dual aims is first to design the universal service and then extend it to ensure that the distinctive needs of the targeted group are satisfactorily addressed.

But Connexions was designed on the reverse basis… In other words, universality was a second-order consideration. As a result, efforts were made to extrapolate to all young people measures designed to address the needs of the primary target-group. If the needs of young people at risk were perceived to require the merging of services, then the services must be merged as a totality. If young people at risk were to have a Personal Adviser, then all young people must have one.

Watts The second flaw identified by Watts was that the original Demos aim of merging the youth, careers and educational welfare services was only part-implemented. The only service brought into the Connexions Service as a whole was the Careers Service. Other services remained as entities, but were expected to take part in, and help fund, Connexions. The main reason for this distinction was administrative convenience: the Careers Service was the only budget that the Department for Education and Employment DfEE — as the main Government department responsible for the planning of Connexions — was able to control; without it, the funding base for the new service looked fragile.

But the decision to commit the whole of the Careers Service budget to the Connexions Service and Strategy, alongside the failure to secure similar commitments from other budget-holders, immediately produced an imbalance in the structure of Connexions Service partnerships. These difficulties can be seen in the role of the personal advisor, the priority groups identified and the organizational structures that have emerged.

A new occupational grouping was established within the Connexions Service — that of personal adviser. The influential Social Exclusion Unit report, Bridging the Gap, argued for the development of a comprehensive service employing staff with a range of professional backgrounds, such as careers officers, youth workers and counsellors.

It was suggested that there was room for a new specialism or professional group. Their role is to:. A new training structure was introduced and then ended after the initial cohorts were trained.

It involved the introduction of a short Diploma Course that all Connexions Service personal advisors were required to undertake. Designed centrally, and run under contract by a range of training agencies, it had a strong emphasis on guidance and case management.

However, and rather fatally, it entailed no supervised and accessed practice. Further programmes, including an introduction to the Connexions Service Understanding Connexions followed. The personal advisers recruited by the initial schemes came, as was expected, from a range of backgrounds including the careers service, youth work and social work.

Several key questions arose with regard to the new occupational role — and these flowed from the original design flaws, and the ideology underlying the Connexions strategy. First, there were questions as to how careers guidance could be sustained at a satisfactory level within the Connexions Service.

Personal advisors had to work with a range of issues and problems and were not be able, in the normal course of their activities, to develop a specialist knowledge of career opportunities and questions.

Furthermore, careers guidance and advice only formed a small part of the new training programme for personal advisers within the Connexions Service. Second, the orientation of the personal adviser role within the Connexions Service was essentially toward case management, placement and advice. The role entailed a shift from casework to case management.

The role and the system in which it makes sense was oriented to the achievement of externally set targets concerning the behaviour of the young people it dealt with — and the completion of the necessary paperwork to facilitate and demonstrate this.

It was not oriented to working with young people to explore how and where they may flourish, and to develop their own strategies for growth. The role also entailed a shift from education to placement and advice. While the educational practice of youth and careers services in England had left a lot to be desired — at least there was in the case of youth work the possibility of appealing to educative statements of purpose or traditions of practice. Third, from the start is was not clear how the role was to be defined.

Each had very different implications for the knowledge and skill base of personal advisers. There was also a potential question of the erosion of professional standards. The notion grew that in the case of career guidance, Personal Advisers might be expected to deliver what was required. But, of course, not all Personal Advisers would have been trained to provide career guidance.

It was suggested that a small element of training in a short generic course might fill this gap. This raised the danger of serious erosion of professional standards in service delivery. Fourth, to achieve the proposed coverage within the Connexions Service an increase in funding was required. The government realized that somewhere between 15, and 20, personal advisors would be required. However, there was a major problem. There are only around careers service advisers in the whole of the UK, and probably around the same number of youth workers.

A significant number of the former were still required to provide traditional career guidance, and a significant number of the latter continued to work outside the Connexions Service and Connexions Strategy. The additional finances was not forthcoming on the scale required. In addition there was some significant diversion of funds from the vocational guidance and open youth work arenas.

Last, there were, and remained, considerable doubts as to the standards of the personnel recruited. This, allied with the limited nature of the training, meant that professional standards in the generic adviser area were variable.

It was argued that it is possible to distinguish between:. In-depth support — for those at risk of not participating effectively in education and training.

This group include those: whose aspirations do not reflect their abilities; who do not attend school regularly, who have learning difficulties or disabilities, who are unlikely to achieve as they should and those who are not undertaking any education or training post Young people in these situations need in-depth guidance and support to help them to address barriers to learning and to enable them to fulfil their potential.

Integrated and specialist support — for those facing substantial, multiple problems preventing them from engaging with learning, who are likely to be involved with a number of different professionals engaged in education, social welfare, criminal justice, health and housing. Equally, we will integrate support for the especially gifted. They will need Personal Advisers to take effective action on their behalf to help them gain access to a range of more specialist services, to ensure that barriers are overcome in a coordinated way, and keep in touch with their progress.

DfEE The new personal advisers within the Connexions Service were expected to carry a caseload of people requiring integrated and specialist support , people requiring in-depth support , and people requiring general support unpublished DfEE papers. Particular attention was to be given to young people with special educational needs.

A key aspect of this work was the monitoring of progress so that further interventions can be made. Two particular questions arose here. First, as Watts commented, the scale of these caseloads rather undermines claims that the service is universal. 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.



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