In considering the release of Alan Milburn’s report, we need to take into account the support structures in the home nations of the UK (Number of young people out of work or training in UK could hit 1.25m by early 2030s, 27 May).
In the 1970s, 80s and 90s, UK governments had a effective tool to support young people to avoid unemployment: careers services run by local authorities. In the early 2000s, the New Labour government that Milburn was a part of replaced this with Connexions, a more generic advice service for youth in England, not exclusively focused on supporting work and learning.
Under the coalition government, Michael Gove disbanded this entirely. He passed responsibility for career guidance to schools, crucially with no allocated budget to support this work. Essentially, careers services for young people were dismantled. As a result, support for those who are unemployed after leaving school is patchy and incoherent. It depends on what local authorities are able to do (and limited input from the National Careers Service, which will soon be folded into the Department for Work and Pensions’ jobcentre network).
The administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland did not make this strategic error. They have coherent careers services that allow a seamless approach from school into young adulthood. They have retained an effective policy lever to manage youth unemployment.
Prof Pete Robertson
Edinburgh Napier University
Alan Milburn’s report on the current situation of young people has a history. In 2004 Tony Blair dismissed Mike Tomlinson’s excellent suggestion, proposed in the Commons in a debate Blair did not bother to attend, that all young people aged from 14 to 19 should be educated towards a final diploma in three areas: the “academic” subject area, the practical intelligence area (vocational) and a work experience area. All would then be ready for further education, training and employment. The pointless examinations at 16 would have been subsumed in this curriculum for all.
The suggestion was dismissed, and a 2009 House of Commons report lamented the nearly 1 million youngsters then not in employment or education. The children, schools and families committee and others pointed to the insult of calling these young people “Neets”.
I interviewed administrators, teachers and school leaders in five countries from 2010 to 2014, and found other countries amazed at our outdated preparation of the next generation of young people, who all deserved more than any government has been willing to give.
Sally Tomlinson
Emeritus professor, Goldsmiths, University of London
There is much hand wringing about Neets – young people not in education, employment or training – whenever the subject arises. But gen Z were asked to make massive sacrifices to protect a generation that has (in general) since repeatedly and openly shown its disdain for them and their desires, and has now left the country and planet in a parlous state for them.
Why go to work if you can’t even dream of a life like your grandparents had? When employers see you as “lower-value human capital”? When political parties are keen to promote AI (and your implied replacement in the job market) but speak little of education? When the best one can hope for, outside the upper middle classes and the lottery winners of football, screen and social media, is the psychological torture of what David Graeber described as “bullshit jobs”?
The social contract for millennials was failing. For gen z, it has collapsed.
Children, and by extension parents, should be the most important people in a forward-looking society. Instead they are exploited, criminalised and derided. Meanwhile, governments pander to their grandparents.
We must do more for the future of this nation.
Jacob Bonwitt
Garsington, Oxfordshire
