Partner Article

Flexible support needed for unemployed young people

Chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, Graham Hoyle OBE, offers his perspective on youth unemployment and the current raft of government measures.

The Deputy Prime Minister’s recent announcement on a new government funded programme to help young unemployed 16 to 18 year olds is particularly welcome news for those of us in the training community who believe that such a programme was urgently needed to address the fact that there are now approximately one million young people out of
work.

The government response to youth unemployment is coordinated across three Whitehall departments which in itself makes the front line delivery challenge for training providers and colleges more demanding. The Work Programme is run by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) while apprenticeships are mostly the responsibility of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) which also funds skills training for anyone over the age of 19. This leaves the Department for Education (DfE) to fund vocational learning for 16 to 18 year olds who can continue to learn either in or out of work if they have left school after their GCSEs.

The government’s new Youth Contract is seeking to package these three strands together although we are essentially still looking at a suite of separate programmes. The so-called NEET group (i.e. not in education, employment or training) covers the 16 to 24 age group and for the last 18 months, members of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) who comprise mostly training providers from the private and voluntary sectors have been lobbying to make the provision for the 16 to 18 year olds more effective.

The issue has been that the DfE has traditionally insisted that programmes which it funds, including the Foundation Learning programme for NEETS, must lead to the young person gaining a qualification as a measure for success when instead a job in the current climate might be more highly prized by the person securing it. AELP would of course be as keen as anyone to see the young person resume some form of learning or embark on an apprenticeship once employment had been secured.

Our representations to the DfE and its Young People’s Learning Agency have focused on them joining the DWP and BIS in equally valuing ‘sustainable employment’ as a shared goal of all programmes that can benefit young people. We also believe that the ‘black box’ approach of flexible provision under the DWP’s Work Programme should be a feature of all three departments’ programmes and by this, we mean that training providers and colleges should have maximum freedom to choose what type of support they offer the young person to achieve a job outcome, a qualification or both.

The new DfE £125m programme, announced by Nick Clegg, has adopted the black box model and, in opting for a payment-by-results framework, has recognised the securing of a job as a successful outcome. In our view, this will make a big difference in helping many young people who are looking for a light at the end of the tunnel.

It is also right that the new programme is encouraging progression on to full
apprenticeships. Many NEETs who have left school with few or no qualifications are not able to meet the standards that employers set for starting an apprenticeship and this is why we have been asking the government to increase the scale of pre-apprenticeship provision to tackle this issue. Last year the government introduced the Access to Apprenticeships programme with an initial 10,000 places available. This new initiative will help expand the level of pre-apprenticeship training that AELP members can offer.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .