Part 3: Why It Matters
In the last post, I talked about what we want to do: real opportunities for students, real capacity for staff. This post is about why. Here's the actual belief underneath Waypoints.
The system measures the wrong thing
Schools are judged, funded and ranked on exam results. That's simply what gets counted, so that's what gets optimised for. Exam results are a proxy for something else, whether a young person is actually prepared for what comes next, and proxies get gamed, even unintentionally. A school under pressure to hit its numbers rationally spends its time on the things that move the numbers: intervention classes for borderline grade boundaries, revision timetables, mock exam cycles. Confidence, curiosity, the ability to speak in front of a room, knowing what you actually want, none of that shows up on a league table, even though it matters just as much to whether someone's prepared for their life after school.
This is what happens when a system picks a metric and builds its incentives entirely around it. Everyone inside that system, from a headteacher to a Year 11 student, ends up optimising for the thing that's measured, whether or not it's the thing that actually matters.
You can see the cost of that once young people leave school. In the Open University's 2025 Business Barometer, 58% of employers reported a mismatch between young people's skills and what their organisation needs, with over half pointing specifically to communication and teamwork. And BACP's 2025 census found young people's own confidence in leadership sitting at just 47%. Those are exactly the things a league table never asks about.
Good people, working in isolation
Here's the part that convinced me this needed a specific answer, not just more awareness. The people who agree with everything above aren't rare. Careers leads who want to do more than tick a compliance box. Teachers who'd rather have a real conversation with a struggling student than another data drop. Researchers who've already worked out what helps, sitting in papers nobody in a school will ever read. These people exist in real numbers. What's missing is a way for them to find each other.
A careers lead at one school figures out something that works. A researcher two hours away has already studied the exact problem another school is quietly struggling with. Neither knows the other exists. Multiply that across the country and you get an enormous amount of duplicated effort and unspent expertise, sitting right next to schools that need it.
The scale involved makes the disconnect obvious. The updated Gatsby Benchmarks for careers guidance now apply to well over 4,700 schools, colleges and training providers across England, each expected to deliver good provision with wildly different budgets, staff time and local connections. And the outcomes show it: comparing similar year groups, regional GCSE results put London nearly ten points ahead of the North East and North West on the same basic measure. That gap tracks which school happened to have the right support already in place, not effort or ability.
Why one person, or one school, can't fix this alone
This is the part that took me longest to actually believe, because it would be more comfortable if it weren't true. A brilliant, overworked careers lead can be excellent at their job and still not have the hours in the week to build what a whole network could give them. A single school can be as good as it wants to be and still be capped by its own size, its own budget, its own staff list. Individual effort has a ceiling, and for a long time we've been asking individuals to solve a structural problem entirely on their own.
The scale of what individual staff are up against makes that ceiling obvious. By 2023/24, roughly 78,500 young people in England were waiting over a year for NHS mental health treatment, and 44% of them had been waiting over two. A single teacher or pastoral lead was never going to close a gap that size alone, however good they are at their job. The good work already happening in schools deserves a system that multiplies it, not one that leaves it to run on individual willpower.
Where this leaves us
Put these together and that's the belief underneath Waypoints. The system rewards the wrong thing. The right people are already out there, disconnected from each other. And no one holding the problem alone was ever going to close a gap this size, however hard they worked at it. We don't think a network is a finished answer to any of this, and we're early enough in building it that we'd be overselling it to say otherwise. What we do think is that it's a better shape for the problem than leaving good people to face it on their own.
What's next
The last post in this series is the plan: how we're actually starting to build that network, beginning with an event we think will tell us a lot about how students feel about their futures.
- Rahul, Founder, Waypoints Education