In the 2024 ‘Get Britain Working White Paper’, the Government announced funding to support 1.3 million 16-19 year olds to access high-quality training, including more pilot schemes known as ‘trailblazers’ to test new approaches.
This comes against a background of a sharp increase in the number of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET).
Latest figures show nearly a million, or one-in-eight young people, are neither earning or learning. Reducing this number to the level of the Netherlands could provide a £69bn boost to the UK’s GDP.
The success of the Government’s new proposals in tackling that challenge hinges on learning the lessons of previous programmes, according to the Designing Better Futures report issued today (24 June) by the Employment Related Services Association (ERSA).
The report outlines several key findings based on the experiences of frontline staff in delivering eleven youth employment interventions in England since the 1980s.
The report has been launched online and will be celebrated at a reception attended by the Minister for Employment, Alison McGovern MP.
The report calls on the government to:
· Create a nationally available, permanent guarantee of employment support for young people, backed by investing in a range of high-quality support options.
· Empower local communities with dedicated people and skills funding, allowing them to fund tailored support for those furthest from the labour market, facing considerable barriers to education, employment and training, whilst meeting local priorities as outlined in their Get Britain Working Plans.
· Review the Youth Employment Hub model of supporting young people, to ensure it has support from the national government where it is being used and to explore the potential lessons for the new Jobs and Careers Service.
These recommendations call on the government to go further in providing support for every young person in England, by investing in a nationally available guarantee of support for every young person wherever they live; ensuring that local communities can access vital pots of funding to offer support tailored to their local labour market; and to review the Youth Employment Hub model, which is promising but fragmented in its availability and funding.
Furthermore, the report recommends that all future commissioning:
· Ensure all funding settlements for future youth employment interventions cover at least three years, ensuring organisations can deliver programmes without the pressure of short-term funding on their operations and staff.
· Commissioning should properly engage with key stakeholders and allow sufficient lead-in time to avoid early teething issues.
· Make high-quality relationship-based support from an adviser a key aspect of all future youth employment interventions, ensuring young people can be guided through accessing support, gaining and sustaining employment.
· Collaborate with and support a network of youth-focused employment support providers who have knowledge and experience delivering programmes for young people.
· Integrate youth employability support with health, housing, and welfare services locally to support young people facing complex barriers.
· Work with employers to create high-quality opportunities for disadvantaged young people in growth sectors, utilising wage subsidies to encourage engagement.
· Ensure that youth voice is embedded in designing and delivering future youth employment interventions.
· Ensure that evaluation is embedded in the design of programmes to ensure that lessons learnt from delivery and outcomes can be effectively tracked for impact analysis.
ERSA CEO, Elizabeth Taylor, has worked in the employment support sector for four decades, delivering several of the programmes covered in the report, she commented:
“I am frustrated that the thorny issue of youth employment never goes away. In the past organisations delivering programmes have been hampered by the rigid way that schemes are structured and who has access to them. We need greater ambition and innovation to combat a rising tide of economically inactive young people, estimated to be one in seven 18-24-year-olds. We must learn from past programmes and act on the recommendations in this report to give today’s, and tomorrow’s, young people a working future.”
You can read the full report here.
