If you’re responsible for leading careers guidance or enrichment in a secondary school, you now have two sets of benchmarks to follow. The Gatsby Benchmarks have shaped careers guidance since 2018. The DfE’s Enrichment Benchmarks arrived in June 2026. The same number, similar language, and often in the care of the same people.

It seems simple to treat these as a single job. However, they aren’t and mixing them up can leave gaps in evidence that go unnoticed until someone asks. Here I’ll look at how to separate them to give them the appropriate level of attention.

The Careers Benchmarks

The eight Gatsby Benchmarks describe what good careers guidance looks like:

1. A stable careers programme.
2. Learning from career and labour market information.
3. Addressing the needs of each young person.
4. Linking curriculum learning to careers.
5. Encounters with employers and employees.
6. Experiences of workplaces.
7. Encounters with further and higher education.
8. Personal guidance.

They are core to the DfE’s statutory guidance on careers advice. Whilst the benchmarks themselves are non-statutory, the DfE guidance expects schools to use the updated Gatsby Benchmarks. In addition, it recommends Compass+ for termly self-reporting. Schools have a legal duty to “secure access to independent careers guidance.”

In short, careers guidance has a well-established structure: a named lead, a self-assessment tool and a clear line of accountability.

The Enrichment Benchmarks

The DfE’s Enrichment Framework, published in June 2026 is non-statutory guidance including eight benchmarks:

1. A strategically aligned enrichment offer.
2. A board and well-rounded enrichment offer.
3. A well-communicated enrichment offer that celebrates participation and achievement.
4. An enrichment offer shaped by the school or college community.
5. An accessible and engaging enrichment offer.
6. An enrichment offer that works in partnership.
7. An outcomes-focused enrichment offer.
8. A continually improving enrichment offer.

Within Benchmark 2 are the five activity categories: Civic Engagement; Arts and Culture; Nature, Outdoor and Adventure; Sport and Physical Activities; and Developing Wider Life Skills. Schools should aim for every pupil to have access to activities in at least those five.

Most schools don’t yet have the enrichment equivalent of a careers leader or a self-assessment tool. This is the real difference between the two, and where confusion may lie.

Where they Meet

The aren’t completely unrelated. Benchmark 1 of the Enrichment Framework asks that your offer lines up with everything else the school is doing. Careers guidance is listed as a clear example of this. Enterprise sits within the category of developing wider life and future skills, itself a part of Benchmark 2. Benchmark 6 mentions local employers, enterprise advisers and careers hubs as possible partners too.

A careers fair or an enterprise club can be included as part of your enrichment offer. But careers isn’t one of the five categories in Benchmark 2, and a strong careers programme doesn’t clearly indicate an enrichment offer that’s broad, accessible or reaching the pupils who need it most.

Why this Matters

The two frameworks ask for different kinds of evidence:

• Careers evidence is about encounters: who met an employer, who visited a workplace, who had a personal guidance interview.
• Enrichment evidence is about breadth and participation: which of the five categories you cover and who isn’t taking part. Benchmark 5 asks for systems to monitor participation, understand patterns and address barriers, especially for pupils at risk of missing out.

A careers tool is built for the job. If it’s the only system you have, enrichment isn’t the key focus and the questions around it can’t be answered because the data isn’t there. We’ve seen some schools assume that because careers are covered, enrichment is too, or that they can use the existing careers tooling to cover enrichment as well. This is a mistake and one that is likely to leave a gap in knowledge.

Three Questions Worth Asking this Term

1. Who ‘owns’ enrichment? Careers guidance often has a named lead. Does enrichment?
2. Where does the participation data live? Registers, spreadsheets, a careers tool, the MIS, etc. Can you easily join them up to build a coherent picture?
3. Could you name the pupils that haven’t taken part in any enrichment activities this half-term? If it takes more than a few minutes to find an answer, that’s the gap.

None of these needs new software to answer. But they do need someone to own the questions.

Where Avalon Achieve® Fits

Avalon Achieve® is built for the second job. It records attendance across your clubs and activities and maps those to the five categories in Benchmark 2. A sync from your MIS runs each night so you can review participation by SEND, Pupil Premium, FSM and EAL. It sits alongside your careers tools rather than replacing them.

If you’d like a quick idea of where your school stands, take our enrichment readiness quiz. It only takes a few minutes.