1,840 CAREERS SCORED · 4,522 LIVE VACANCIES · THE EIGHT GATSBY BENCHMARKS

Eight benchmarks, mapped honestly

Careers leads get handed a lot of glossy PDFs claiming to tick every box. Here is ours, on a URL instead of a slide: the same eight Gatsby Benchmarks, the framework used across England to judge a careers programme, from the Gatsby Foundation's Good Career Guidance research. Every claim below opens onto a real, live page you can check yourself. Every gap is named as a gap.

How to read this

Each benchmark below is marked LIVE where Careermash genuinely does the whole job today, PARTIAL where it does a real part of it and the rest is named honestly, or SUPPORTSwhere the job belongs to a human, a careers adviser, a teacher, an employer, and Careermash's role is to hand that person better evidence, not to stand in for them.

1BENCHMARK 1 · A STABLE CAREERS PROGRAMMEA free, always-on substrate a careers lead can build a programme around.Today: The whole career library, the quiz, the Class Deck lesson game, and a printable lesson sheet per subject are free, live, and need no login and no procurement conversation, so a programme can start this term rather than next budget cycle. Start with the career library or a subject lesson sheet.Not yet: Careermash does not write your whole-school careers strategy, staff CPD calendar or governor report; that stays the school's own job. The paid evidence layer that turns student use into Gatsby-mappable reporting (preview the dashboard) is a founding-schools pilot for the coming term, not a finished product.PARTIAL

2BENCHMARK 2 · LEARNING FROM CAREER AND LABOUR MARKET INFORMATION1,840 UK careers, each carrying a sourced, dated number instead of a vibe.Today: Every career on the library carries a measured AI exposure figure, an entry-difficulty door grade, a 20-year horizon and published pay, each with a named source, mirrored as open data at /yellow/data. Apprenticeship standards carry the same measurement, cross-referenced against 4,522 live vacancies from the government's national Find an apprenticeship service.Not yet: The figures are national, not hyper-local. The one place they do narrow down is the vacancies board's region filter, which is real English regions, not individual towns.LIVE

3BENCHMARK 3 · ADDRESSING THE NEEDS OF EACH PUPILThe same sourced numbers for every pupil, with more than one route into them.Today: Nobody needs an account, so every pupil sees the same evidence regardless of background or postcode. The quiz and Find My Matchstart from a pupil's own interests rather than one scripted answer, and vocational and academic routes sit side by side, not one above the other.Not yet: Because the open site has no accounts, it cannot yet tell a careers lead which individual pupil has, or has not, engaged with any of it. Per-pupil tracking is part of the invited-account evidence layer (Careermash for Schools), not the free public site.PARTIAL

4BENCHMARK 4 · LINKING CURRICULUM LEARNING TO CAREERSA ten-minute in-lesson game and a lesson sheet per subject, not a bolt-on assembly.Today: The Class Deck is built to run inside a subject lesson, and its printable lesson sheets generate their objectives and discussion prompts live from that subject's own scored careers, written explicitly against Gatsby Benchmarks 2 and 4, so a change in the measurement changes the sheet.Not yet: A sheet needs enough scored careers in a subject to generate one; a handful of niche subjects do not have that yet, and the page says so plainly rather than faking a sheet.LIVE

5BENCHMARK 5 · ENCOUNTERS WITH EMPLOYERS AND EMPLOYEESA live database of who is hiring right now, not a simulation of one.Today: The live vacancies board lists 4,522real openings from the government's national apprenticeship service, every one a real employer hiring now, searchable by role and English region.Not yet: A vacancies database is not a person in the room. Careermash does not run employer talks, speed-networking or mentoring itself; it points at who is hiring, and the human encounter still needs a careers lead, or a scheme built for that purpose, to arrange it.PARTIAL

6BENCHMARK 6 · EXPERIENCES OF WORKPLACESThe real entry ladder for a career, so a placement gets chosen with open eyes.Today: Before a pupil chases a placement, every career's page shows the real route in, from apprenticeship or degree through to first job and typical pay (for example, game designer), so the placement they go looking for matches a route that genuinely exists.Not yet: Careermash does not broker or arrange workplace visits or placements itself. That is a physical-world relationship between a school and an employer that a card on a screen cannot substitute for; it can only make the choice of which placement to chase a better informed one.SUPPORTS

7BENCHMARK 7 · ENCOUNTERS WITH FURTHER AND HIGHER EDUCATIONLive, searchable directories of real institutions and real courses.Today: Universities and colleges and courses as cardsare searchable directories, and every career's pathway ladder links its real degree route, with each course carrying its own AI-impact assessment through its actual graduate destinations. Your Level 3 options covers the FE side plainly.Not yet: Browsing a directory is research, not a campus visit or an FE taster day. Careermash does not run open days; it is what a pupil reads before deciding which one is worth attending.PARTIAL

8BENCHMARK 8 · PERSONAL GUIDANCEA defensible number to bring into the room, not a replacement for the person in it.Today: Every career carries a kitchen-table parent's guide and a sourced verdict page, so a careers adviser, form tutor or parent walks into a one-to-one conversation with a defensible figure instead of a guess.Not yet: Personal guidance is a qualified adviser's job, done one pupil at a time. Careermash supports that conversation with real numbers; it does not replace the person having it. There is no booking system or guidance interview here, by design.SUPPORTS

Every figure above is dated: Measured August 2026. Want to see what a school gets from this once it is switched on properly? Preview the evidence dashboard, or read about Careermash for Schools. Curious what the underlying measurement actually is? The open data page has the licence, the methodology and every machine-readable mirror.