Jackie Hartley’s BLOG

At last it appears that someone up there in the ivory towers has realised that adults need careers guidance too. Well that is not strictly fair. We have got a system of providing adult guidance but it is fragmented, targeted and for many potential adult clients, hard to find. Apparently MORI did a survey […]

So, at last, we have some national IAG standards that are easy to follow, relevant and doable. Not surprising when you know who wrote them. Why the Government didn’t just tackle the whole thing this way right from the off I do not know. I wonder if Mouchel Parkman got paid for not delivering? With […]

Getting back into writing I started researching where things were up to with the Personal Development Curriculum so headed off to the QCA website. What did I find? Well if you google PDC you get sent to the old QCA website 14 - 19 bit, with all the old stuff on PDC. I knew though […]

So, the IAG Quality Standards, as written by consultants Mouchel Parkman, have been dumped and David Andrews brought in to rewrite them (see YoungPeopleNow magazine article). Apparently ..
A spokeswoman for Mouchel Parkman said: “We were contracted to produce draft standards and the contract ended in May. We published the draft standards and they were well […]

If you are struggling to keep up with all the new policies affecting careers and guidance work (and unless your name is David Andrews you probably are!) then a good place to start to find out what is what is on the new IAG Workforce website. Written by my friend and colleague, Janet Donoghue, this […]

We have just started sorting out what we are going to do about producing our new catalogue and a number of issues have come up.

Product costs - these have gone up quite a lot in the last 10 years and we have never put our prices up in all that time. Should we try to […]

Yet again, we have proof that making sure that kids eat healthy food has a real impact on their ability to perform well at school. According to an article in the Observer today …
Children who ate healthy school meals instead of packed lunches scored higher marks in tests, were less disruptive and concentrated longer in […]

So now we might be going to raise the school leaving age to 18. Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Education says it is one of the most important matters facing his department. Gordon Brown is also keen for it to happen. Apparently they have been looking at the system in Canada where there is […]

I have been trying to get my head into the new quality standards for IAG, as mentioned in my previous post. I don’t know if it is just me but I am finding this document a bit hard to digest. Although it seems to be saying the right sort of things, they don’t hang […]

Spent a nice afternoon speaking to the students on the DipCG at Manchester Met today. Although I was there to talk about using resources in careers work I ended up telling them my top tips for surviving in the wonderful world of careers work, as it relates to working in education and trying to get […]