Understand the national frameworks for Careers in schools.

Meeting the Gatsby Benchmarks

Alongside our statutory requirements, Gordon's School is supported to benchmark, manage, track and report on careers provision at individual student level via the Careers and Enterprise Company's Compass+ platform. Once populated with student data, Compass+ provides features that assist a school to properly assess their careers provision against the Gatsby Benchmarks and report on it. This report is completed once every term in order to track progress with the expectation that the school react and reach full compliance by the end of the school year.

Click here to view the report.

Understanding the gatsby benchmarks

In 2013, Gatsby commissioned Sir John Holman to set out what career guidance in England would be like if it were good by international standards, resulting in the Good Career Guidance report. The eight Gatsby Benchmarks defined in the report serve as a framework for world-class careers provision and have been adopted as part of the Government's Careers Strategy, Statutory Guidance for Schools.

In 2023, The Gatsby Foundation began the process of reviewing the benchmarks to keep pace with the evolution of the education landscape and the labour market. They used their findings to "clarify, refine and strengthen the benchmarks to ensure they continue to define a world-class careers guidance programme that is fit for the future." (Gatsby Foundation 2024)

Their most recent report, Good Career Guidance: The Next Ten Years, presents their response, updating the Benchmarks for the next 10 years.

Gordon's remains committed to keeping pace with change and ensuring students are prepared for the world or work as they will find it.

Further reading:

The CDI Framework

The main purpose of the CDI’s Career Development Framework is to clarify the skills, knowledge and attitudes that individuals need to have a positive career. A ‘positive career’ will mean something different to everyone, but it will typically include being happy with the way you spend your time, being able to make a contribution to your community and being able to have a decent standard of living. Career development skills are the learning outcomes that career development programmes and interventions should be aiming to bring about. They need to be developed alongside academic skills and knowledge, and employability skills, and Gordon's uses this framework to enhance the careers provision in school and ensure it is truly meaningful to our students' lifelong learning journey.