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

• attending to a range of experience, feelings, and allegiances
• for learning as volunteer, and social entrepreneur as well as employ
• taking account of ‘outsider’ - including criminal - perspectives
• working both inside and across existing programmes
• drawing in a range of community resources
• an agent of curriculum-wide change

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developing the argument for integration

The real dynamics of what happens in career are not entirely rational ,neither can they be contained within an account of a persons’ management of selection, training and employment. People therefore need to be educated to become effective and fulfilled consumers, householders, parents, partners, and citizens while they are being educated as fulfilled workers. It is true that they will make different decisions in each of these roles; what they do in each affects what happens in the rest.

All of this requires an education which links domestic, neighbourhood and community life, to working life and life as a citizen. For such purposes people need to learn on the basis of their starting points in the neighbourhood, culture and among their social attachments. And the programme needs to take account of the beliefs, assumptions and feelings that these experiences generate. Each community has a distinctive social, cultural and economic character . And no useful careers-work programme can afford to ignore it.

All of this also means that people need to learn both how to understand and question what happens in their life roles. And, without the education of such an informed but consenting participation, social stability becomes increasingly precarious.

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what integration means for provision

The implications of such assumptions are principally for curriculum - understood in institution-wide terms. Such work must be delivered in wide-ranging, penetrating - and progressive terms. Progression is important - taking sensitive account of prior learning and also locating each piece of learning in a developing sequence.

Transfer of learning is also critical. It means that a learner can recognise the applicability of learning to a range of situations. In order to be useful, in people’s lives, learning must be recognised and embedded as useful, in their ‘classrooms’. Lists of centrally-generated learning outcomes do not necessarily express such relevance. Only where it can be recognised and embedded, will learning be likely to be retained and used.

The implications for time and space for learning are considerable. For example, they mean drawing on community partnerships whose authority usefully supplements the perspectives that can be found in the institution.

Because it engages widely dispersed cooperation, integration is an agent of curriculum reform. Part of its aim is to make learning across-the-curriculum more relevant to the lives of students.

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issues for integration

1. is integration asking too much
2. can it win enough political and institutional support?
3. is it too diffuse and long-term to be worth undertaking?

Integration is more demanding of time, skills, management strategies, materials and goodwill than any other approach to careers work. It requires inter-departmental and inter-agency cooperation. It also depends on voluntary help. There may be insurmountable resource problems for harnessing, managing and activating this network.

There is no obvious political or institutional support for integration. Its concept of learning-needs cannot be readily reduced to readily-accountable or economically significant terms. Furthermore, it will require cooperation between agencies and constituencies. Some of these constituents - in the citizenship-careers-pshe-academic spectrum - may not want to endanger the favourable policy attention they are currently enjoying.

It can be argued that integration - with its broader, deeper and more dynamic understanding of the human condition - is the true heir to the basic commitment to careers work. It can be further argued that, in contemporary conditions, it offers more hope of fulfilment both to people and to society. But, integration relies on widely-dispersed understanding, goodwill, and energy - much of it voluntarily invested. Indeed it is arguable that a few initiatives undertaken by better placed and braver careers people, may be all that we should risk for the time being. And while integrative momentum is gathered, perhaps the interests of survival dictate that we hold to consolidation approaches. In all events, progress on integration will be slow - and needs to be careful.