You are a career development practitioner who has, until recent years, been employed by the local careers service as it went through its many changes from local authority, to privatised service to Connexions. During that time you worked for several years in a large local community high school. While you were part of the careers service provided free of charge to the school, you had very little contact with the Head Teacher; interview schedules were organised by the CEIAG lead in the school and although service level agreements had been in place, they were negotiated between managers in your organisations and a member of SLT in school so you never felt that that was your responsibility. You were made redundant by the careers service and have now decided to go it alone as a self-employed Career Adviser. The school have chosen to employ you as they know and trust you. One day you were in the middle of interviewing a year 11 pupil when the door of the room opened and the Head Teacher walked in. She announced that she was going to sit in on the rest of the morning’s interviews “to see what the school is getting for its money”. You had already completed your contract with the client in which you had emphasised confidentiality and client-centeredness and had obtained the permission of the client to proceed under those conditions. You had one further interview scheduled for the morning so you allowed this to happen. You felt very uncomfortable with this but, without the infrastructure of an organisation around you, you did not know how to respond; when you were employed you would have taken the issue to your line manager who would have taken the responsibility of discussing and challenging this with the school.
Adapted from: CDI Professional Standard Committee (2017)
Reference the above case, discuss in 750 words what kind of a problem you are facing as a career development practitioner:
- Is it an organizational problem: there is a conflict between your expectations of what the school expects from you and your own expectations of how you will operate in the school as a self-employed practitioner?
- Or a professional problem: there is a conflict between your professional ethics particularly in relation to client confidentiality and trust as agreed with the client during contracting of the interview.
Propose actions that should be taken by the head teacher or school management to correct such practice/avoid such problem.
Hint (VERY IMPORTANT)
• To answer the query of this question, you need to define different types of accountability and different approaches that can be taken by a manager for better accountability practices.
• Reflect on the case and discuss accountability from the perspective of the career development practitioner. Alternatively, provide concrete actions to be taken by the head teacher or school management to improve such accountability practice.
Sample Solution
