We recommend that personal guidance is managed in Compass+ in two ways:
- Creating a personal guidance activity for multiple learners
- Creating a personal guidance activity for a single learner.
Creating a personal guidance activity for multiple learners
When setting-up personal guidance activities in Compass+, it is most likely that you will be managing these for multiple learners (e.g. whole classes, year groups). If this is the case, you do not need to create a separate activity for every individual learner in Compass+. Creating personal guidance activities for learners appropriately will also make sure that they contribute to your Gatsby Benchmark scores.
To create a personal activity for multiple learners, firstly navigate to Plans > Create new activity in the navigation bar:
Select ‘Benchmarks 2-8’, then click on the ‘Create activity’ button:
A new activity form will open. Firstly, give the activity a name: the name should describe the whole period in which the personal guidance activities are taking place for the whole group, e.g. ‘Year 11 personal guidance interviews.
Then select ‘One-to-one careers guidance’ under Gatsby Benchmark 8 in the main category dropdown list:
Add an additional Benchmark categories (if applicable) from the second dropdown. Please note: only the main category Benchmark contributes towards your Benchmark scores.
Now, add the school lead for the activity, followed by the whole period in which the personal guidance activities for the group are taking place. In the example below, the period of activity lasts for one month:
You then need to add all the learners who are receiving a personal guidance interview. In the example below, the whole of Year 11 is added:
Any learners who will not be participating can be removed from the group by clicking on the edit icon beside Year 11:
Remove the learners not receiving a personal guidance interview by clicking on the ‘X’ beside their name:
Add any providers helping the activity to be delivered. If these organisations are in your Careers Providers Database, you can add them quickly to the activity by clicking in the employers/providers field and selecting them from the dropdown list.
If you are using your institution as an activity partner to provide personal guidance interviews, you can also add it as an activity provider in the Careers Partners Database first, before adding it to the personal guidance activity:
Finally, add any notes that might be useful, then click ‘Save activity to Plan’:
The personal guidance activity will appear as a single activity in your Plan, and in the individual profiles of all Year 11 learners who have been assigned to the activity.
To mark the activity as completed, you must wait until the whole period of personal guidance consultations have been completed (in the example above, this date is 31 May):
Evidencing personal guidance
Learners may be asked to document their personal guidance interview. As files cannot be attached to Compass+, we recommend that you capture the location of the folder on your institution’s network drive containing the documentation for each learner (e.g. in Word files) in the notes field of the personal guidance activity:
Alternatively, you may wish to copy-and-paste a learner's record of their personal guidance interview into one of the notes fields in the ‘Interests and Destinations’ tab screen of their individual profile:
Again, it may also be useful to save the location of the documentation file on your institution’s network drive.
Creating a personal guidance activity for a single learner
If you need to create a personal guidance activity for a single learner (or smaller group), repeat the steps above, but only select the single learner from the learner list. Start by typing the learner's name in the box:
As this single personal guidance activity is likely to take place on a single day, the activity can be marked as ‘Complete’ as soon as the learner has completed their guidance interview.