The Connexions service: a holistic policy response to young people's needs?

The creation of the Connexions service followed the increasing governmental awareness in the 1990s that growing numbers of young people were failing to engage with any form of employment, education or training after compulsory education (DfEE, 2000a). The Social Exclusion Unit (SEU), set up in 1997, responded to the high political visibility of the link between poor educational achievement and poverty in later life. Indeed, social exclusion was defined as ‘a shorthand term for what can happen when people and the communities in which they live suffer from a combination of linked problems, such as unemployment, poor skills, low incomes, unfair discrimination, poor housing, bad health, and family breakdown’ (SEU, 2004: 2). The policy response to the holistic understanding of social exclusion came partly in the form of the Connexions service, announced in 1999 in the report Bridging the Gap, which explored multiple forms of social and economic disadvantage (SEU, 1999; Britton et al., Reference Britton, Chatrik, Coles, Craig and Hylton2002).

For SEU, the issue of turning around the lives of young people required much more than simple advice about employment and educational opportunities open to them. It required a sustained effort to understand the all too often interrelated needs presented by young people and helping them make the right life choices in their transition to adulthood (SEU, 1999). In other words, Connexions was created to provide a holistic response to the interconnected range of social needs through advice, guidance and support, to help young people overcome barriers to learning and work and achieve a successful transition from their teenage years into adult life (Walker and Walker, Reference Walker and Walker1997; CYPU, 2001). The result was a comprehensive service that could offer a universal minimum of provision for all young people but which was nonetheless able to respond to the needs of each individual and prioritise accordingly (Grove and Giraud-Saunders, Reference Grove and Giraud-Saunders2003). In particular, the service focussed on those young people presenting the most complex needs, including those who were not in employment, education or training (NEET).

Since the Connexions service was created to support young people aged 13–19, it found a natural home in schools and colleges (DfEE, 2000a; Garrett, Reference Garrett2002). The service was provided by PAs able to assess the needs of young people, provide or broker the necessary interventions to deal with those needs, and review the progress made throughout the period of contact. For example, the PA deals with information, advice and guidance (IAG) needs, including post-16 learning and career choices. The service is also equipped to deal with more complex needs, making Connexions PAs a single point of contact and continuity in the young person's progress into adulthood (Ainley et al., Reference Ainley, Barnes and Momen2002; Coles, Reference Coles2003: 95; DfEE, 2000b, c). The holistic conceptualisation of young people that was the driving force in the theoretical design of the Connexions service implied that meeting the needs of young people would require professionals from a variety of backgrounds to supplement the skill base of the existing majority of Connexions PAs who had been transferred from the careers service.

Although an aggressive drive to recruit youth and social workers, teachers and staff from other youth-related professions took place, the single most important professional body in the new service came from the careers service. This is because, in effect, Connexions had absorbed the former careers service (Peck, Reference Peck2004; Watts, Reference Watts2001b). The new remit of Connexions had enormous implications for the professional role of careers advisers inside the new service and for their subsequent identity. Indeed, the creation of a single, generic PA was initially driven by an expectation that the different professional groups working as part of Connexions would merge into a single professional form (DfEE, 2000b). However, the professional response to this expectation has been characterised by different forms of resistance, an issue explored later on. In the meantime, the article outlines the ways in which it was envisaged that interagency partnerships between Connexions and the education sector would operate.

Connexions and education: the ideal model

The way the Connexions service was to be deployed in schools was not entirely clear and the guidance from DfEE – and later DfES – was not particularly detailed for some time. Instead, the ministry issued documentation that described the main objectives of the service. Thus, the specifics of rolling out the new service in schools and colleges depended largely on local management arrangements between individual institutions and their local Connexions service (Hoggarth and Smith, Reference Hoggarth and Smith2004). For policy makers, Connexions was to support school and colleges through the contribution of personal advisers in order to:

• • provide all young people with the help and support they needed to make progress to further stages in education, work and adult life;

• • offer information, advice and guidance on learning and career options as well as access to broader personal development opportunities;

• • raise aspirations and motivation to retain students and promote achievements;

• • identify and address potential problems before they became major barriers to learning and entry to work;

• • help young people overcome barriers to participation in learning and work.

(DfES, 2001: 5.)

It was not until a year later that the DfES explained the way in which Connexions was expected to meet the original objectives by building on existing pastoral systems and curriculum provision in schools and colleges. At this point, it was established that ‘Connexions will not duplicate or take over where they [school and colleges] already provide effective support, but enhance such support’ (CSNU, 2002: 6). This point is important because it draws attention to policy design attempts to make the new service work as part of an integrated interagency team of professionals, adapting itself to fit the needs of young people and to the existing support systems in educational institutions. Furthermore, the same guidance document established that Connexions would be ideally placed to act as the link between support systems inside and outside of the school or college. These support systems included employers and the voluntary and community sector outside schools, but also personal tutors, counselors, Special Education Needs Coordinators (SENCO) and welfare officers inside the school (CSNU, 2002: 11).

