Every year I try and review the year. The blog is the way that I capture what I’ve been doing professionally, but, I rarely look at whether anything that I post is actually being read by anyone. So, at the end of the year it is nice to look back and see what people have been using from the blog.

So let’s count down the top 10!

10

In October I had the opportunity to go to New Zealand and talk about career guidance at the CDANZ conference. As part of this I was asked to run a workshop entitled Building good career guidance in schools. In it I talked about the Gatsby Benchmarks, careers leadership and all of the other things that we’ve been learning about in England over the last decade. It seems to have gone down well!

9

2023 has been a year of strikes and industrial unrest. Inflation went crazy and all of our living standards dropped. I spent a fair bit of the year arguing that people who worked in higher education deserved to have decent pay and not to get steadily poorer. University management generally took a different perspective. As a result I spent a fair amount of time on the picket line and worrying about whether we could win the dispute. In March I asked ‘Is UCU still rising?‘ and offered some thoughts on the dispute. From there we got some minor concessions, but essentially lost our major claim to not get a lot poorer. I suspect that these issues will reappear next year, so watch the blog to keep up with all of the news.

8

One of the most enjoyable trips that I’ve had this year was my visit to the Netherlands for the IAEVG conference. While I was there I gave a keynote entitled Careering from cradle to grave in which I told some career stories and made the argument that careers matter and career guidance should be at the heart of government policy. People seem to have liked it because a lot of people have been downloading the PowerPoint.

7

During the pandemic I made a bunch of videos explaining different aspects of career theory. I then put them all together into a short self-study course on career theory. Three years later people are still watching it.

6

Thanks to Google a post that I wrote almost a decade ago still gets regular views. If you type ‘what is radical education’ into a search engine, you end up on my answer to that question.

5

In September I was working myself up into an angry mess about the weakness of the government’s response to the Education Select Committee report on career guidance. It was nothing more than an empty box, I argued. Four months later, still nothing has happened, and it looks like I was right.

4

In at number four was a guest post from David Andrews. In it David makes some important arguments about involving teachers in career education more deeply and sets out the implications for training and CPD.

3

In a very 2023 post, back in February I was playing around with ChatGPT. I got it to write a guest post on the state of career guidance in England. The result was very mediocre, but seems to have been pretty popular.

2

The second most popular post on the site was my take on the Ofsted review of career guidance provision. Back in October I pronounced that Ofsted’s report was Good but not outstanding. But the more that I’ve reflected the more dissatisfied I’ve become with that report. I think that Ofsted really missed an opportunity due to both methodological flaws in their study and political cowardice. Downgrading it to a Requires Improvement.

1

And so the most popular post this year was Investing in careers: What is career guidance work? This was a really interesting project that we did which tried to capture firstly how much England is spending on career guidance, secondly how this compares to what was spent under the last Labour Government and finally to explore at what point this spend would pay for itself. I think that it was worthwhile, and hopefully will make an impact into thinking about why it is worth investing more money in career guidance.