A few thoughts on the political hot potato of youth unemployment.
To have more than a million 16-24 years olds not building up experience of work and contributing to the economy is pretty grim, whichever way you look at it.
History shows that the longer young people are out of work the more difficult it becomes to get them into the habit.
Grimmer still is the fact that the UK’s struggle to get school leavers through the workplace door appears to have been around for much longer than politicians would have you believe.
Buried away in the Office for National Statistics data published yesterday was an Excel spreadsheet which shows the path of youth unemployment since the last recession in the early 1990s.
In the early 90s recession, youth unemployment peaked at just over 900,000 in 1992. It then commenced a long, downward path as the economy gathered speed again, bottoming out at just over 500,000.
But that was in 2001. And the ONS’s figures show that while it has risen steeply since 2008, it was already on a marked upward path which had begun in 2003.
Between 2003 and 2007 it rose from under 600,000 to over 700,000. Right in the heart of the economic boom.
There is also a clear divide in these numbers, one which was also glossed over yesterday.
The unemployment rate among 16-17 year-olds (i.e., GCSE school leavers) hovered around the 20 per cent mark from the turn of the century and wasn’t much lower in the decade before that. Among 18-24 year olds (the A-level to college/university period), it fell from around 15 per cent to around 10 per cent before starting to edge up again from 2005 onwards.
I won’t pretend to know why it is that we’ve had an upward trend in youth joblessness that predates the crunch (though it might suggest when the true stresses in the economy first began to emerge), but there was an interesting contribution yesterday to the debate about solutions.
Derbyshire & Nottinghamshire Chamber of Commerce has been reporting for some time that its Quarterly Economic Surveys have been consistently flagging up a problem with the quality of young people turning up for job interviews.
The problem is that these job candidates lack both basic skills – literacy and numeracy – and an understanding of what it takes to hack it in the working world.
To cut to the chase, it’s suggesting that schools’ relentless focus on driving up exam results has missed a crucial element in the bigger picture of what makes a good employee: that attitude counts just as much as attainment.
The Chamber’s got to be careful that it isn’t accused of tarring all kids with the same brush and suggesting school leavers are a generation of feckless Facebook addicts.
That is a tabloid cliché which won’t help identify a solution.
I know that because the same day the unemployment figures came out, I spent the evening at the Nottingham Post’s inaugural Student Awards. It was an inspiring occasion, with young students from city schools and academies proudly receiving awards for a range of stunning achievement which covered everything from academic brilliance to community involvement and immense sporting and creative prowess.
So we should not lose sight of the fact that great things can and do happen in Nottingham’s schools.
But those ONS numbers point to an urgent and serious issue. The jobless rate among 16-17 year-olds has been rising relentlessly since the early part of the last decade, and is heading into territory which points to a fundamental failure underneath apparently improving educational attainment figures.
That points towards wasted lives and economic under-achievement
The Chamber says the Ofsted inspection regime for schools should be changed so that it also measures how good schools are at preparing people for the working world.
It may be a step in the right direction. But schools – and business – may need to make some giant leaps.
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