Beeline, and the systems under it
Beeline is the young person’s version of the MBacc, Greater Manchester’s framework of technical and academic routes into work. It runs across the region’s ten local authorities and serves people up to 25 years old.
In the press Schools to offer technical subjects to pupils from age 14 in England, Burnham says BBC News, 27 July 2026
Understanding careers education, and building a service for it
Six artefacts that carry the work: how careers education actually behaves across a region, and what a young person needs from something built inside it.
What the system is doing
Line of experience
The young person’s reality
The pressure curve is how much is being decided, and how hard it is to undo. It is drawn from the fixed points in the school calendar. Tap a point to see what is happening.
Line of digital offer
What we build
Where it reaches
Delivery buys reach. Channels buy trust.Drawn from my own landscape mapping for Beeline. Evidence marks show what I could confirm from a source and what is still inferred.
A fear in a young person’s own words, traced to the people who carry it, the challenges it opens, and the outcomes it resolves into.
How to read it
one sentence, four layers — step through the examplesDifferent young people carry the same fear differently. One barrier can sit with two personas.
From: user research“How might we…” questions that open a barrier up without jumping to a solution.
From: design assuranceEvery new proposal has to answer one of these ten questions.“I can…” statements, numbered from first steps (1) to work-ready (24). They become the success measures.
From: the Equalex frameworkA change counts as working when a young person can say the outcome.Follow one fear, pain or barrier
tap one — the layers below dim to what it reachesSee the whole system
and where it has a gapEach row is a fear, each dot an outcome it resolves into. Tap a row to follow it above; hover a dot to read the outcome.
One barrier, the design decision taken against it, what the evidence then said, and what I did about the gap.
Fourteen metrics on a four-step climb, from named, to defined, to baselined, to trended — each one only moving up when the evidence allows it.
Two metrics, in action
LM-03 asks whether young people leave with more options than they arrived with. A session counts as broadening when it explores two or more . This is the first month it could be read: between two thirds and four fifths of sessions narrow to one gateway, and the ones that broaden cluster in Digital and Engineering. That reading is what the Discovery Quiz redesign is now aimed at, and it gave the board a baseline to judge the next release against.
LM-05 asks whether interest turns into a real next step, counted as outbound clicks to live job searches and technical courses. People who finish the Discovery Quiz open more than double the job searches of people who browse the landing page, and more than any of the seven gateway pages manages on its own. The best of those, Finance, Business & Professional Services, reaches 4.0.
This is the clearest evidence the quiz does the job it was built for, and it is also why step-level tracking is the open ask: how many people start it, and how many finish, is still invisible.
How the Discovery toolkit felt to young people, phase by phase, from their own feedback. Confidence dips while they work out the game, then spikes once they do. Some of that dip is the point. Tap a numbered moment to read what happened there.
The layer does not sit on a blank page. It sits on Build Your Future, a planning board (another feature I designed) where a young person lays out the steps they are actually considering, from the subjects they take now to the job they are aiming at. The layer reads that board and speaks about what is on it.
Swipe the board sideways to see every stage
Nothing here yet.
Where I work across the lifecycle
From mapping the system to the metrics the board reads.