The strongest correlation with a higher Overall Benchmark Score was schools and colleges that had sought and achieved a Quality in Careers Standard. The Quality in Careers Standard is an independently assessed award which schools and colleges can seek for their careers provision. The institutions that have achieved the Quality in Careers Standard achieve 13.1 percentage points better on the Overall Benchmark Score than those schools and colleges that do not have a Quality in Careers Standard. We tested this effect by controlling for all of the other factors listed in table A2 and it becomes slightly stronger (13.34%). This provides a strong indication that the impact of the Quality in Careers Standard is a real one and cannot be explained through chance or by any other factors. However it is worth noting that the schools and colleges who have achieved the Quality in Careers Standard are still only meeting 2.9 benchmarks on average.
It is unsurprising that the Quality in Careers Standard is strongly correlated with performance on the benchmarks as it is a measure of the quality of careers provision. During the last academic year, it was assessing schools and colleges to a different, albeit related, standard to the one set out by the Gatsby Benchmarks. It has recently been aligned to the Gatsby Benchmarks and so we would expect the correlation to get stronger in future years. A key question is how much the Standard is actually driving increases in performance rather than simply measuring them. This would be a useful area for further research and analysis.
Here we reproduce page 53 from the report. You can read the full report by following this link