However, two years later and three after the introduction of the service, a survey conducted by the National Audit Office found that the majority of staff in two-thirds of schools did not fully understand the role of Connexions PAs (DfES, 2004). Further, the document argued that ‘the level of success for Connexions depends on the extent to which schools cooperate with Connexions to coordinate support mechanisms for young people’ (DfES, 2004: 10).

This statement questions very much the extent to which the Connexions objective of ending the fragmentation of services for 13 to 19 year olds and acting as the ‘bonding’ element of support systems inside and outside schools was being achieved. If the majority of staff in schools did not fully understand the role of PAs, what went so wrong? What are the issues that limited the ability of Connexions and schools to create the interprofessional care arrangements for those young people who need the service the most by virtue of their mounting and multiple barriers to learning? Some answers to this question are obvious. For one, staffing and resource levels in Connexions were always inadequate to provide the service that was being proposed and to date the service operates with only about half of the originally proposed number of PAs (Hughes, Reference Hughes2005). What follows explores some of the limitations inherent to the two aspects of service integration that were contained in the original design of Connexions.

Limitations to integrated care: contested professional identities in Connexions

The creation of the Connexions service had locked within it a professional body, the careers adviser, with its own specialist knowledge and expertise. In addition to this, the new service embodied a radically new conceptualisation of youth transitions that emphasised the interdependence of the many factors that can act as barriers to learning, employment and successfully reaching adulthood (Catan, Reference Catan2004). The new Connexions service promoted a ‘social’ and holistic understanding of youth transitions as opposed to a view that had traditionally concentrated on knowledge about, and the provision of, information on learning opportunities and the labour market. Thus, the understanding of transitions into adulthood embodied in the original Connexions strategy contained an implicit criticism of the limited approach of the service traditionally provided in schools. In addition, research into the ways in which young people make career choices has debunked the technically rational view of decision making that assumes total freedom of choice and a separation between the decision-making process and the cultural contextual factors that inform all decisions (Hodkinson et al., Reference Hodkinson, Sparkes and Hodkinson1996; Hodkinson, Reference Hodkinson1998).

The arrival of the Connexions service was meant to transform all that because it operated under radically different premises. The new service portrayed itself as a support mechanism that could offer a universal service that was appropriate to the level of need presented by young people and was informed instead by a renewed political preoccupation with poverty and social exclusion. Careers advice was still on the agenda but within a context of support to remove barriers for progression in young people, providing a holistic form of support according to need (CYPU, 2001). As a result, the service required a new type of professional that could encompass a wider set of skills and knowledge to take account of all needs presented by young people and prioritise accordingly. The new professional based on the figure of the PA would emerge from the amalgamation of professionals from different backgrounds with a range of types of expertise in working and engaging with young people (DfEE, 2000b). This expectation was reinforced by the introduction of a Connexions service-specific form of training, the PA diploma, to help workers develop an understanding of the Connexions strategy and the principle of inter-agency working. The PA diploma included units of study covering all the key aspects of the role such as engaging effectively, seeking to effect positive changes in young people, developing ways of working with other agencies, and reflecting on professional practice (Garrett, Reference Garrett2002). However, although an active recruitment drive attracted new professional groups into Connexions, careers advisers continued to be the most prominent professional body inside the new service.

A number of arguments put by critics of Connexions have aimed to defend the careers profession's traditional image and identity. Firstly, it was argued that by being ‘absorbed’ into Connexions, the careers service had become linked to young people aged 13–19 rather than to the subject of careers needs of people regardless of age (Peck, Reference Peck2004: 95). Secondly, it was considered that careers practitioners had become locked into a service that had moved beyond what they considered to be their area of competence and expertise because it prioritised young people with multiple needs rather than those in the mainstream who required access to piecemeal information, advice and guidance (Watts, Reference Watts2001b). This was further compounded by claims that newcomers to the service without the relevant professional qualifications might be expected to offer careers advice from within Connexions, colonising professional territory beyond their expertise. Thirdly, the creation of the Connexions service was seen as part of a wider agenda to transfer some of the responsibilities for providing IAG to schools, within the new curriculum of citizenship and personal and social education. The warning here was that transferring responsibility for the provision of IAG to schools would break the traditionally upheld principle of impartiality in the advice the careers service provided to young people (Watts, Reference Watts2001a). To make matters worse, the argument followed, the principle of universal entitlement to careers guidance that the previous service provided was now under risk because Connexions prioritised provision for those most in need, effectively ‘neglecting’ mainstream young people (Morris et al., Reference Morris, Rickinson and Davies2001).

Yet, the reality of the Connexions service appears to have been rather different. First hand experience gained as part of the national evaluation of the impact of Connexions on young people at risk appeared to show that little had changed in the everyday practice of those PAs within Connexions who still identified with the careers service (Hoggarth and Smith, Reference Hoggarth and Smith2004). The overwhelming majority of them based in educational settings still spoke of themselves as careers advisers rather than Connexions PAs. Basic provision still consisted of information about learning and career paths, rather than the holistic support package Connexions was meant to be. This is supported by the image of Connexions among young people who overwhelmingly considered it to be only about jobs and training (Hoggarth and Smith, Reference Hoggarth and Smith2004).

