Alan Milburn’s wide-ranging report on NEETs published today commissioned by the Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden warns of a “generational fault line”.
It projects a potential 1.25 million young people not in education, employment or training by the early 2030s without urgent attention to education, welfare, health and the jobs market.
Tania Bowers, Global Public Policy Director at APSCo UK and OutSource commented:
Britain is an international outlier – its NEET unemployment rate is double that of Ireland for example, so it’s failings cannot be blamed purely on global factors such as AI job replacement and economic uncertainty.
Temporary, flexible, agency work is a proven successful gateway into work for young people, building critical skills, confidence and real-world work experience. Flexible work is under attack, not least from the zero hours reforms to agency work.
Agency work is a significant part of the solutions and the Growth and Skills Levy must encompass training and support given to agency workers, enabling funding for shorter more flexible modular training targeting NEETs, aligned to apprenticeship training opportunities. The Levy must be spent on a fair broader range of training beyond the very highly regulated Ofqual accredited providers.
Our members have long recognised the critical role they play for new entrants into the jobs market, and they have been investing with larger businesses and public sector organisations on dynamic solutions to get young people “work ready”, building their technical, interpersonal and resilience skills and getting them into good jobs.
Hire-train-deploy programmes are an employer-led approach, which are popular as a more bespoke alternative to apprenticeship programmes. The recruiter employs and trains young workers delivering a mix of training and onsite work with the hirer, with the worker being taken on by the business at the end of the programme. By removing financial and operational risk from the business, recruiters are removing some of the barriers to offering young people work.
Working with the Government’s Careers and Enterprise Company they helped develop targeted guidance on model hiring processes including AI interviews, online and in person assessments and interview techniques. Candidate ghosting is a negative and demoralising consequence of some large-scale AI driven application processes and members are focused on ensuring positive experiences for young workers making their first applications for work.
However, the Government needs to do more to deliver genuinely employer led skills policies to get all businesses, particularly SMEs to take the risk and invest in young people. Sign up of the tech, retail and hospitality giants is not enough to turn around this tragic situation. Alan Milburn must advocate an employer led skills reform in his recommendations later in the year.