V.Barker, A.Watts, T.Sharpe & A.Edwards : Building career guidance capacity in the voluntary and community sector
This article analyses the Kent and Medway Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG) programme for adults. This is a partnership model where community and voluntary groups are contracted by the government to provide a service. This is favoured by the government as it allows them to access clients who have been traditionally hard to reach.
Thoughts from the article:
1. (p 461) Providing IAG training to community workers produced the opposite outcome of what was intended. This training, instead of equipping the community workers to provide guidance, made them more aware of their own limitations in their efforts to provid guidance. This served to protect the professionalism of the Community Learning Mentors (who are qualified career advisors) as it created an ongoing need for their expertise.
2. The article described ‘community-based guidance’ which is resource sharing & joined up working within a community location. Using the ‘Competing conceptions of community’ handout you could argue that this approach matches the description of ‘provision’ which is, “when communities are encouraged to provide services previously provided by the state, a kind of creeping privatisation”.
This is different from working with and in partnership with the community to deliver guidance which might be considered as true community guidance.
