Career advice may soon come with a survival percentage

A guidance framework under discussion among education and labour authorities would attach one number to every occupation on the school careers list: the probability that the job still supports a household when the pupil turns forty. The number would appear on the printed handout, next to the required qualifications and the average starting salary, in the same size type. The framework is a draft. It has no legal force. Two regional education directorates have already asked for the print template.

The number would not officially be called a survival percentage. The draft calls it a long-horizon viability indicator, a phrase chosen by a committee that understood perfectly well what pupils would call it instead. A week after the first handout it would be a survival percentage in every classroom in the country, and the committee would have to decide whether to correct them.

The arithmetic would be the least defensible part. The indicator would be assembled from published labour-market projections that disagree with one another, sometimes sharply, and then flattened into a single integer, because a fourteen-year-old cannot usefully be shown a confidence interval. The draft is candid about this in an annex. The handout would carry the integer. The annex would not be printed.

“We would not be telling anyone what to do,” a spokesperson for the drafting group would say. “We would be handing young people the same information the labour market already has. If the information is uncomfortable, that is a property of the labour market, and we would be reluctant to accept responsibility for it.”

The two highest-scoring occupations in the accompanying modelling would be jobs that nobody in the room has heard of and no parent can picture. Both would sit where physical work meets machine supervision: roles that are awkward to automate precisely because somebody has to be standing there, deciding, in a place where it rains.

The parents' evening would be the real event. The child would arrive holding a number. The parent would arrive holding a career that the same table scores somewhere in the low thirties. The conversation that followed would not be about the child. The staff briefing note attached to the draft would devote noticeably more space to the adult's reaction than to the pupil's.

The objection to the framework is not that the numbers would be wrong, although they would be. It is that a number handed to a fourteen-year-old stops being a forecast and becomes an instruction. Careers guidance has always been a form of quiet steering. This draft would simply make the steering legible, printable and, for the first time, arguable at the kitchen table.

Nothing has been adopted, funded or scheduled. The working group stresses that the indicator is illustrative. It has so far received one request for the underlying spreadsheet, two questions about whether teaching appears on the list, and no answer to either.