a) Career informant: In this role, teachers provide students with a model, an approach of thinking about a career and help students shape their own way to view career choices by using their own experience as an example but without offering it as the only way to do this. The report lists some taks that a teacher in this role might perform: “talking about their decisions and how they made them, talking about their career building (including discussing challenges and regrets”, and many more; 

b) Pastoral support: This refers to the teacher as a first contact point for students who may approach them with conversations they need to have with a trusted adult. These can be related purely to career choices/guidance and sometimes, they may appear as being related to careers, but in reality the issue the student is having may be, for example, health-related. In this role, the teacher helps the student in line with their capabilities, but also direct the student to other professionals who can help. A task the teacher can perform in this role: “acting as facilitator and advocate for students to help them to have career conversations with other staff, parents and employers.” 

2. Teaching roles:

a) Within-subject: In this role, the teacher has two opportunities to provide CEL: within or beside the curriculum. For some subjects it may be more straightforward to discuss careers (e.g., Economics or Politics versus Physiscs, where more direct connections have to be made), and teaching approaches can also vary. If career information has to be provided besides the curriculum (e.g. STEM subjects), then the report proposes a team teaching approach, involving employers and other enrichment activities. Some tasks teachers can perform in this role: “explaining to pupils the progression routes open in continued learning in their subject area, using the curriculum to develop core employability skills”, “arranging visits to relevant workplaces”, “organising a programme of visiting speakers from business”; 

b) Delivering CEL: This role refers to the teacher being involved, where possible and it exists (as it depends on curriculum set-up), in CEL as a separate, standalone subject of the curriculum. A task teachers can perform in this role: “contributing particular CEL inputs related to subject expertise”.  

3. Leadership roles:

a) Leading CEL: A teacher leading CEL will be someone that, either has a teaching background or not, but needs to be familiar with and be able to coordinate various stakeholders involved in providing CEL to the school. Therefore, a teacher in this role would be someone in a middle leader position, and a Career co-ordinator/Careers Leader/Head of Careers. 

b) Senior leadership: This role is taken up, normally, by someone of the school’s senior leadership team. In this role, the person would “connect CEL to the school’s mission and ethos, identify resourcing for CEL programmes, appointing and managing the school career’s leader” and other tasks.  

As mentioned initially, these roles are proposed in the study for UK schools and some aspects may not be applicable to other countries but this should help for a first reflection.

As an optional activity, if you want to understand better the nuances of role overlapping between teachers and career counsellors, read pages 28-31 of the report (including Table 2) to see how these responsibilities might be shared.