Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many and which schools in Ashfield constituency meet all eight Gatsby benchmarks for careers education.

The information requested is not held centrally.

The Careers & Enterprise Company and the Gatsby Charitable Foundation developed Compass, a free online tool that helps schools to evaluate and monitor improvements in their careers provision against the Gatsby benchmarks, which is now used by over 3,000 schools and colleges.

The Careers & Enterprise Company collects this information, which is published annually at a national level. The 2018 ‘State of the Nation’ report provides an updated assessment of progress, based on the Compass results of 3,092 schools and colleges. It shows that benchmark engagement and performance have both improved:

• There are now five times more schools and colleges assessing themselves against the benchmarks since 2017, and ten times more than in 2014.
• The average school or college is now fully achieving 2.13 benchmarks, up from 1.87 in 2017 and 1.34 in 2014.
• 21 schools and colleges (0.7%) are now meeting all eight of the benchmarks.

The report is available to view at: https://www.careersandenterprise.co.uk/stateofthenation.

A good way to highlight the importance of the Gatsby Benchmarks is for individual MPs to contact the schools in their constituency.