Tutor Support

When I did my own Masters dissertation ( not at CCPD ) I attempted to contact the tutor assigned to me at the time agreed , only to find he had been offered an unexpected research project in Iceland , so had made a speedy departure was non contactable for 3 months. No other tutor was willing to help me at the time. I particularly remember this incident at this time of year, when the summer tem is coming to its end at CCPD. This term is always a very challenging one for the students with all the practical skills assessments together with a flurry of written assignment deadlines. It is a time of year when more than ever, as tutors, we need to be available to help support our students.


With short time scales for students to submit their work, we must be able to offer tutorial time when the students require it and be able to respond quickly to questions asked. My status as a ‘part timer’ has implications for my availability. So, with that in mind, as well as face to face tutorials I promised I would check my emails everyday whether in work or not and would be happy to receive home phone calls. I knew that only a few students would probably need to take advantage of this - but for them it could be crucial to have the help when they needed it.

In the event I responded to quite a few emails but received only one phone call at home, from a male student. At the time of the call I was all soaped up, lying in my bath, as a precursor to going out for the day. “Is it a convenient time to call?” he asked. I thought about this. As I needed to go out immediately afterwards I said that it was probably as good as any, so to go ahead. He did. My first ever bath tutorial!

I think we were on the phone for around 15 minutes. I realise now there is an art to it. Trying to move around to keep warm under the water without making tell tale splashing noises, at the same time as talking seriously about academic matters is not easy. In this case, talking to a student who I knew would be horrified to think he was present at such a private moment in his tutor’s bathroom.

However, it was all worth- while - he passed the assignment!

Barbara Shottin

Youth Support Workers

Youth support workers in a range of job roles are experiencing first-hand the effects of government cut backs to the services they offer young people. It goes without saying that their work is demanding and challenging at the best of times, when services are well resourced and fully staffed. So when cuts in funding (but not in clients) begin to bite, youth support workers may find themselves under increasing pressure to work longer hours, see more young people or take on additional responsibilities. It is at times like these that the need for quality support and supervision in the workplace is essential.

Workers need a place to share the load that they are bearing with a fellow professional who can understand, empathise, guide and support. Not only are many youth support workers continuing to manage their client work, but they are also processing issues such as colleagues' redundancy (survivor guilt as it was recently described to me) and a severe cut in resources (this can include work premises closing down).

Historically the youth support sector has taken a somewhat patchy approach to supervision. Good in parts (the youth service) non-existent in others (career advisers, for example). It is imperative that those who remain in employment and work hard to offer a quality service to young people feel that, in turn, they are supported by their organisations and receive an equally quality service as employees. In the words of Dr Hazel Reid, ‘taking care of self, in order to take care of others.’

Jane Westergaard

“What’s going on?” as they say on Eastenders! (With apologies to all those who have no familiarity with the BBC soap opera.)

On the programme every traumatic event (and there are many) requires one of the characters to enter stage left and ask this question. So in the style of Eastenders – what’s going on with career guidance in England? How does removing ‘ringfenced’ funding for an impartial and independent service which helps young people to make informed choices about education, training and employment, chime with the coalition government’s focus on addressing issues of social mobility? And it looked so hopeful just a few months ago. We had Dame Ruth Silver’s excellent and – apparently – influential Careers Profession Task Force, which led to the forming of the Careers Professional Alliance of the major professional associations in the field (no mean feat). One outcome was to call for level 6 qualifications (i.e. graduate) and strive for level 7 (post graduate) qualifications for professional guidance practitioners within 5 years – well, of course – many would say – it is a profession! This desire resonated with the Minister for Skills, John Hayes, in his support of the careers profession and the move to an ‘all age service’ in England. Ah, such ‘heady days’ at the time of the Institute of Career Guidance’s annual conference in Belfast in the autumn of 2010. There is no doubt that Hayes remains an advocate for professional career guidance (and the need to keep emphasising the word ‘professional’ is an indication of how far the service is perceived to have been de-professionalised over recent years). But what happened to the excitement generated by Hayes at the ICG conference?


Well, a sweeping and severe budget cut to public expenditure is one explanation of the stalling of developments; leading to the worry that we are facing the disintegration of career guidance provision in England (and we can add career education as the other significant and related casualty in this collapse). The all age service is to be called the National Careers Service and it is supposed to build on the best of both Connexions and Next Steps. But the funding does not match the rhetoric. Recent estimates suggest that the overall budget for the National Careers Service will not be taken from the merging of the career guidance element of the Connexions Budget and the Next Steps budget, just short of £300m, but may be confined to the £83m from Next Steps and the £7m from Connexions Direct. So, what will be ‘going on’ may be limited to web-based and telephone guidance. And in schools? With the transference of any funding to schools, individual guidance for young people, it seems, will rely on what schools are willing to pay for. The widespread redundancies within Connexions have, anecdotally, led to some guidance practitioners forming clusters of career guidance professionals offering services that can be bought-in by schools. On the one hand this is enterprising and self reliant – on the other it fulfils Michael Gove’s rationale that the previous partnership model is no longer required – i.e., “there you are you see this does open up a free market in guidance”! One view of the impact of the DfE’s Education Bill is that schools who can afford to pay for one-to-one career guidance will and those who can’t – won’t. There may still be some guidance for ‘intensive’ work in some schools as part of the Local Authorities’ brief. But, if the Bill goes ahead unchanged, it will be the majority - those in the middle - who will be squeezed out, receiving little more than ‘access to on-line services’. How could you deny access? It’s all a bit bonkers really - they’d be less polite on Eastenders!

Hazel Reid