Memorandum submitted by Rathbone
BACKGROUND
Rathbone is a national charity which engaged
with over 15,000 young people aged 14-24 last year; a significant
proportion of whom were NEET before coming to Rathbone.
Rathbone has a successful track record of working
with disadvantaged and disengaged young people over many years;
prior to coming to us most have poor attainment; personal and
social barriers to learning; are subject to supervision by the
youth justice system; are from care backgrounds and suffer the
effects of poverty.
Our core programmes of learning are focused
on youth training linked to employability and skills. In recent
years this has been focused on the Entry to Employment Scheme
(E2E) and Apprenticeships.
Rathbone has developed strong collaborative
relationships with partners across the sectors including: government
departments (DCSF, DWP, Home Office, Office of the Third Sector),
Youth Justice Board, Ofsted, local authorities, colleges and schools,
as well as national and local third sector organisations.
COMMENTS
Rathbone is pleased to respond to this inquiry
and welcomes the opportunity to offer comments and suggestions
to help to reduce the number of young people who are NEET. The
voluntary sector generally has a good track record in designing
and delivering successful and sustainable NEET reduction strategies.
Rathbone's work has been particularly fruitful in this area, initially
through the Neighbourhood Support Fund (NSF) and more recently
working with local authorities and charitable foundations to target
and reduce the number of young people who are NEET. We have been
very effective at reducing NEET figures with sustainable progressions
into employment or continued training or education. Rathbone has
been the subject of several DCSF research visits and evaluations
focused on our work to reduce young people NEET.
There is cross-party support for the benefits
the third sector can bring to youth and training provision, and
wide recognition of the cost and other delivery advantages of
third sector provision. In this very difficult area, the third
sector is a unique resource to develop relationships with young
people and to respond and provide support in a way that statutory
organisations cannot. Young people who are NEET have highly specialist
needs. The ability to provide genuine, successful support to them
does exist—in large part in national voluntary organisations.
We would like to take this opportunity to highlight
a serious concern that is felt across the voluntary sector concerning
14-19 reforms from next April. The transition of responsibility
for funding from the LSC to local authorities is a significant
shift in commissioning and delivery, requiring capacity building
in both local government and the third sector. Rathbone, for instance,
focuses staff on front line provision, enabled by central commissioning.
There is a very real danger that in the transition the voluntary
sector will not maintain its current level of participation in
NEET reduction work, meaning a "dip" in the quantity
and quality of provision. We are pleased that LSC contracts will
be rolled over until April 2011, but during this time serious
attention needs to be given to transitional support arrangements
for national voluntary organisations to enable them to respond
to this national policy shift. Local authorities have support
through the React programme.
National voluntary organisations will need to
restructure and re-build their regional LSC relationships with
individual local authorities to maintain the level of provision
currently available to young people; this will require additional
infrastructure support. Rathbone recommends a phased process,
supported over three years. The establishment of a working group,
involving national providers, to assess how voluntary organisations
should be supported is essential to this process. This could be
developed from the existing DCSF third sector advisory group of
which Rathbone is a member.
STRATEGIES FOR
THE IDENTIFICATION
OF YOUNG
PEOPLE AT
RISK OF
FALLING INTO
NEET CATEGORY
There is a significant amount of evidence to
confirm that the earlier intervention for young people at risk
of being NEET takes place the more effective it is. This view
is supported by the work Rathbone has undertaken with schools
and with young people who are at risk of dropping out of school.
Interventions after a young person has left school are too late;
earlier on they are more disposed to engage with support, advice
and guidance. Moreover, it is far easier to re-motivate and encourage
a young person when they are in school, before they have become
NEET, exposed to risky behaviours or to potential offending lifestyles.
It is the view of Rathbone that considerably more work needs to
be happening in school in years 9, 10 and intensively in year
11 with those young people identified as being at risk.
Early signs of disengagement include low attendance,
limited progress and achievement and poor behaviour. Risk factors
include: care responsibilities, health and mental health issues,
learning disabilities and bullying. Rathbone has developed an
in-reach model in schools which allows support to be tailored
to individual needs and extended seamlessly into the community
for young people at risk.
Services and programmes to support those
most at risk of becoming NEET, and to reduce the numbers and address
the needs of those who have become persistently NEET.
Interventions that work with young people who
are NEET must also target and work with young people categorised
as Unknowns, ie known to have left school but cannot be tracked.
Rathbone and the Nuffield Foundation recently
carried out a year long piece of research, the Engaging Youth
Enquiry into young people who are NEET, a copy of our report's
Executive Summary is enclosed as an appendix.[1]
We interviewed over 500 young people who were NEET. The key finding
from this research was that short term interventions that do not
lead to further learning or employment were highly demotivating
and encourage "churn" in the NEET statistics (covered
in more detail below).
Young people who are NEET often have personal
characteristics such as poor school achievement, low self esteem
and are alienated from mainstream institutions. Interventions
with young people who have been out of mainstream education and
training for some time need to last for 12 months as a norm. Shorter
interventions are simply not long enough for young people in this
category to gain the skills and experience necessary for successful
progression into sustainable employment.
Many young people who are NEET suffer from varied
and overlapping disadvantages and lack family support structures.
The Engaging Youth Enquiry confirmed the value of a "significant
other", often a youth worker, to provide support, brokerage
and transitional support. Rathbone data confirms that successful
progression is increased by 50% where this role is provided. The
voluntary sector is well placed to offer this "significant
other" support because it offers a different relationship
to statutory bodies and a different kind of trust. Furthermore,
this support is often cheaper, more flexible and effective at
reducing NEET figures.
