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Tackling the problems of youth unemployment17 February 2010During a recent speech on youth unemployment to business advisory firm, Deloitte, CBI director-general Richard Lambert warned of the “long tail of educational under-achievement” in the UK, and suggested that the biggest problems still lie in our most deprived communities. "Politicians, teachers, business people and the whole of civil society have a very strong interest in doing whatever they possibly can to put this right," he said. Mr Lambert’s speech was delivered within 24 hours of the government’s announcement that the number of universities taking up its £13.6 million fund to provide internships with small businesses, had just passed the 50 mark.
Forming part of the Backing Young Britain campaign to help young people into work, the graduate internship programme is being promoted by the Federation of Small Businesses, and provides support for small businesses that take on – and get the best from – a graduate intern. It is estimated that up to 7,000 graduates will potentially now benefit from this scheme. They will receive practical assistance before, during and after their internship, including mentoring, pre-employment and interview training, and CV workshops.
But with his speech, Mr Lambert was scanning a broader horizon, calling for a range of policy measures to embrace the needs of all young people from all social classes and with a broad range of abilities. He wants to ensure that young people are not priced out of the jobs market and would like to see firms incentivised to take on more apprentices than they actually need. Echoing his broadside against the UK’s education system earlier this year, Mr Lambert also called for educators to make sure that their young charges knew how to apply for jobs while still at school.
Turning to government policy, Mr Lambert said that young and inexperienced workers’ chances in the labour market were especially sensitive to wages, and although the overall impact of the minimum wage had, he conceded, been positive, trade-offs clearly do exist in terms of employment prospects. That has clear implications for how the minimum rate for young people should be set in the future.
The OECD has also indicated that the focus on raising the school leaving age and meeting performance targets in education may still be distracting attention from the more important goal of raising core literacy and numeracy achievement. “Put less delicately,” says Mr Lambert, “there have been too many initiatives, too much messing around with the basic mission of the education system.
“Substantial efforts have been made by government and schools in recent years to break the link between family disadvantage and attainment, and real progress has been made. But the gap is still too wide. And it’s this that largely explains the unhealthily wide ratio of low to high skilled youth unemployment in this country, as well as a number of other social problems.
“Given the poor state of the public finances, the first step must be to look for better value from existing support schemes. For example, the £1,000 subsidy being offered to firms that take on a long-term unemployed person doesn’t seem to be having much of an impact. Money might be better spent encouraging firms to take on apprentices for the first time, so we welcomed the Department for Work and Pensions’ decision to give SMEs £2,500 for every 16 and 17-year old apprentice they take on, with the target of 5,000 new apprentices by the end of March. Companies could also be incentivised to train more apprentices than they actually need for the benefit of their sector as a whole.”
Business is an important stakeholder in the education system, and has a strong interest in breaking the cycle of under-achievement. And that’s not just because of its requirement for a growing pool of skilled employees. “In a tough job market, gaining as much experience as possible is vital to employment prospects,” says Mr Lambert. “Well-structured work experience that focuses on employability skills can help young people understand what employers expect of them.”
As he drew to the end of his presentation, Mr Lambert touched on an interesting aspect of employer/educator interaction. There are currently some 40,000 school governor vacancies, many in those deprived areas where education problems are at their most acute. “By encouraging their staff to fill these spaces, firms can perform a valuable social function and benefit staff development in the process,” suggests Mr Lambert. “They may also help poorer areas develop the sorts of alumni and parental networks that are already providing support and guidance for young people in more affluent areas, or by suggesting alternative structures and link-ups with employers.”
Les Hunt
Editor
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