The statements give a special place to one-or-more of these priorities:

• the person is seen as an individual
• an appreciation of his or her needs and wants
• provision of help to develop a sense of self
• based on feelings and motivations
• directed at equal opportunity
• allocating extra help to people whose life chances are at risk

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developing the basic argument

The basic commitment in careers work is to the individual as a person rather than - say - as a producer or consumer of wealth. It is a commitment to a person’s need to find a course of action which is personally rewarding. It argues, then, that people should be helped to make their own choices and enabled to manage their own transitions.

There is an equal-opportunity issue here: if a person is to make her or his own moves, then - of whatever background, gender or race - he or she has a right to expect as fair a chance of realising aspirations as anybody else.

This means that careers work must help people to consider hitherto unconsidered possibilities - in employment and in other forms of work. For this commitment to be realised, everybody should examine possibilities both from what is familiar and from what is farther afield. And, whatever they do, they must do it with their eyes open to a realisation that they could have done something else.

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what the basic argument means for provision

This commitment argues for good ‘listening guidance’, offered to an individual who is helped and supported in reflecting on self and situation. The helper therefore needs to be in reliable touch with that ‘outer’ world of opportunity, but also sensitively to appreciate that ‘inner ‘world of the learner.

Where there is a careers-education programme it may be something whose worth is proved by the extent to which it supports that humanistic commitment. In this view, good careers education helps people to be able to draw upon what good guidance can offer.

Such a commitment carries implications for the redistribution of resources. Help in these terms will uncover many, subtle and unsubtle, ways in which some people’s life-chances are damaged - for example through some combination of injured feelings, arbitrary stereotyping, constricted horizons, and unhelpful contacts. The basic commitment will not shrink from examining such issues, and will accept that most resources should be allocated to those who most need help.In this view, good careers education helps people to be able to draw upon what good guidance can offer.

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issues for basic approaches

1. do basic priorities - concentrating on labour-economy and learners - pass over too much the social dimensions of both self and opportunity?
2. are they over-reliant on face-to-face work, offering too limited a role to educational processes?
3. valuable though it is, is guidance - in contemporary conditions - in any position adequately to respond to basic concerns?

No one, however much we think of them as individuals, lives in a social vacuum. Each person manifests different aspects of self in different settings. Each person’s ‘self’ is - to some degree - the internalisation of social influence. That being so, narrowly-based provision, focussed on the individual, may not be able to do enough for enough people.

In contemporary circumstances - where social pressures penetrate deeply and pervasively - complexity becomes the more complicated. Helping people to disentangle causes and effects in their lives needs more educational time and resources than individually-focussed programmes can afford.

It is true that the basic provision is a necessary foundation to careers work; and no careers work can be justified unless it is justified - at least in part - by such some such commitment. However, careers work may need to look wider for how it locates the person in an increasingly pressurised social and economic environment. Not to do so may lead to the formation of paltry responses to what is a an increasingly formidable task.