This year, just over 800,000 young people are due to celebrate their 16th birthday; for those in year 11, compulsory education ends on June 30. Of course, most will stay on in further education, or get a job (hopefully with an apprenticeship), but each year about one in eight finds themselves not in employment and not in education or training either (taken from The Poverty Site, ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training’ on 04/06/2009). There have been ups and downs, but unemployment has been rising for 18 to 24 year olds (and, to a lesser extent, 16 – 17 year olds) for five years (source for this and further statistics unless otherwise stated is the Office for National Statistics. LFS data, ILO definition of unemployment, seasonally adjusted).
The waste of young people’s talents and giving them the worst start to adult life is not just an extra problem caused by the recession. But it is a problem that has become worse since the recession began, and it has been worse for young people than for other age groups.
The Labour government has done a great deal it can be proud of. The vast majority of New Deal funds have been spent on young people and there has been a consistent high-level commitment to training, with a greater effort to revive and sustain apprenticeships than we have seen from any previous government. For a generation, progressive policy enthusiasts argued for Education Maintenance Allowances but never found a government willing to listen. Now they exist, and provide up to £30 a week to help young people from poorer families stay in education or training – and any other party in power will probably get rid of them.
But none of this has been enough to stop young people being the main losers from this recession. The erosion of employment opportunities for people with low or no qualifications, the continuing loss of manufacturing jobs and the increased competition for part-time and temporary work during the recession have all hit under-25s hard.
Helping more people to have higher levels of skills and qualifications has to be part of the solution, and raising the compulsory education/training age to 18 is definitely the right move, and one that helps show the progressive difference between Labour and other parties.
But still we have more than three quarters of a million school leavers looking for jobs during a recession that is getting worse. As they go longer without getting jobs employers will be more and more reluctant to hire them. It is way past time to reverse twenty years of labour market policy, which says that only the supply side matters – helping disadvantaged people to compete for the jobs that the market creates all the time. In a recession that approach will just produce a better qualified dole queue.
That is why the government’s jobs guarantee is such a welcome move. Starting next January, long-term unemployed young people coming up to 12 months unemployment will be guaranteed an offer of training or a real job (paying at least the national minimum wage), with the Future Jobs Fund (£1bn) paying for 150,000 vacancies with local authorities and other organisations. As James Purnell said in a speech to 2020 Public Services Trust in May this year, this marks a completely new stage in the government’s policy, addressing demand deficiencies, not blockages on the supply side.
My only criticism is that it is such a shame we have had to wait until Labour has been in power for twelve years to see this. But better late than never: the mix of policies we have now means there is a real chance that this recession will not create a lost generation.