Redacción de Políticas Institucionales de la Cooperativa de Ahorro y

One of the interesting findings is the conflict between policy directives and the guidance practitioner’s own professional judgement. Question 13 asked: ‘Do you feel that meeting targets has affected the way you deliver guidance?’ and all 12 respondents answered ‘Yes’. There was a subsequent prompt for those who answered Yes: ‘If ‘Yes’, how would you describe the effects of targets on the way you deliver guidance?’ Three of the practitioners responded in terms of having to accommodate both the funding requirements and the guidance imperative. The former has an external locus of control, the latter an internal locus. To accommodate the funding requirements, the practitioner must adhere to the DfEE criteria. It was common practice for practitioners to have the quality of the action plans they produced monitored by managers within the careers company. As outlined in the previous section, Company X had produced a checklist for careers advisers to audit their action plan against the DfEE criteria for acceptable action plans which would draw down the funding agreed in the core contract with the careers company; this ‘claimable’ action plan is the desired outcome of the interview. The Sample X checklist asserts that, for an action plan to be ‘claimable’, the careers adviser must have:

 identified clear educational or occupational goal(s) for the client

 clearly identified the reasons for the client’s choice

 commented on the realism and appropriateness of the client’s goals.

Such mechanisms, which check quality against managerial and audit criteria rather than against professional criteria for effective delivery, are symptomatic of the managerialist-professionalist tensions found elsewhere in the public sector (Power, 1997) and notably in Further Education (Randle and Brady, 1997; Gleeson and Shain, 1999). Some respondents echoed this tension to satisfy audit requirements which do not quite fit with best guidance practice:‘You work the interview to ensure

all the criteria [quality] is[sic] met whether appropriate or not’ (Y6) and:‘Targets imposed define that for every guidance interview there should be a CAP [careers action plan] - very difficult if client undecided/no ideas/vocationally not ready- but feel the need to push to make a decision - technical rationality. Often feel paper-

pushing, target meeting exercise’(Y1). Roberts (1997) was eloquent in challenging this kind of assumption, arguing that: ‘A consequence of young people’s uncertain futures is that realistic guidance has to trade in possibilities rather than certainties or even probabilities’ (p.352). This runs counter to the underlying assumption of the funding mechanism, which requires a clear choice of occupational or vocational progression, supported by an appropriate rationale, which should sustain the client in achieving the stated career aim. The difficulty for some practitioners is that they are the ones expected to make sense of the client’s uncertainty, the vagaries of the Labour Market and satisfy stringent funding requirements. All this in real time, with a real client: ‘[action plan] Dominates interview - over rides their[client] needs and wants’(Y3).

Policy seems to have a kind of presence within the interview space, and vies for the attention of the practitioner, even at the expense of the client. The practitioner seems to feel a genuine dichotomy between serving the paying client and the client in front of them. Another response shows the tension experienced by the practitioner in trying to satisfy the various demands discernible in the interview; demands which may even be diametrically opposed: ‘I steer the agenda to fit the process required - though may not be on the agenda for the client I am interviewing’ (Y8). This respondent also feels that there are choices to be made about the direction the interview takes; and that by ensuring the funding requirements are met, the focus on

the actual client can be lost. This is not only an impression gained by these few individual practitioners feeling the effects of accountability pressure, but is corroborated by research undertaken by the local Training and Enterprise Council:

‘Recent research carried out by our TEC [Training and Enterprise Council] has

shown that client sometimes feel that their guidance needs are not always being met

due to our needs’(Y10).

A clear distinction is drawn between the process of the careers guidance interview itself, and the tangible outcome, the artefact that is the Action Plan:

‘I have always worked in jobs where targets are integral to the job. However, there has always been a tangible link to the work I did and income generation, and not as an indicator of quality and amount of work done! The CS targets seem to be an attempt to justify the work we do and I feel they are very poor indicators of the work we do with clients. This leads to a feeling of being undervalued and de-skilled - the ap [action plan] is the product and outcome not impartial guidance to assist clients to move on and work towards reaching their goals.’ (Y6)

In responding to a subsequent question (Q17) one practitioner makes a powerful statement about trading off the process of the careers interview against the action plan outcome: ‘I have never felt that action plans are for the client - so quickly complete them and in a way feel they are the "price I have to pay" for interviewing

the client’ (Y9). In the struggle to satisfy the god of guidance and mammon, the client becomes the sacrifice: ‘Something has to give - usually client needs. Managers check your monthly stats, not the quality of guidance given - action plans

