A thoughtful debate was held in the House of Lords to discuss the Youth Unemployment Committee’s report entitled ‘Skills for every young person’. This was published in 2021 with the help of our excellent Executive Director, Olly Newton, who worked as Specialist Adviser to the committee.
Edge is passionate about giving young people the skills they need to get into work. In the period July-September 2022, the unemployment rate for young people was 9.8 per cent compared to 3.6 per cent for the population as a whole. While this is historically low for the UK, it is higher than other OECD countries like Japan (whose youth unemployment stands at 4 per cent).
The committee’s report made a number of recommendations that Edge welcomed, including a long-term plan for identifying, measuring and addressing skills gaps and shortages; better skills development in schools, particularly in digital skills; refocusing apprenticeships on young people; an education and workplace race equality strategy to address barriers to work for young people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups; and the creation of an independent Young People’s Commissioner to interrogate government policy on youth employment and skills.
At the debate, peers with a wide range of experience in government, both local and national, education, and industry, shared their thoughts about the report. The debate was opened by the committee’s Chair, Lord Shipley, who provided a summary of the report’s key themes and recommendations and related his hope that the Government will address this serious issue.
Former Education Secretary, Lord Baker, and former Schools Minister, Lord Knight, both gave impassioned speeches on the need to modernise our curriculum to reflect the skills needed for the future. Edge has repeatedly raised concerns about the narrow focus of our curriculum and the lack of real-world learning in schools, which leaves many young people without the necessary skills to succeed in the workplace.
"The danger of our current curriculum is that it is training our children to be machines that will be outcompeted by better machines. We need to be more human, more caring and more curious. We will have an ageing population during our lifetime which simply cannot afford to carry a large number of young people who become long-term unemployed and a drain on the welfare state."
Lord Knight of Weymouth, former Minister for Schools and former Minister for Employment
Viscount Waverley shared his experience working in the logistics industry and what reforms he would like to see to make apprenticeships work better for employers. Apprenticeships are an excellent entry point to the labour market, but we are seeing far too few young people completing them. We agree with the report’s recommendations to focus the apprenticeship funds on young people, as we outlined in Our Plan for Apprenticeships. We would also like to see better quality apprenticeships that are measured on the delivery of equality, diversity and inclusion strategies and participant satisfaction.
Lord Watson and Baroness Wilcox described Labour’s plan for education and skills, highlighting the recommendations made in the recent report by Labour’s Skills Council. At Edge, we welcomed many of the recommendations of this report, especially on curriculum and assessment reform. We also welcomed Labour’s plan for a ‘growth and skills levy’ to allow businesses to spend levy funds on non-apprenticeship training.
Baroness Uddin related the social impact in Tower Hamlets on young people with limited opportunities to work. She rightly congratulated Tower Hamlets Council for reinstating the Education Maintenance Allowance to support young people with the costs of post-16 education. This was a crucial tool to help young people from low-income households stay in education, which we looked at as part of our series on learning from the past and we would like to see it returned nationally.
In her response, the Minister for Education, Baroness Barran, provided an overview of the Government’s work to address skills gaps and improve apprenticeships and further education. While we welcome the Government’s vocal support for apprenticeships, there is still a long way to go in addressing the problems of the current apprenticeship system (as outline in our report). A transcript of the debate is available here and a recording can be found here.