ABSTRACT
Does careers education and guidance work? In order to answer this question, we need to know what guidance (as we shall henceforth refer to it in this chapter) is supposed to do. From a policy perspective (cf. Chapter 21), the main objectives of guidance can, rather loosely, be called ‘economic’; we accordingly use the term economic outcomes to describe them. From the viewpoint of the guidance practitioner, the main objectives are changes in people exposed to guidance, many of which (but not all) can be called learning outcomes. In this chapter we shall be concerned with both economic and learning outcomes, but we shall not exclude other outcomes just because they are not commonly encompassed within these terms.
