Labour should commit to slashing the number of young people not in work or education. Graeme Cooke suggests how
More than one in seven 16-to-24-year-olds – over a million young people – are not in education, employment or training in the UK. Rather than developing their skills or starting their careers, these youngsters are being left behind. The lack of growth and high unemployment is making things tougher for this generation of young people. But longer-standing structural trends and institutional failures are also to blame. Recent analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that median incomes among those in their 20s fell by 12 per cent between 2008 and 2012: a crisis of youth living standards.
The acronym ‘NEET’ is widely used in policy circles but it dehumanises the personal stories of young people who cannot find an employer who will give them a chance or who cannot obtain a decent apprenticeship. It treats as a bureaucratic category the experiences of those who need a second chance having run into trouble, and those who, after struggling at school, cannot find anyone who cares enough to help them back on track. Our economy is not creating enough jobs, but systems to support young people are not good enough and are full of holes.
Britain faces huge challenges in the coming years, requiring political priorities to be set and stuck to. One of them should be to set the goal of dramatically reducing the NEET rate to among the best in Europe. Being young is, by definition, a period of transitions, and the economy has ups and downs. So we will not get the rate to zero, but there is no reason why any young person should spend more than a short period of time not participating in society or progressing in their lives. As part of IPPR’s Condition of Britain programme, we are investigating why so many young people are NEET, especially compared to their counterparts in other countries, and what it might take to effectively abolish this terrible human category from our national life.
Just over half of young people who are not in education, employment or training are actively seeking work (579,000) and an upturn in the jobs market would undoubtedly bring these numbers down. However, the problem is far from only being about levels of aggregate demand. Unlike continental countries like Germany or the Netherlands, the UK has a weak system of vocational education and training and a fragile framework for apprenticeships. A number of recent reviews – notably those by Alison Wolf and Doug Richard – have highlighted this problem. But it remains the case that young people not on the A level and university track lack a properly coordinated training pathway organised around institutions, programmes of study and qualifications with real labour market traction.
Compounding this problem, young people who do not continue in education find themselves in a welfare and benefits system poorly suited to the stage they are at in their lives. Those claiming jobseeker’s allowance are faced with a strictly ‘work-first’ regime, aimed at rapid labour market entry, which does not ensure young people acquire the foundation of education necessary to build a successful career. And if they cannot find a job opening, they can spend an indefinite period unemployed, with massive damage to their long-term prospects. Alternatively, young people can be channelled onto inactive benefits, like employment and support allowance or income support, which do not support or focus them to participate in education or employment – and risk long-term detachment from the labour market.
There are also deeper employment trends which seem to be making life harder for young people. Youth unemployment began increasing a number of years before the financial crisis and there seems to be a preference among employers for hiring older workers. The rise of temporary, fixed-term employment means it takes longer for young people to attach themselves securely to the labour market, while the decline in intermediate-level jobs can leave them stuck in poor quality, low-paid work. And, though some employers take seriously their responsibility to train and give opportunities to the next generation, others complain about the inadequacies of the schools system rather than rolling up their sleeves and getting involved.
Overcoming these challenges will not be easy, but there is a major institutional failing which can be addressed. Reform should aim at creating a distinct benefits, training and work track for young people, separate from the adult welfare system, through which they can advance their learning and work goals together, while preventing a drift into long-term inactivity. There are a number of options for the institutional design of such a system: it could be driven though a national agency with local delivery arms or constituted around the mobilisation of local leadership and partnership. It would certainly need to draw together funding and expertise from a range of sectors.
Underpinning such a system would be a form of financial support – perhaps called ‘universal youth credit’ – available to young people without other sources of income and conditional on participation in learning or searching for a job. The priority would be to ensure young people acquire a basic level of education through attaining valuable qualifications which enable them to enter the labour market and advance to higher level learning or a job with prospects or training. Young people would be supported into a training or work pathway soon after entering the system, with the backstop of a job guarantee to prevent long-term unemployment. Other routes into the benefits system, through less active benefits, would be closed off, other than to those with a serious disability acquired in childhood or young parents with very young children.
