Emma Hamer is a teacher in Hull, the city where she grew up. She understands better than most the negative mentality that many of the city’s young people struggle to shake off.

“When I was about 18, I found myself staying in a Hilton hotel in London,” she recalls. “I’d never had any experience of being anywhere like that before. I remember - vividly - ringing my dad and saying, ‘Dad, I don’t belong here. I don’t fit in here. People are going to look at me funny.’

“He gave me a real talking to and said, ‘You’re no better or no worse than anyone else. You’ve got just as much opportunity and intelligence as anyone else around you.’ He called it, then. He said, ‘That’s a very Hull mentality. You need to break down those barriers and put them to the back of your mind.’ It was a ridiculous thing to feel but I do think the culture here sometimes impresses that upon us.”

A now-fading poster in Hull’s city centre bears the slogan “a city coming out of the shadows”. This was the strapline for the Yorkshire coastal city’s year as the UK City of Culture in 2017. It saw new cultural attractions open, swathes of public performances and the promise of an enduring arts legacy.

Following the city’s year in the spotlight, research by the University of Hull showed that the “City of Culture” accolade boosted the economy to the tune of £300 million, brought in an extra 1.3 million visitors and made three-quarters of Hull’s residents feel proud to be from the city.

It is perhaps the last statistic that is most important. Since the collapse of the fishing, shipping and manufacturing industries from the 1970s onwards, Hull and the wider Humber area has been severely economically depressed.

Figures published in 2015 by the then Department for Communities and Local Government revealed that 45 per cent of neighbourhoods in Hull were among the 10 per cent most deprived areas in England. This was the third highest figure in the country. The same data set showed that more than a third (34 per cent) of children in the city lived in income-deprived households.

Not surprisingly, this trend crosses over to educational performance. In terms of the latest Attainment 8 figures - a measure of a pupil’s average grade across eight subjects at key stage 4 - Hull comes 15th from the bottom, out of 152 council areas in England.

In an area of such high deprivation and low attainment, it is perhaps surprising to hear that the area comes second from top in terms of its careers advice offering. Across the city, there is a concerted push to drive its young people to aim high and pursue ambitions which would have been unthinkable for previous generations.

Since September, secondary schools and colleges in England have been required to adopt a named careers leader on their staff roster, and publish a career strategy. This followed the launch of the government’s national careers strategy in December 2017, with the eight internationally pegged Gatsby benchmarks (see box, above) listed as the ambitions that schools and colleges are expected to work towards.

Some parts of the country have been performing better than others when it comes to meeting these targets. Only the Solent - another coastal area - performed better than the Humber region, in which Hull is located.

In its 2018 State of the Nation report, the Careers and Enterprise Company (CEC) notes that schools and colleges in some relatively deprived areas - particularly coastal areas like Norfolk, Suffolk and the Humber - are outstripping areas with less deprivation when it comes to achieving these benchmarks.

The report’s authors say it is “not clear” why this is the case. They add: “It may be attributable either to increased investment in careers interventions in deprived areas or due to an increased focus on careers in schools, where school leaders, teachers and careers professionals perceive that young people are disadvantaged.”

Righting the ship

In the Humber area - which includes Grimsby, Hull and Scunthorpe - it seems clear that a determination not to repeat the mistakes of the past - and to break the cycle of poverty - is what is driving college and school leaders to focus on careers advice, information and guidance.

“I think it would have been enormously helpful to have had the outlook that we now have in the 70s and 80s,” says Stephen Savage, chair of the Humber Local Enterprise Partnership’s (LEP) employment and skills board.

“In certain areas of the country, when there was the decline of coal and of steel, enterprise zones were set up or they had other similar initiatives. We didn’t have that in this area. We had nothing to support the fishing industry and there was no real thought given to retraining.”

This had devastating effects that are still being felt to this day, Savage continues. “We’re talking about five generations of unemployment where children are being brought up without an adult in their lives who is working.”

Hamer, now assistant principal at Boulevard Academy in the city, says this has led to an ingrained lack of ambition for some youngsters. “You don’t expect a lot of where you are going to go to,” she explains. “Generations before you haven’t gone much further. So breaking the cycle is really important for our pupils. You hear children say a lot here, ‘I can’t do that,’ because that doesn’t happen in their family. They almost feel they don’t belong.

“You think, ‘Oh well, I’m only from Hull.’ Making students aware that they’re not ‘only’ anything and that they can be anything that they want to be is where we’re really coming from with our [careers] programme.”

