Sections

Collaboration

The Careers & Enterprise Company is pleased to be working in partnership with The Gatsby Foundation, continuing to build on their early pilot work on parental engagement.  

Parents, carers, guardians and wider family members (here on referred to as parents) have significant influence on their child’s career decision making which is why it is crucial to equip all parents to have impartial, constructive and well-informed careers conversations. Talking Futures is designed to give you the motivation, resource and opportunity to improve parental engagement in careers in your setting. 

Talking Futures

To achieve effective and meaningful parental engagement in careers, our research has identified some key principles, represented in this diagram.

The Careers Leader’s awareness and understanding of the value of parental engagement in careers education needs to be supported by the wider team and quality resources. The approach should be integrated into existing communications or touch points, providing a progressive and targeted offer. 

Our FREE Parental Engagement Modules have been designed to support you towards implementing a targeted, progressive and integrated approach to parental engagement in careers education.  

Go to Getting Started to find out more. 

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Strategic provision
Inspiration

Our recent Excellence Seminar focused on how we can positively engage all families with careers education and brought together panel of experts to explore innovation in this space, showcasing progressive and integrated parental engagement approaches across a range of settings, and effective strategies that have helped to develop relationships with families facing barriers. To find out more, and watch a recording of the live-streamed event, please click the Further Information button below. 

1. Developing the Programme

Getting Started

Minimise workload. Maximise impact. Access free training and resource to structure a targeted, progressive and integrated approach to parental engagement in careers education. 

Building a Team

Parental engagement in careers is not the sole responsibility of the Careers Leader. Access resources to help you gain buy in from staff and senior leaders. 

Impact and Evaluation

Plan to evaluate and measure the impact of your work from the outset, using these resources and guidance. 

2. Implementing Activities

Key Information

It is important to make sure both staff and parents have up to date information, for young people to make well-informed decisions. Here are some key resources, videos and sources of information to help. 

Activities for Parents

These activities are for parents, and either add an extra dimension to existing activity, provide focused support for targeted groups or encourage the sharing of careers information from transition. 

Activities for Families

These activities bring families together to stimulate family conversations about skills, strengths, careers decision making and potential pathways.  

Activities for Students

These activities are designed to help students initiate conversations and understand the role their parents can play in their decision making. 

Adapting Existing Activity

Use these resources to help you consider how you can tweak existing engagement opportunities to support quality parental engagement in careers education

The Gatsby Foundation

The Gatsby Foundation is the philanthropic trust of David Sainsbury (Lord Sainsbury of Turville). Through its work in education, in 2014 the trust developed the eight Gatsby Benchmarks for Good Career Guidance, which have been incorporated into the statutory guidance for secondary schools and colleges in England to follow. The Benchmarks are:

  1. A stable careers programme
  2. Learning from career and labour market information
  3. Addressing the needs of each pupil
  4. Linking curriculum learning to careers
  5. Encounters with employers and employees
  6. Experiences of workplaces
  7. Encounters with further and higher education
  8. Personal guidance

Find out more about the Gatsby Foundation’s work in education and the Gatsby Benchmarks.

Here is a collection of case studies which highlight the benefits and successes of using the Talking Futures resources to develop parental engagement.