There are a number of questions to be resolved before such a reform could be put into action, most obviously in relation to finance (though the direct and long-term cost to the Treasury of youth unemployment is high). To succeed, parallel improvements are needed in vocational education and there would be responsibilities on employers to provide work and training for young people. However, similar institutional arrangements are in place in countries like Germany and Netherlands, where NEET rates are far lower than in Britain. This direction of policy also chimes with the arguments Ed Miliband recently made about addressing the structural drivers of social security spending, rather than picking up the cost of a so-called ‘lost generation’. Before 1997, Labour put a plan for tackling high levels of youth unemployment at the top of its election pitch to demonstrate that it offered hope over despair. In 2015, it should do so again.
—————————————————————————————————————
Graeme Cooke is research director at IPPR and a contributing editor to Progress
—————————————————————————————————————
This is an excellent article, I totally agree that ensuring that today’s youth have adequate prospects should be one of Labour’s top priorities (which I guess won’t surprise you). I also support the goal of reducing welfare spending by addressing its root causes rather than its recipients – and I believe that Labour could be using this more effectively to reframe the debate on welfare. The most interesting thing in your piece is that you recognize the need for an institutional framework. This will be an essential aspect of ensuring a strategy that is coordinated, coherent and fits in with other economic goals. I wonder why this isn’t more clearly recognized – perhaps because it’s been a while since anyone created a genuinely great British institution…
I agree with much of this. Thirty years ago, the YTS was developed to establish a permanent structure for young people entering the labour market. It was abandoned along with the recovery of the late 80s. I attach a paper written at the request of Liam Byrne to which I have had, not surprisingly, no response. I also attach a paper written for and published in the Guardian by mnembers of the Project (the Core Skills Project) largely responsible for the development of YTS. Can we now just get on with it? 30 years is a long time a-coming!
Apprenticeships for All?
Current Government policy on work experience for the young unemployed (NEETS) needs a robust response from Labour, both to demonstrate the utter inadequacy of the current schemes and to set out a long term policy framework for the education and training of young school leavers. Simply focussing on the perceived inadequacies of unpaid or paid work experience is not enough. We need to move away from a preoccupation with the immediate crisis of youth unemployment to develop durable structures for the future development of the labour force. We should aim to reverse the NEET acronym to ensure that all young school leavers are in employment, education and training. The normal expectation needs to be that school leavers enter a planned and rigorous programme of EET as they make the transition to the adult world.
A similar crisis of youth unemployment following the collapse of manufacturing industry in the 1970s and 80s gave rise to a series of initiatives to deal with the problem and to establish permanent structures for the education and training of young people. For a variety of reasons, these initiatives did not fully take root and have subsequently been largely abandoned. The main exception to this is NVQs which are widely used but still struggle to be recognised alongside conventional academic awards.
The Youth Training Scheme pulled together a number of such policy initiatives into a comprehensive national framework which was intended to be a permanent feature of the vocational education and training scene. The key elements of YTS were:
Occupational Training (ie training within an occupational cluster or “family” of occupations united around a common economic purpose (eg transport; manufacturing; catering))
Work Based Learning, a concept which had three components, namely, planned work experience to include a range of learning opportunities in the workplace; additional on the job training (eg work-based projects) to broaden the range of learning opportunities, and off the job training to facilitate theoretical insights and leaning opportunities which could not be delivered through the workplace.
A recognised national qualification.
Development of Core and Occupational Skills. Core skills were seen as those skills which are essential to competence in an occupation and common to a range of occupations. Thus, they were believed both to assist transfer within a changing employment environment and to developing competence in the workplace. They are those skills, frequently termed “soft skills” which are particularly valued by employers and employees – the ability to communicate effectively; to work with others; to use numbers; to plan and solve problems; to organise work effectively, and so on.
Thus, the focus in YTS was very firmly upon learning (rarely mentioned in the current hotch potch of initiatives!) and preparation for an uncertain future.
The framework developed for YTS could be readily presented as the basis for an apprenticeship programme for all. School leavers would be expected to participate in the scheme and be rewarded both by the opportunity to learn in a well-planned and organised adult environment as well as by a training allowance higher than the alternative of JSA – which would hopefully disappear for young people. There would be a trade off here that would be easily recognised.
