Scottish Enterprise have announced the axing of a scheme with a proven track record of getting thousands of graduates into work.
The Graduates for Business scheme arranges paid work placements for participants. Around 250 graduates a year have participated in paid internships of between three months and a year, with two-thirds ending up employed by the firms involved and the majority of the rest gaining an equivalent job as a result of the placement.
The scheme, which has been praised by the Federation of Small Businesses, Universities Scotland and the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, has been used as a model by agencies in England to set up similar programmes.
To some extent, Scottish Enterprise have been forced into this position by the SNP government, who have cut the enterprise budget by 21 per cent, as the decision appears to have been made purely on the grounds of cost. However, given the success of the scheme, and the cost of the redundancy packages for the seven staff affected, it appears a false economy indeed.
The number of Scots participating in higher education has risen by nearly a quarter over the past decade. In 1999 24,943 Scots were accepted onto a university place compared to 31,030 last year.
Meanwhile, the most up-to-date statistics on graduate employment, taken from 2007/08 and prior to the worst effects of the economic downturn, show that 6.1 per cent of graduates in Scotland were still unemployed six months after graduation. This is an increase of over 40 per cent from the year before (4.3 per cent) with obvious concerns that the situation has got even worse for graduates this year due to the economic downturn.
An increase in participation in higher education is to be welcomed, but it makes an even stronger case for the importance of ensuring appropriate schemes are in place to help graduates find employment.
Historically Scotland has suffered hugely from depopulation, particularly at the higher skilled end of the population demographic. This has turned around in recent years, in part due to immigration, but the proportion of graduates from Scottish universities choosing to stay in Scotland had also been increasing. However, without appropriate employment opportunities, our most highly educated young people will have little choice but to build their future elsewhere. This has knock-on effects, not just in the short-term, but for the next generation, as those graduates settle outside Scotland and start families.
This is not just an economic issue, it is also one of social justice. Those graduates whose parents can help them to make connections, or who can afford to work on a voluntary basis, will not be affected by the scrapping of this scheme. But for those graduates who are perhaps the first in their family to go to university, who have worked their way through and who need to start to earn as soon as possible, paid work placements, arranged in a fair and equitable way, are a vital leg-up.
Scottish Labour are calling on the SNP to invest in the future of Scotland’s young people and reinstate the graduate programme as a matter of urgency.
Prior to the last Scottish parliament elections, the SNP courted business assiduously. The reality appears to be that the SNP are no more the friend of business than they are of graduates, schoolchildren, first-time buyers or others on the ever-lengthening list of Scots that the SNP have let down.