The school’s careers strategy is extensive and runs right through from Year 7 to 11. It comprises talks from businesses, trips to universities and one-to-one guidance, using the Gatsby benchmarks as a framework.

Kylie Jackson, the school’s careers lead, says the strategy is about wanting pupils to “dream big”. She adds: “Part of the reason the Humber area is doing well is because we share good practice. If one school has a company link that someone else might be able to benefit from, we all talk about it and share it.”

Since January, schools have been required to open their door to colleges, training providers and university technical colleges (UTCs). This followed an amendment by former Conservative education secretary Lord Baker to what became the Technical and Further Education Act 2017 - this has since become known as the “Baker clause”.

Speaking in the House of Lords in February 2017, Lord Baker said that “the curse of our education system” was that schools had a narrow focus on getting pupils to do A levels followed by university. “There are many pathways to success and it is our duty to try to open them to more people,” he added.

In May, Robert Halfon, chair of the Commons Education Select Committee, challenged the skills minister, Anne Milton, over the enforcement of the Baker clause, and asked whether schools actually were letting FE providers in to speak with their pupils. Milton said it was “early days” but added that she would keep an eye on how this developed.

Charting a course

The CEC, however, believes it is still an issue: schools with their own sixth form - in other words, those with a vested interest in retaining their GCSE students (and the associated funding) post-16 - are less likely to be meeting the Gatsby benchmarks than those without, it says in a report. The “issue has proved to be persistent despite the introduction of the legislation which requires schools to open their doors to providers of vocational education”, the report adds.

It continues: “This new law aims to help schools to engage with the further education sector and give young people more information about non-academic options. Our analysis suggests that those schools which have sixth forms score 3.4 percentage points less on the overall [Gatbsy benchmark] score than those that do not have a sixth form.”

Hull is a city with few school sixth forms, so school leavers go on to a variety of destinations. Stephen Logan, the deputy principal and the designated careers lead at Malet Lambert School, says this is because there is strong provision among post-16 providers locally.

The number of 16-year-olds leaving his school and going on to an apprenticeship stands at around 15 per cent, compared with an average in all English schools of just 6 per cent.

So why are so many schools struggling at this? Logan attributes the situation to a lack of understanding about technical education in many schools. This concern has also been repeatedly raised by ministers within the Department for Education. Last month, education secretary Damian Hinds became the latest to hit out at the “snobbery” towards vocational learning.

Logan explains: “There is sometimes a misconception from teachers and leaders that because some routes are not as traditionally academic, it won’t lead to success. If you look at the opportunities that are out there, sometimes an apprenticeship can be a more appropriate route for some young people.”

This joined-up approach between schools and colleges also relies on buy-in from FE providers, too. For Zailie Barratt, the director of learner and customer services at Hull College, a level of objectivity is needed before accepting a prospective student on to a course.

“We’ve done a lot of work around impartiality,” she says. “It’s very easy to go out there and say, ‘Come on, quick, we want you, let’s get your bum on the seat.’ It doesn’t work for us in the long run, though - our achievement rates go down, our attendance goes down. We’ve got to get the right person in the right seat. We might not be the best [provider] for them - it might be another college. It’s important we know that and where they need to be.

“It’s really important that we are enrolling with integrity. So if a student comes in and says, ‘I might want to be a hairdresser, but I might also want to be a bricklayer as well,’ and they go straight to a hairdresser, [the hairdresser] will talk really enthusiastically about hairdressing and the student will think, ‘Oh yeah, that’s what I want to do.’ But they might get halfway through the year and think, ‘Actually, it was bricklaying that I wanted to do.’”

Before a student enrols, a member of college staff interviews them to find out what it is that they want to do, and set out the career paths each course entails. “Then they can make the informed choice,” Barratt explains. “Because then they will have made that choice and they have really good information about both sides, so they are more likely to be successful on the course they are on.”

The practice of colleges promoting courses that do not have good local employment prospects was denounced by Ofsted’s chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, in November, when she hit out at providers “offering false hope” to students - and she singled-out colleges’ promotion of arts and media courses, in particular, in areas with limited employment opportunities in these industries.

Hull College, however, uses local labour market intelligence to ensure that there is the need for recruits in the pathways that its provision offers. As Barratt explains: “Each of our directors of curriculum will do research into the local labour market and they will look at what’s out there, what’s needed and where the gaps are. The curriculum will then be tailor-made for those areas.

