Score your college against Gatsby.
Ten questions. Four minutes. An honest number out of 100 and where the gaps sit.
Why Gatsby delivery matters - Milburn review 2026
“The evidence is now unambiguous. Where a young person’s institution delivers all eight Gatsby Benchmarks, their probability of becoming NEET falls by up to a third. Delivery - not intent, not policy, not paperwork - delivery is the intervention.”
Careers Leaders and SLT in FE colleges.
If you own Gatsby delivery, write the SAR careers section, or brief your Principal on where the college sits before Ofsted - this is for you. Four minutes gives you a defensible number and the language to explain it.
- Careers Leader
Get a benchmark-by-benchmark diagnosis you can lift verbatim into your annual review.
- Principal / CEO
One score, three tiers, the specific gaps that produce NEETs. No jargon.
- Vice Principal Curriculum
See which benchmarks are dragging your destinations data - before Ofsted does.
- Quality / SAR lead
Language that maps to the CEC 2024 framework and the 2026 Milburn recommendations.
The Milburn review named careers education as the fault line.
Alan Milburn’s independent review for the DWP on youth inactivity landed in June 2026 with an uncomfortable headline: nearly one million 16–24 year olds are NEET, and the young people falling through are overwhelmingly the ones whose schools and colleges delivered the least joined-up careers education. The review’s central recommendation to the sector is blunt - full delivery of every Gatsby Benchmark is the single most effective lever government has.
This assessment is the fastest way to see where your college sits against that lever - not against a compliance form, but against the specific gaps the Milburn review says are producing NEETs right now.
Milburn review of youth economic inactivity · DWP · June 2026
A cohort the size of Birmingham is disconnected from work or study.
Up 22% in three years. The review is explicit that this is not a labour-market failure - it is a transition failure between education and destination.
Scored by Q1, Q3, Q10 (BM1, BM3, BM8)
Disadvantaged learners are 2.4× more likely to become NEET at 18.
Milburn pinpoints uneven access to employer encounters, workplace experience and personal guidance as the mechanism - the exact ground BM3, BM5, BM6 and BM8 cover.
Scored by Q3, Q7, Q8, Q10
Geographic 'careers cold spots' concentrate risk.
Colleges in cold spots achieve on average 1.8 fewer benchmarks. Learners there are half as likely to have had a meaningful employer encounter by 18.
Scored by Q7, Q8 (BM5, BM6)
Ten questions. One score. A diagnosis your Careers Leader can act on Monday.
Each question maps directly to one of the eight benchmarks or to a Milburn cross-cutting theme (use of data, and inclusion of disadvantaged learners). You pick the option that honestly describes your current delivery. We score 1–4 per answer, weight the benchmarks Milburn flagged as highest-risk, and give you a number out of 100 with the gaps laid out.
What you get
Why this matters
Gatsby isn't a compliance box. It's the lever.
Milburn's review names full Gatsby delivery as the single most effective way to cut NEET numbers. This tool tells you - in four minutes - which of the eight levers you're already pulling and which you're leaving on the table.
Milburn review · DWP · June 2026 · CEC
What you get
A diagnosis, not a checklist.
A verdict tier, a benchmark-by-benchmark tile with diagnosis text your Careers Leader can lift verbatim into SLT papers, national comparators from CEC Compass 2024/25, and - only where you're weak - up to three earned cards on how urfuture would move the needle. No sales wall.
CEC Compass 2024/25 · N=4,863 institutions
Ready to see your number?
Ten questions. A score out of 100. The exact benchmarks dragging you toward a Milburn-style NEET risk - and the ones you should be shouting about.