Rathbone has developed a model of street based
engagement and support to NEET young people. We know you cannot
reach marginalised young people by sending them letters or using
compulsion and you have to go out to disengaged young people.
Last year Rathbone reached over 4,000 young people through its
street based work and was able to successfully re-engage around
70% of these with mainstream programmes. The Rathbone model provides
intensive support early on which tapers off quickly once the young
person has re-engaged with training provision—responsive
to need and providing long-term consistent support.
THE EFFECTIVENESS
OF THE
GOVERNMENT'S
NEET STRATEGY
The number of young people aged 16-18 who are
NEET has remained fairly consistent at around 10% for the last
20 years despite numerous initiatives to reduce this number. Small
decreases in 16-18s have been outweighed by increases to the 18-24
cohort.
We know from our records that significantly
high numbers of young people joining Rathbone have been on short
programmes several times. We know from our own work and that of
other providers that the issue of young people "churning"
in and out of NEET status—the so called revolving door syndrome—is
a serious concern and may actually be doing more damage than good
to young people. They have their hopes and expectations raised,
only to be dashed as they come to the end of yet another short
course and fall back into NEET status.
We believe the issue is as much about the sustainability
of interventions as it is about getting the overall number of
young people who are NEET down at any one time.
Rathbone sees the current trend of interventions
which typically give young people six months training eg the Future
Jobs Fund, as "churning" the NEET numbers rather than
reducing them.
Data mechanisms should be put in place in the
NEET statistics to record whether young people are re-joining
programmes or are new entrants. The omission of this information
is a serious weakness in understanding the issue of "churn"
and in designing strategies for permanently reducing NEET figures
and creating sustainable models that take young people through
to employment.
The likely impact of Raising the Participation
Age on strategies for addressing the needs of young people NEET.
Rathbone has concerns about Raising the Participation
Age. The patterns of behaviour that we see early on (pre-16 and
pre-14) which lead to NEET status are not removed by existing
compulsion to age 16.There is a long standing problem of non attendance
of young people of statutory school age; even with current sanctions
to fine parents and the issuing of enforcement notices. It therefore
seems unlikely that these young people will attend provision after
16—unless the offer is substantially different.
The Engaging Youth Enquiry has confirmed that
a majority of NEET young people simply want paid work for financial
support and the status they associate with it and do not want
further education and training. Many have pressures on them to
make a financial contribution to the family income and many will
have different needs, such as being parents or carers. Work provides
a good learning environment, as long as it is properly regulated
employment.
Rathbone recommends that a youth training scheme
similar to that of the Youth Training Scheme (YTS) or the Community
Programme (CP) of the 1980s is incorporated within the 14-19 offer.
The key success factors of these previous initiatives were: an
offer of 12 months' placement as the norm and longer if the young
person needed it; a non means tested allowance; and training based
on real work experience. An offer which is in an employment growth
area would be particularly beneficial—for instance environmental
or green projects which young people are particularly keen to
engage with and which provide transferable skills to the market
place. We believe a properly constructed form of work creation
would be a cost effective way of reducing NEET sustainably and
will be cheaper than the estimated cost of Raising the Participation
Age which appears focused on increased provision in colleges and
school 6th forms.
The opportunities and future prospects in
education, training and employment for 16-18 year olds.
Rathbone suggests that the prospects for young
people leaving school would be improved if there was a broader
offer, deregulating the curriculum to make it more flexible for
those not inclined to traditional routes. The new diplomas do
promote work related learning but critically are not work based,
ie to learn on the job; to be able to complete practical tasks
as opposed to theoretical understanding in the classroom. This
makes learning real to young people who want to work.
We are concerned that the 14-19 curriculum reform
strategy will again miss out those young people for whom an ongoing
engagement with learning is most problematic. There is as yet
no clear policy vision as to how a young person with complex learning
and support needs will be enabled to develop a meaningful, sustained
and fully funded learning pathway up to the age of 18. Much of
the curriculum and qualifications reform process is focused on
work-related rather than work-based learning. Other than apprenticeships,
there is a distinct lack of policy engagement with the challenge
of enabling young people both to progress into employment and
to receive access to accredited and well-supported learning. We
are extremely disappointed that the recent ASCL Bill has effectively
removed work-based programme-led apprenticeships from the range
of routes available to more vulnerable young people and see therefore
the reform of the statutory framework applying to apprenticeships
as representing a really significant reduction in opportunity
for those young people to whom organisations such as Rathbone
is most committed. With respect to the curriculum reform proposals
relating to Foundation Learning, we are also very concerned that
these will lead to an overly simplistic qualifications-driven
approach to funding learning programmes which will be far from
adequate in meeting the learning and support needs of our cohort
of young people in the round. Again, whilst Entry to Employment
is a far from perfect programme, the migration to Foundation Learning
may well result in a real reduction in learning opportunities.
We believe that there is a need to really strengthen
and further develop properly funded and structured work based
learning opportunities and to considerably strengthen employers'
commitment to and engagement with the education of young people
who are not going to take up an apprenticeship route. The casualisation
of the labour market is of growing concern to Rathbone; we have
found a huge increase in young people working casually through
agencies in poorly regulated employment eg contract cleaning and
factory work. A young person who is entering work for the first
time and needs to develop work skills and an understanding of
what is expected of them is not able to gain the right experience
from this kind of work. It is also difficult for the young person
to gain stability if their employment is ad hoc.
This is a worrying development, exacerbated
by fewer employment opportunities because of competition from
migrant workers, who may have a better education and stronger
skills and, in the current employment market, graduates seeking
employment.
December 2009
1 Not printed. Back
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