commitments

• considers a wider range of experience - feelings, attachments, and allegiances
• learning for life in shops, home, the street and with mates is also important even when illegal
• need to work inside and outside timetabled slots
• need more community resources
• can become an agent of curriculum-wide change

rationale

While there is a need for focussed career learning mostly concerning how effectively to use information and make effective applications the real dynamics of what happens in career, and how to manage them, are deeper and wider than that.

People need to be educated on the basis of their starting points in neighbourhood, culture and social attachments. They also need to be educated to become effective and fulfilled consumers, householders, parents, partners, and citizens as well as workers. People make different decisions in different roles; but what they do in one role affects what happens in another. All of this requires an education for life in domestic, neighbourhood and community life. That community has a distinctive cultural character. But it stands in a regional, national and global setting constantly changing. People need to be educated for living in all of these settings.

People need to learn both how to both question and understand the system. Without such an informed but consenting participation, social stability becomes increasingly precarious, and the basis for all social life may be threatened.

implications

ICareers work must be delivered in wide-ranging, penetrating - and progressive terms. Progression means taking each piece of learning as part of a sequence - building on foundations in early learning. Where these links are acknowledged, learning will be more likely to be remembered, understood and used. Transferability of learning requires such a basis - it means that a learner can recognise the applicability of learning to a range of situations. That requires time and space for making the links and practising what is learned. In all, it requires working in partnerships - both in the networks of the learner and in careers-work networks. Furthermore, such thinking requires a broad basis for programme management.

issues

Integrating can be one contributor to reforming curriculum - school or college wide. The aim is to make all learning more relevant to the lives of students. Integrating would need, then, to be evaluated - as much as anything - in terms of its impact on the culture of the institution and its relevance to its community.

Management for integrating need a great deal of trust in the people making it happen - many of who are volunteers and outside the institution. It is hard to hold to bureaucratic account. It is also difficult to preprogramme, and requires constant monitoring.