“They then have to go to the senior leadership team and for a curriculum-purchasing meeting to sell what they want to offer. That is to make sure that the courses we offer are current, they will appeal to the learners and there is a gap out there, so we’re not training people to go into an industry where there are no gaps.

“It’s a balancing act of knowing what the local labour market looks like, but also the outside world, because students might not want to stay in Hull. We want to keep their skills in the city, but at the end of the day they are all individuals [and will do what they want to do].”

Claudia Harris, chief executive of the CEC, says that success in the Humber is down to strong local collaboration.

“The Humber has built an incredibly strong network connecting employers and education. This helps to ensure all young people get the vital opportunities and inspiration they need.”

She adds: “Schools, colleges, employers and partners here recognise careers education is a real opportunity to tackle social mobility, and they are grasping that opportunity with both hands.”

While for Logan, a focus on careers underpins everything that a good education provider should be doing. He says he is sometimes “appalled” by the lack of focus on careers elsewhere.

“I speak to leaders all the time and it frustrates me so much that some young people in this country do not have a person who offers one-to-one guidance or access to employers, or they do not have access to work experience. My question is: why? I just fundamentally do not understand it.

“There are no excuses. Because, ultimately, there’s a young person in our classrooms who needs [good careers advice], because that could unlock something in them that gets them to the point where they achieve and have a future. I’m sure that’s what we all want, isn’t it?”

George Ryan is an FE reporter for Tes. He tweets @GeorgeMRyan

‘We want to create life opportunities in our home city’

For Emma Hardy, MP for Hull West and Hessle, a key objective of Hull’s focus on careers advice is to prevent people feeling that they have to leave the city in order to have a good career.

“We want to create life opportunities for people to stay in their home town so they’re not forced to leave,” she says. “If we’re going to grow our economy, we need to get young people to stay.”

Before she became an MP, for 10 years Hardy was a primary school teacher in the city she now represents in the House of Commons, where she also sits on the Commons Education Select Committee. In that time, a burgeoning new green energy sector was taking shape around one of the city’s former docks.

Siemens Gamesa and Associated British Ports have invested £160 million in the port, where the construction of the world’s largest wind turbine blades now takes place - a move that has created around 1,000 jobs.

“We have had to think seriously about careers and training,” Hardy explains. “Because we are starting a new industry up in Hull that wasn’t there 10 years ago.

“The city has had to think, ‘How do we develop our careers strategy to make sure our young people are ready for jobs in the energy sector?’

“When companies come here, we want to be able to say, ‘Our young people have the skills you need’.”

Careers success: benchmarks for schools and colleges

The Gatsby benchmarks were developed by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and have been embedded in the government’s national careers strategy. The charity commissioned careers expert Sir John Holman, emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of York, to set out what career guidance in England should look like if it were to match the best international standards. The eight benchmarks now form the basis of what colleges and schools are expected to achieve through their careers strategies.

• A stable careers programme - “Every school and college should have an embedded programme of career education and guidance that is known and understood by pupils, parents, teachers and employers.”

• Learning from career and labour market information - “Every pupil, and their parents, should have access to good quality information about future study options and labour market opportunities. They will need the support of an informed adviser to make the best use of available information.”

• Addressing the needs of each student - “Pupils have different career guidance needs at different stages. Opportunities for advice and support need to be tailored to the needs of each pupil. A school’s careers programme should embed equality and diversity considerations throughout.”

• Linking curriculum learning to careers - “All teachers should link curriculum learning with careers. For example, [science, technology, engineering and maths] subject teachers should highlight the relevance of Stem subjects for a wide range of career pathways.”

• Encounters with employers and employees - “Every pupil should have multiple opportunities to learn from employers about work, employment and the skills that are valued in the workplace. This can be through a range of enrichment opportunities including visiting speakers, mentoring and enterprise schemes.”

• Experiences of workplaces - “Every pupil should have first-hand experiences of the workplace through work visits, work shadowing and/or work experience to help their exploration of career opportunities, and expand their networks.”

• Encounters with further and higher education - “All pupils should understand the full range of learning opportunities that are available to them. This includes both academic and vocational routes and learning in schools, colleges, universities and in the workplace.”

• Personal guidance - “Every pupil should have opportunities for guidance interviews with a careers adviser, who could be internal (a member of school staff) or external, provided they are trained to an appropriate level. These should be available whenever significant study or career choices are being made. They should be expected for all pupils but should be timed to meet their individual needs.”