Tackling youth unemployment

For many, the summer of 2009 will be remembered as the time when the English cricket team regained the Ashes from the Australians.  For me, it will go down as the time when youth unemployment rose to just short of one million – not something to celebrate.

This means one in six of our young people aged 18 to 24 in England are now not in education, employment or training.  And with thousands leaving and college this summer, the figure is set to go even higher.  Perversely, this comes at a time when we have seen reported record number of students getting five GCSE 5 A* to C grades, including English and maths and A-level passes increasing for the 27^thsuccessive year. 

There has also been a surge in university applications, fuelled by the recession and, as a result, 135,000 candidates did not get their first choice of university, leaving them chasing just 22.000 places from clearing.

We have long lived on the simple belief that a good education should be encouraged, because it leads to a good job and a prosperous future.

But a Prince's Trust report recently issued suggests that one in five teenagers receiving their GCSE results this summer could be receiving unemployment benefit by the time they are 21.

However, the salutary fact is that those leaving with no qualifications are twice as likely to sign on as those with qualifications.  The main victims of the recession will, therefore, be young, unskilled males living in the poorest parts of the country.  This will further compound the massive social problems these communities face.

This position alone is worrying, but history suggests that once people sign on, many stay on benefits for some time.  It becomes a way of life.

I was shocked to read in the local newspaper of Blackburn with Darwen – where I an sponsoring an academy – that 18,000 of 94,000 unemployed had been on benefits for more than 13 years.  A 16 year-old leaving school today could, therefore, be 29 before they experience work.

There are now 3.3 million households in the country – one in six – where no-one over the age of 16 is in employment, and 1.9 million children living in families without a parent in work.

This makes it even more challenging to convince young people to 'break the mould' set by others and get a career and be successful.  The politics around this are enormous and will be one of the key battlegrounds at the next general election.  It is a human tragedy of wasted opportunity.

While I accept the call for more apprenticeships, particularly in those industries where growth will return as the recession eases, we must look at all options to prepare our young people for work.

This must include volunteering as a way of developing key skills much needed by employers, and also the more radical steps of encouraging young people to start businesses and employ others, rather than wait for work to come to them.