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

• the person’ employability
• vocationally-relevant education and guidance
• leading to clear learning outcomes
• with professional understanding of career decision-making
• achieving subject status - like an academic discipline
• staffed by specialist and trained people

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developing the argument for consolidation

Economic benefits - to the individual, the economy and to society - feature prominently in this thinking. National and individual competitiveness is improved where people enter work well-prepared - and well-matched to their occupations. People will then be in a position to find economically significant work. The thinking supports an education system seen to be developing employable abilities.

This is the orientation most likely to be supported by dominant political and economic interests. Coalitions of professional, government and agency interests - seeing themselves responding to some form of market forces - will find these assumptions congenial.

All of this can be taken to mean that careers work will become more like an academic subject - examined in much the same way. It may be seen as a way of achieving appropriate status in the education system.

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what consolidation means for provision

This commitment argues for seeing careers education and careers guidance as mutually complementary. They call upon a shared body of knowledge and develop many shared techniques.

These techniques enable: the use of labour-market information; an identification of personal skills and interests; linking opportunities to self; realising decisions that emerge from this process; making effective approaches to educational, training and employment opportunities; successfully representing self as employable; and managing the resulting transitions.

Learning programmes can certainly be constructed from such topics - although they read more like topics for training than for education. They tend to be treated fragmentarily, without the kind of progression which is a necessary feature of learning with any conceptual breadth, depth or dynamics.

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issues for consolidation

1. is careers education and guidance too narrow and too fragmented?
2. do consolidating assumptions rely on too-rational an understanding of what happens in careers?
3. do they rest too heavily on current policy rhetoric?

It may be dangerous to make careers work focus so completely on employability and economic gains - whether for individuals or for society. Such thinking dilutes, reduces and fragments any basic understanding of the breadth, depth and dynamics of motivation for work. And claims for economic benefits are, in any event, sometimes founded on questionable evidence.

Furthermore, this thinking relies on a rather narrow range of techniques which can only be effective where there is an entirely rational system for selection. And, even then, its techniques probably work best for the relatively articulate and well-positioned. And, so, this approach may be risking the life chances of people who, for one reason or another, cannot make constructive use of its provision.

Even if selection systems were perfect, few areas of the labour market can offer work to every well-enough qualified person. Economy- and market-driven ideas runs the risk of serving selection rather than career-management activity. Any such ‘body of knowledge’ would be too narrowly based to justify the use of the term ‘discipline’. There may even be dangers of being led up a blind alley. We need to accommodate people whose approach to working life will not be dominantly undertaken in employment and for economic reward, and whose contribution to social or community well-being needs broader frames of reference.