Careers Wales: Coronavirus update

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last updated you on how Careers Wales is supporting young people and their parents/guardians; and I wanted to assure you of our support, whilst providing an update on some of our services.

Our advisers are in regular contact with pupils via phone, text and email. Since lockdown we have sent over 29,500 emails, 25,500 texts and had over 2,300 telephone contacts, allowing us to continue providing them with the vital careers advice and guidance they need.

Our Wales-wide live chat with careers advisers is still proving popular amongst young people and parents and we’ve have had over 100 live chats with this group since the end of March.

Our first live Q&A for parents had a good response and we have another one scheduled in for Thursday 21 May at 2-3pm across Facebook and Twitter. Parents can also contact us directly via phone, text and email and we have already supported 1,550 concerned parents over the phone to date.

We’ve had a lot of parents accessing our distance learning resources and I’m pleased that we will be expanding our suite over the coming weeks. A further five sector-specific webinars and lesson plans will be available on our website and on the Hwb website in June as part of the Stay Safe, Stay Learning project.

In line with Welsh Government guidelines, we are exploring and reviewing other options as well such as live events and video interviewing. Our priority is making sure this is both an effective and safe way to communicate with your pupils and we will update you on this soon.

Plans are also well underway for exam results support for Yrs 11, 12 and 13 students. We have a dedicated team of advisers working on this and we will be delivering a comprehensive campaign with Welsh Government to reach relevant pupils and parents.

Finally, I just wanted to let you know, we currently planning our delivery for next year. We are continuing to roll-out the Career Check survey to Year 10 via smart survey – using your school platform or directly with the pupil, and we will be in touch soon to arrange our partnership agreement meetings with you.

Please keep visiting our website and our social media channels for the latest information about accessing our services.