Aligning parental engagement with Gatsby Benchmarks

Jan 21, 2025
5 min read

Updated: Jul 22

This article is intended for schools and colleges.

As part of the 2024 Gatsby Benchmarks update, greater emphasis was placed on parental engagement. This included both providing parents with good information about the career pathways available to their children, and practical ways parents can use that information. If you're interested in parent-specific resources that cover both, read on to find out how we could help.

The Parents' Guide To helps parents support their teens through Years 10 to 13, with guidance on post-school options and teenage wellbeing. Parents can access our resources directly through our website. Many schools like to share our guides with their parents (rather than parents buying their own individual copies), and our school membership programme includes a licence for this. School membership is designed to make your life easier throughout the academic year, giving you a range of up-to-date, reliable resources to answer parent questions and show them how to support their teens at home.

Membership also supports schools in meeting inspection criteria and the Gatsby Benchmarks. In this article, we explain how, referring to extracts from Gatsby's Good Career Guidance: The Next 10 Years (November 2024).

Introduction

As part of the 2024 Gatsby Benchmarks update, greater emphasis was placed on parental engagement:

“Updates embed parent and carer engagement into planning and specify the need to share information with parents and carers and support them to use it with their children.”

With membership, you'll have access to our specialist guides written specifically for parents, personalised with your school logo.
Updated every year, they contain information about career pathways for teenagers and include actionable steps parents can take at home, so they feel confident having meaningful conversations about careers with their children.
We'll include reminders of good times to share these resources with your parents, so they get the right information when it's most useful to them.

Benchmark 1: A stable careers programme

Engagement of parents and carers is now included in Benchmark 1.

“We have added a new criterion that careers programmes should set out how parents and carers will be engaged throughout. In practice this means ensuring parents and carers use and understand good-quality, up-to-date information about all the pathways available, what different education routes and qualifications involve, and where they can lead.”

Our guides include information on the pathways available after GCSE and sixth form.
We guide parents on which qualifications are needed for each pathway, what to do if their teen doesn’t have the qualifications they need, where each pathway can lead, and why different qualifications may suit some students more than others.
Our guides are updated each year so the content includes the latest information and stays relevant.
We offer member schools an annual calendar to help them share information with parents at timely intervals throughout the year.

“Throughout the framework we emphasise the importance of not only sharing information about education and careers options with parents and carers, but also supporting them to access and use it in conversations with their children.”

All our guides include actionable steps parents can take at home to support their teen. This includes:

step-by-step advice on how to start conversations
examples of the types of questions they can ask to help their teen make the right decisions
where they should intervene and where they should step back
what to do at home to give their children the best opportunity of success

Benchmark 2: Learning from career and labour market information

“All pupils, parents and carers, teachers and staff who support pupils should have access to good-quality, up-to-date information about future pathways. We have added that parents and carers should be encouraged and supported to access and use information about careers to support their children.”

Our guides are updated each year so the information stays relevant and current. To support parents in using our resources:

we provide twice-termly live video calls with parents, so they can talk through aspects of career pathways and ask us any questions
we provide member schools with a monthly newsletter, highlighting key messages to share with parents throughout the year, aligned with school and national events (exams, National Careers Week, National Apprenticeship Week, Green Careers Week, the UCAS timetable, subject choices, work experience week)
member schools can access our online calendar with key events and recommendations of good times to share resources
parents can join our Parent Club for fortnightly email updates
our social media channels offer bitesize information aligned with our overall messaging, so parents have greater choice in how they receive it

Benchmark 2: Learning from career and labour market information

Benchmark 7: Encounters with further and higher education

“Research shows that there can also be misconceptions about certain pathways, so institutions may need to make more effort gathering information and encouraging encounters with providers that are less well understood. For example, uptake of apprenticeships is 16% higher in schools that provide information on apprenticeships to most or all pupils, compared with schools that provide information to only a minority.”

We provide dedicated guides for all available options after GCSE and sixth form (The Parents’ Guide to Post-16 Options and The Parents’ Guide to Post-18 Options).
We provide specialist guides on T Levels, apprenticeships and university.
Our guides include advice for parents on how different qualifications suit different types of learner, and how where their children study can influence outcomes.

Benchmark 8: Personal guidance

“Benchmark 8 has been updated to state that information about personal guidance support, and how to access it, should be communicated to young people and parents and carers, including through the institution’s website.”

As a member school, you can share our specialist parent guides, personalised with your school logo, directly on your website, so parents can access the information anywhere, any time.
You can share the whole guide or extracts from it, in whatever way you feel is useful for parents.

Overview: parent engagement goes beyond sharing information

“Although a considerable amount of information is shared with parents and carers, they are not always supported to make best use of it or to get involved in the opportunities offered. Parent and carer engagement goes beyond just sharing information. It equips parents and carers to have informed careers conversations and ensures they can better support their child’s career decisions.”

Our guides don't just give information; we offer step-by-step actions, including practical ways to start discussions and what parents can do at home to support their teens with their studies.
We also include The Parents’ Guide to Standing Out, detailing how hobbies, interests and co-curricular activities help develop skills and experience, and why that's useful in future interviews.

Overview: parent engagement goes beyond sharing information

Parents remain one of the biggest influences on young people’s career decisions

The Parents' Guide To helps parents recognise their influence, giving them tools and guidance so they feel comfortable having meaningful career conversations with their children. Our information is up to date and easy to understand, with plenty of suggestions on different ways parents can talk to their teens about the future.

School membership gives participating schools access to a range of dedicated parent resources you can share with your parents at no cost to them. Membership is available for KS4, KS5 or whole school.