Thus, there is little evidence that the Connexions service has managed to fuse the diverse professional roles in its midst into a single, generic form. The holistic agenda envisaged by the Connexions strategy never really became a reality and has now been dropped in current policy announcements (DfES, 2005). In fact, individual Connexions partnerships always maintained a separation of roles between personal advisers in education and personal advisers in the community. More often than not, the former were represented by ex-careers advisers, whereas the latter were constituted by the minority of new recruits who shared the Connexions vision of integrated service provision (Artaraz, Reference Artaraz2006). In some respects, some of these differences have been exacerbated by the introduction of the new PA diploma. Either due to the passive resistance of careers advisers or to the practicalities of having to deliver a specific form of provision to large numbers of young people in schools, the result is that the Connexions service has, on the whole, continued to operate a dual-pronged approach to service delivery that maintained the specialist status of careers advisers within the service. In sum, in spite of claims to the contrary (OECD, 2003), the operative reality of Connexions has maintained recognition for the careers profession's specialist role by failing to integrate the various professions into a single generalist form. The next section explores the second aspect of integration expected to produce effective interagency teams between educational settings and Connexions.

Limitations to integrated care: the effect of power relations between organisations

The difference in power relations between educational settings and the Connexions service provides a partial explanation to account for the limited success of the partnership between the two. The Connexions service's operational arrangements in educational settings vary considerably and depend largely on the specific partnership arrangements that exist between the individual institutions and their local Connexions service as well as on the working relationships established between PAs and other members of the interprofessional team (Joyce et al., Reference Joyce, White and Franses2004). Thus, authors found that some of the elements that could affect the partnership arrangements between Connexions and schools were better management support for Connexions workers, clarification of protocols and mechanisms for troubleshooting conflicts between agencies (Coles et al., Reference Coles, Britton and Hicks2004).

However, partnership arrangement documents are often based on templates that do not necessarily reflect the complex reality of the relationship between educational establishments and Connexions. Instead, the national evaluation of the impact of the Connexions service found that the relationship between schools and Connexions was mediated by power differences expressed through two interrelated factors: the level of integration of the Connexions service inside the life of the school and the degree to which the service was given access to relevant information, including student data (Hoggarth and Smith, Reference Hoggarth and Smith2004). Both reflected the extent to which Connexions was allowed to act as the binding element within the pastoral care team and between the school and outside forms of provision.

According to this study, models of partnership arrangements between schools and Connexions fell within three distinct categories. The first saw Connexions as a fully integrated agency in schools and colleges with freedom to locate and work with young people in need of their service. This ‘ideal type’ fitted fully with the original Connexions strategy by linking every member of the wider pastoral team inside the educational establishment and outside forms of service provision (Francis, Reference Francis2003). In the second category, Connexions acted as a neutral agency with restricted access to student information, converting the school or college in question into a gatekeeper to student information that was provided to Connexions on a ‘need to know’ basis only. The degree of team integration would be incomplete because of reticence and ambivalence towards Connexions, resulting in partnerships with varying degrees of effectiveness. The third model presented Connexions as an outside agency that conducted some of its work within the school premises. This type of arrangement was characterised by high levels of control of student information on the part of schools, leaving the Connexions PA marginalised and isolated.

The research uncovered worthy examples of teams that fell within the first model. Often these were in Special Educational Need (SEN) Schools that have a strong tradition of collaborative working with other agencies, a condition facilitated by legislative requirements (Hoggarth and Smith, Reference Hoggarth and Smith2004). These examples demonstrated that inter-agency teams could work adequately when the transfer of information and harmonisation of professional roles between school and Connexions had been established. However, other examples showed that the degree of information control exercised by schools – including pastoral care notes or information related to risk factors – could have a negative impact on young people facing barriers to engagement in the curriculum, because it inhibited an adequate Connexions response. In these scenarios, service provision could be based on incomplete information or, alternatively, lead to the duplication of efforts. Some of the schools also acted to prevent greater Connexions involvement for fear that the service might spoil their reputations or wariness about the involvement of ‘outside agencies’ in the lives of young people in their care (Hoggarth and Smith, Reference Hoggarth and Smith2004). Some of these fears were born out of the conflict between the young person-centred ethos of Connexions and other priorities dominant in certain schools. For example, it is possible to imagine cases where a school's ‘high achieving’ reputation could collide with independent advice on alternative qualifications or a school's religious ethos could clash with a young person's need for clear advice on contraception. In essence, the unequal power relations between the school and the Connexions service affected the potential for synergy in the partnership, a finding that chimes with some of the existing literature (McQuaid, Reference McQuaid and Osborne2000; Powell and Dowling, Reference Powell and Dowling2006).

In sum, a number of reasons might explain why partnerships between Connexions and schools did not work sufficiently well. They include elements that are internal to the Connexions service, and elements that affect the spirit of collaboration between agencies. In any case, these issues were always mediated by the power relations between schools – exercising high levels of independence – and an external agency dependent on effective partnership working in order to succeed.