Southwark’s Labour council is bringing in a pioneering £3m Youth Fund – to help young people stay in education and get a job.
Young people tell me the goal posts have moved.
They have played by the rules – worked hard at school, got their grades. They expected – and deserved – to have a world of opportunities to progress in life.
Instead, they see barriers all around them.
Education maintenance allowance scrapped. Tuition fees trebled. Youth unemployment rocketing, and huge competition for any vacancy.
In my borough, Southwark, nearly 4,000 young people benefited from the education maintenance allowance each year – and most got the maximum rate. For many of them it made the difference between staying on and dropping out.
Students told me it meant they could afford the train to the college that ran the best course; or that they could pay for the course books and materials they needed.
As Barnardo’s reported this week, the government’s smaller bursary scheme is an ‘unfair and totally inadequate’ replacement for the education maintenance allowance and is ‘failing to adequately support disadvantaged 16-19-year-olds to cover the everyday costs of studying or training’.
University hopefuls tell me the trebling of tuition fees could put them off. To many students from a household with an annual income of £17,000 – the median average income in Southwark – the idea of taking on a debt of up to £27,000 for tuition fees alone is unthinkable.
And for those young people looking for their first job, times are tough. In Southwark youth unemployment is over 25 per cent, and young people are competing against more experienced jobseekers. As the ACEVO Commission on Youth Unemployment headed by David Miliband said in its report this week, youth unemployment is a crisis we cannot afford.
We cannot stand by and let our young people be written off as the government puts up barriers to their success.
In Southwark we are creating a £3m Youth Fund to help young people stay in education and get a job – helping around 6,000 young people over three years.
We’re doing this in three strands: giving financial support for young people staying on in sixth form and further education college; paying some students’ university tuition fees for the duration of their degrees; and creating opportunities to help people into work.
This week we launched the strand to give financial help to young people in sixth form and further education. This year students who have been eligible for free school meals will get around £200 each, which will help cover the cost of course books, materials and food.
We have already agreed to pay the full university tuition fees of six talented Southwark students from low income backgrounds who started their degrees last autumn. One successful applicant told me ‘I live in one of the poorest parts of the country, but from my flat I can see the City. I want to go to university and study finance, so I can be a part of that’. We will be awarding more tuition fee scholarships this summer, and are seeking to increase the funding pot with contributions from local organisations.
And we are creating around 1,500 work experience and training opportunities for young people – in over 70 local employers and training providers.
Southwark was hit by the worst cash cut from central government in London this year. We lost £34m – 34 times as much as Richmond. But it is in all our interests to invest in young people. If young people can’t get the education, skills and experience they need to progress into a sustainable job, it’s bad for all of us.
Some people may ask whether we can afford to do this.
The truth is we can’t afford not to.
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Catherine McDonald is cabinet member for children’s services at the London borough of Southwark and tweets @cath_mcdonald
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“We cannot stand by and let our young people be written off as the government puts up barriers to their success.”
Not forgetting of course the millions of economic migrants NuLabour let in. Some are convinced the hundreds of thousands of jobs taken up by the last governments immigrant program hasn’t effected the job market one jot.
I beg to differ. For every job taken up by an economic migrant, one job vacancy is closed to a prospective Labour voter.
and the employers so busy employing those ‘eastern europeans’ all those building firms and here in west london tfl (to drive the buses – when they didn’t get lost & we had to give them directions – oh yes on more than one occasion ! quite funny -but they’ve mostly gone now like the builders, plasterers etc I suppose) they don’t come into it huh ?. NO one has denied cuts are needed or who is to blame really ( apart from the Tory blind it was Labour spending blah blah blah- which we all know would have been well and good had growth continued and the tippity top Capitalists weren’t so skimming well greedy) Oh and if Gove thinks a classical education for all will turn a trick for the workers watch the mess that will be created there !