 The effect of targets

In addition to the preceding responses to Question 13 (‘Do you feel that meeting targets has affected the way you deliver guidance?’) two respondents wrote of the effect of the targets from their own perspective. The first:‘Often feel paper-pushing, target meeting exercise’ (Y1). This description of the work undertaken with the client is not one that accords with the idea of professional work. There is a sense of bureaucracy gone mad; that the emphasis on producing the evidence to account for work undertaken to core contract has displaced the work itself. Careers guidance is lost in the quest for audit evidence. The second respondent gave a graphic description of their experience of working to set targets: ‘Sausage machine. It’s made me think more careful [sic] about the way I deliver things, as my time is so valuable and schools are aware of this. However, job satisfaction has diminished’

(Y5). Clearly a negative effect on morale.

One respondent was sanguine about targets, and somewhat dismissive of the effect of targets on colleagues: ‘They are useful tool. It can be a pain when everyone gets overly uptight about them. Not a problem’(Y4).

Respondent Y7, a Team Leader, pointed to the positive effect of targets on morale:

‘Targets have helped to show individual contribution to company so helped with

motivation. Supportive management so few problems with morale’. Such positive views of the effect of targets were very much in the minority however: ‘Quantity could mean delivering lots of crap - how does this help client?’ (Y4) and ‘Less motivated as people who are crap at guidance can still meet their targets and be

seen to be performing’ (Y2). The language used here is rather more robust than anything in Sample X. This may just be a question of personal style, or even of

regional variation. It might also be indicative of Sample Y responding to the questionnaire at a weekend, albeit a study weekend, in the neutral space that is their university, as opposed to the formal space of a company conference.

One final comment on quality uses a common enough metaphor: ‘When we are appraised twice each year by team leaders we are measured by meeting our targets

not on how we meet our targets - the ‘extra’ we put in. Feel the width, not the

quality’ (Y8, emphasis added). Put in the geographical and historical context of a locality which traditionally produced and traded in cloth, the comments have a particular resonance.

 Reliance on schools to meet targets

The importance of the practitioner’s relationship with schools for meeting targets was a recurrent theme; those who were able to meet targets often admitted that good relations with schools helped. Practitioners make reference, as in Sample X and in the Focus Groups, to ‘good’ schools. By this, they mean specifically that the school appreciates the need for targets and is prepared to help achieve them; either by ensuring classroom release so that pupils can attend the guidance interview at the allocated time, or ensuring substitutes are available in school to cover no-shows when pupils are unexpectedly absent: ‘To meet targets you need to be organised - this is a problem in a badly organised school and so leads to tension’(Y4) and:‘Be organised - get on well with careers co-ordinator and school. This can give you the

flexibility to meet client needs’ (Y4). Releasing individual pupils from timetabled lessons is relatively straightforward when compared with assembling the groups in

the configurations required to satisfy the core contract for groupwork in schools, a problem identified in a national evaluation of group work in schools (Bysshe et al., 1997). One of the big problems has been the prescribed size of the groups being smaller than the average class. Reporting groupwork has given rise to a number of creative accounting practices, where for example, groupwork is delivered to a large group, but they are asked to do an activity in a sub-group in order to satisfy the letter of the contract compliance: ‘Need to prioritise who will be seen, see in groups etc. Need to work closely with school staff’ (Y12).

Having secured the collaboration of the school to deliver both what the targets require, and what the school wants, a further hurdle is posed by policy decisions that reverse the status quo ante. By the time this questionnaire was administered to Sample Y, in November 1998, the re-focusing of the careers service had taken place. In this, careers companies were expected to focus greater effort in working with disaffected pupils, who may not even be attending school. As a result, work in school was cut. From the summer term of 1998, when guidance professionals had to convince teachers to release pupils from National Curriculum subjects to attend careers guidance activities, they returned in the autumn term, having to explain that the service will no longer be offered: ‘Over reaching targets is a problem and it is hard to explain to school that last year 100% of Post 16 seen, this year 30% because

of work with disaffected’ (Y12). Not that the pupil need has changed, nor that guidance theory has developed and moved on. The goal posts have been moved.