The adoption of such a policy would put Labour well ahead of Government “thinking.” It is a surprise that the Government response so far has shown less imagination and humanity than that shown by the Thatcher Government. Labour would be seen to be making the pace and offering a programme that responded to public anxieties about both “welfare dependency” and “job substitution”, so making a positive response to unemployment, avoiding the pitfalls of mere work experience, and preparing for the future.
Germany has had such a system for some 60 years. It’s about time we caught up!
Reply to Linda Clarke in The Guardian Comment columns Feb 2013
Interesting that Professor Linda Clarke should call for “a comprehensive scheme of vocational education and training, integrating college, workshop and work-based elements, negotiated and agreed by employers, trade unions and educationalists, and backed up by government regulation” on 13th February, while on 15th February four “young unemployed people” want “real jobs, not a rerun of the YTS schemes of the ‘80s.”
As members of a project (The ESF/MSC YTS Core Skills Project) which had a major impact on the design, development and implementation of the Youth Training Scheme, we shall be grateful for the opportunity to set the record on YTS a little straight – for what Professor Clarke calls for is a pretty accurate description of what YTS was.
First, YTS was emphatically not a scheme which forced young people into unpaid shelf stacking. Trainees were paid. Undoubtedly, part of the political support was generated by fear of the consequences of massive youth unemployment brought on by industrial restructuring and Thatcherite economics, but by design YTS was intended as a permanent programme of training and education for the whole ability range across all occupational sectors. It provided a broad curriculum framework which mirrored the highly varied target group for which it was designed, incorporating on- and off the job education and training with work experience, a blend for which we coined the term “work-based learning” and which looked to develop both transferable and occupational skills and knowledge. In many respects, it specified an ideal apprenticeship system, without time-serving.
It would be idle to deny that all was not sweetness and light within YTS, and the scheme certainly suffered from guilt by association with the worst excesses of the rarely-lamented Youth Opportunities Programme, which is often, wrongly, seen as one of its precursors.
The main problems with YTS were, firstly, familiarity and secondly, of status. The familiarity problem was highly predictable. Vocational education and training (VET) had usually been conceived in terms of examination-based qualifications (“I’ve got my City & Guilds”) and specific occupations, particularly traditional time-served apprenticeships, rather than in terms of nationally-specified design elements aimed at preparing trainees to face an uncertain future. The very idea of a national framework for VET was foreign.
Nonetheless, in our experience, industrial supervisors and vocational tutors rarely had problems with the concepts underpinning the scheme, whereas senior civil servants and politicians certainly did, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the narrowly classical educational background from which they mainly germinated. This uncomprehending tradition is currently well-illustrated by the witless Gove and his insistence on undervaluing vocational education, whilst at the same time his government calls out for a more highly-skilled workforce. Left and right hands in concert spring to mind!
Similarly, the problem with status reflected, and reflects, the British perception of what is valuable and worthy in education. Classics was, and is, more highly-rated than mechanics; history is more highly-rated than building. Even on the left (though perhaps less so now) there was a common response to YTS that seemed to say that any offer other than a traditional Grammar School curriculum was selling the working class short. Stephen Twigg’s support for Gove’s reintroduction of the School Certificate no doubt lies in this
tradition. So, it was always going to be difficult to encourage a very bright student to go down the YTS rather than the “A” level route as further progression routes would be much more uncertain, even if the experience was more worthwhile. Why not, for example, a YTS in animal husbandry leading to veterinary school? Horror of horrors!
It is interesting to speculate on what would have happened had YTS become firmly embedded as part of the British VET landscape. Any supply-side initiative is unlikely to enable all to withstand the current economic blizzard (though Germany, with its long- established VET system seems to be doing quite well), but well-trained and educated people are much more adaptable to changing circumstances and, arguably, more creative and entrepreneurial, and so more likely to weather the storm. The fact that YTS was abandoned in 1989 says far more about the short-sightedness of politicians and their lack of understanding of VET than it does about the design of YTS.
We strongly believe that, had YTS been properly supported and developed, there would be no need for the current ramshackle response to youth unemployment that the four young people rightly complain of. But they are wrong to characterise YTS as they do. Professor Clarke is quite right, but how often do we need to reinvent the wheel in this country?