A Compass evaluation enables education settings to quickly and easily evaluate their careers activity against the eight Gatsby Benchmarks.
The Compass evaluation feature was built in partnership with the Gatsby Charitable Foundation to help practitioners easily discover their education setting's strengths and find areas for improvement.
The Compass evaluation questions have had some small updates for 26/27 and updated question by question guidance is coming soon to reflect these changes.
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Understanding Compass Evaluations
In 2026, the Compass evaluation underwent a series of updates in response to the updated Gatsby Benchmarks and statutory guidance for Careers.
There are three evaluation types:
- Compass evaluation for schools
- Compass evaluation for specialist settings
- Compass evaluation for FE and ITPs
Before completing a Compass evaluation, we strongly recommend reviewing the relevant evaluation type for your setting, and the question-by-question guidance. Both are available at the top of this page.
These resources will help you better understand the questions, scoring approach, and enable you to feel confident in your self-evaluation against the updated Gatsby Benchmarks.
Completing a Compass evaluation is simple: just answer the questions in the evaluation and Compass+ will calculate the evaluation results for you.
A Compass evaluation takes approximately 30 minutes to complete.
If you start an evaluation but need to stop halfway through, you can save your progress anytime and come back to it later to finish answering the questions.
We recommend completing a Compass evaluation once a term to effectively track and monitor your setting’s progress against achieving the Gatsby Benchmarks. Please note: given variations in term dates, CEC takes formal measures of progress on 31st of December, 31st of March and 31st of July.
Compass Evaluation Results
Compass evaluation data can be used in a variety of different ways to support the delivery of an effective careers programme and contribute towards meaningful impact evaluation. For example:
- Incorporate Compass evaluation results in reporting outputs for SLT/Governors/Senior Management
- Use Compass evaluation results to support internal leadership reviews.
- Compass evaluations are a key driver for effective impact evaluation.
- Communicate results and progress to key stakeholders.
- Use Compass evaluation data to inform your careers strategy and inform future planning.
Support and guidance
Compass+ Help Centre: A full suite of guidance and resources to help you complete a Compass evaluation effectively for your setting.
Compass evaluation Feature Focus : Watch this detailed video walkthrough of how to complete a Compass evaluation in Compass+ following the updates to the Gatsby Benchmarks in 2026.
Evaluations in Compass+ webinar : Register for our next evaluations webinar this term to explore the feature and how to use it effectively in your setting.