The Provider Access Legislation is now live and specifies that schools must provide at least six encounters with approved providers of apprenticeships and technical education for all their students. Promoting all pathways will enable young people to make well-informed and more confident decisions.
Click here to familiarise yourself with the Provider Access Legislation and what it involves.
To read the full PAL guidance, in context from the DfE, please click here
At The Careers & Enterprise Company, we are keen to support schools and providers to meet and evidence this updated requirement meaningfully as part of wider progressive careers programmes.
Using Compass+ to support PAL requirements
New features have been released in Compass+ to support PAL requirements:
New Evaluation questions: the Benchmark 7 (Educational Encounters) section of the Compass Evaluation now includes questions about Y8-13 pupils’ meaningful encounters with providers of apprenticeships and technical education that meet the requirements of PAL.
This question will be asked for each year group.
Users should also list the names of the providers of eligible encounters in the box provided…
Benchmark 7 activity: When creating a new Benchmark 7 activity: we have included a checkbox for you to confirm that the GB7 activity is eligible to be recorded as an encounter that meets the requirements of PAL.
As PAL is only applicable to GB7, the check box will only appear if you allocate GB7 to the main benchmark. You'll need to do this first, and then the PAL check box will appear.
To count as eligible with PAL, the provider must deliver an encounter that includes the following:
- Information about the provider and the approved technical education qualifications or apprenticeships that the provider offers
- Information about the careers to which those technical education qualifications or apprenticeships might lead to
- A description of what learning or training with the provider is like
- Responses to questions from the pupils about the provider or approved technical education qualifications and apprenticeships.
The encounter must also meet all of the other conditions outlined from page 43 in the statutory guidance here.