Generation ‘Y can’t I get a job’??

By Sarah Webster and Joel Mullan

‘If I was a politician I would think that young people had not shown enough commitment…’

These concerning words came from a young unemployed person from London we spoke to earlier this summer. And it’s easy to see where such impressions might come from – we’ve had a fourth- generation MP complaining about “young people’s lack of grit and a stream of articles in the right-wing press attacking ‘lazy jobseekers’.

But the truth is very different. There can be little doubt that policies pursued by Coalition politicians – the cuts to youth services, the abolition of schools’ duty to provide face-to-face careers advice, and the removal of Educational Maintenance Allowance – have all cumulatively had a negative impact on youth unemployment.

The new youth unemployment figures released on Wednesday make for grim reading, with 9,000 more young people becoming unemployed over the last quarter. The statistics on long-term unemployment are even worse – we now have 3 times the amount of young people unemployed for over a year than when the Tories came to power in 2010. The Chancellor’s statement that we are turning a corner on economic growth clearly rings hollow for the 960,000 young people who can’t find work.

There are also however structural problems. Tackling youth unemployment when a young person is already in the dole queue is tackling the problem too late. The key message coming out of a new report on youth unemployment from the Young Fabians, based on hundreds of interactions and conversations with young people themselves over the course of this summer, is that we need much more focus on getting the transition between school and work right.

Central to this is access to high quality careers advice, but careers services are failing. You don’t need to take our word for it – a damning new report from Ofsted, also published on Tuesday, found that careers services in schools were ‘not working well enough’. Too much of it is low quality and suffers from being too far removed from the realities of the labour market.  This lack of adequate careers advice means that hundreds of thousands of young people are leaving our schools each year with no plan for ‘what next’

Things need to change.

Firstly, we need to rapidly recruit and train more careers professionals, equipped with the skills and knowledge to provide good advice to young people and to broker introductions and work experience. We are proposing the creation of a ‘WorkFirst’ programme, based on the TeachFirst model, to recruit talented graduates into the careers advice field.

They would work for ‘Careers Agencies’ a cross between careers advice and recruitment agencies, responsible for linking schools with their local labour market and ensuring every student who approaching the end of school, has a progression plan into employment (including apprenticeships), education or training.

Secondly, the careers advice that young people are given should be better informed by labour market information – solid intelligence on the jobs that are likely be available. There are already too many young people who are studying on courses where there is an oversupply of workers. Young people need to know the chances of getting a job if they choose a certain route and be empowered to make their own informed decisions.

Nothing short of a revolution in careers services will do. We need to stop treating careers education as a second-class add-on, and invest now, to prevent another youth unemployment crisis in the near future. Fixing careers services is the first step to making Ed’s vision of an education system that works for “the other 50%” a reality.

The consequences of not acting are clear. The phrase ‘Lost Generation’ is one we must remember represents nearly a million real people whose lives are on hold, whose potential is not being reached. They deserve to have their aspirations fulfilled; they ought to have hope for their future.  The question is; are we ready to take these bold ideas forward and turn them into policy?

Sarah Webster works to tackle youth unemployment at City Gateway. Joel Mullan is Young Fabians Policy Officer. You can download the Young Fabians paper on ‘Tackling youth unemployment’ here.