Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
82-99)
JOHN COPPS,
SHAKS GHOSH,
SONIA SODHA
AND DR
RICHARD WILLIAMS
27 JANUARY 2010
Q82 Chairman: Let me welcome
our witnesses this morning: Sonia Sodha, John Copps, Shaks Ghosh
and Dr Richard Williams. We tend to be a bit informal in this
Committee—do you mind if we revert to first names? Is that
all right? Are you all happy with that? We get knights of the
realm, lords, distinguished professors and all sorts. You can
call members of the Committee anything you like, apart from me—you
have to call me Chairman. You know what this inquiry is about.
We had the first session looking at NEETs on Monday. What came
resoundingly from that session was that NEET is an inappropriate
category and we shouldn't really use it, but we then all proceeded
to use it. We know the area we are looking at—young, unemployed
people at the bottom of the employment pile, who very often move
in and out of work. We know how that happens and we have a reasonable
amount of experience in this area. We did a pre-legislative inquiry
into apprenticeships not long ago, so we are not entirely naive
about this. We are going to the Netherlands this afternoon to
look at what they do there, because our research suggests that
they do some rather interesting things that we could learn from.
So, here we are. You have a unique opportunity to prime the Committee
for our trip. We want to delve into your experience of what this
category is. Why is it so difficult to evaluate it as a category?
If someone walked up to me and said, "Look, these people
are not in employment, education or training," I would have
thought that was pretty neutral, but everyone tells me that is
not the case. Let's start with Sonia.
Sonia Sodha: Hi. My name is Sonia
Sodha and in 2009 I was head of the capabilities programme at
Demos. That programme was responsible for research into children
and young people and education issues. I think the reason why
I have been invited here today is that we have been doing a big,
year-long project looking at educational disengagement. The focus
of our work on NEETs—as you say, it is a criticised term,
but it is one that people often use as a shorthand—has really
been on a preventive approach to the problem of youth unemployment.
One of our critiques of Government policy in this area is that
there has not been enough effort to join up services that tackle
the issue of youth unemployment, aimed at the 16-to-18 and 16-to-24
age groups, with what goes on earlier in the school system. We
published an interim report back in May, and we are publishing
a final report in the last week of February. In our work, we are
saying that although we have this policy problem, which we categorise
as NEETs, it needs to be a mainstream part of education policy
and the education system. We need to look at what we do to prevent
young people becoming NEET, even when they are starting school
at age 5, as well as when they are in primary school and secondary
school. It is very important to have those 16-to-18 services for
young people who are unemployed at age 16 to 18. It is just as
important to tackle the risk factors that make a young person
more likely to be unemployed during those years. For example,
one of the statistics that we point to in our report is that eight
in 100 children leave primary school each year without the basic
reading and numeracy skills that they need to do well and to benefit
from secondary school. Our research has looked at the fact that
10% of five-year-olds are starting school without the behavioural
skills that they need to learn. These are the children for whom
school is an uphill struggle all the way through. Unless we tackle
those risk factors early on and look at some of the systemic issues
around special educational needs, behaviour and alternative provision,
we are not going to tackle effectively the problem of youth unemployment
in the long term.
Chairman: Thank you. That has got us
moving. John.
John Copps: I am John Copps from
the think-tank and consultancy New Philanthropy Capital. We focus
on the charitable sector and improving the way in which it operates
in the UK. I am the author of a report, published last year, that
looked at NEETs and various different areas and, in particular,
at the contribution that the charitable sector can make. In this
particular area, we know that some of the things done by the Government
do not work. It is important to think about other activities in
the third and private sectors, and about how the Government can
best work with them. We know that there is not one solution or
one cause of young people being NEET, but we must consider skills
and the different things offered by charities locally and nationally.
Q83 Chairman: Do you mean
charities that are strictly defined as charities, or the third
sector more broadly?
John Copps: The third sector more
broadly. We are talking about not just single organisations, but
partnerships between organisations—Shaks's is one of them—in
the private and third sectors.
Shaks Ghosh: I am Shaks Ghosh
of the Private Equity Foundation. Our mission is full potential.
We have three mission-related goals, the first of which is empowering
children and young people to achieve their full potential. The
second goal is to enable the voluntary sector to achieve its full
potential. We are building a portfolio of 17 charities, all operating
with children and young people. I use the word "charity"
interchangeably with "voluntary sector" and "not-for-profit
organisations". Our third goal is to harness the business
skills of the business community and offer them to the charities
to help with capacity, to build them up and to make them stronger.
The area in which we are particularly interested is that of children
and young people, and we are trying to solve the NEET problem.
The way that we see that panning out is through an integrated
approach, with our charities falling into three clusters, the
first of which is early intervention. It is pretty much as Sonia
was explaining: if seven, eight and nine-year-olds do not get
to school and do not learn to read and write, almost inevitably
they will end up NEET. The second cluster of charities works with
naughty teenagers, and tries to get those who abscond or are excluded
from school to stay in school. The third cluster of charities,
such as Fairbridge and Tomorrow's People, is made up of organisations
that work with young people of 16-plus who are already NEET. We
are discussing an important issue. The transition from the world
of school to the world of work is difficult for everyone. It was
difficult for all of us. The more disadvantaged people are, the
more obstacles and problems they have to face in their lives and
the more help they will need. We all need help in that difficult
transition period. It strikes me that there has never been a more
important time to look at such issues, what with the recession
and rising unemployment, but on the plus side, there are also
initiatives such as increasing the age of participation. How do
we make that into an opportunity to solve the intractable problems
caused by the issue of NEET? One of the things that bothers me
is fragmentation. Of course, coming from the voluntary sector,
we see fragmentation everywhere around us. It is one of the really
big things that we will have to solve and address. If every organisation
simply sees its end point as the young person leaving, we shall
never mesh things together. As I think about the transition from
school to work—or, indeed, the transitions that young people
have to make as they move from voluntary organisation to voluntary
organisation—it seems that organisations such as mine have
a role to play in somehow putting our arms around the fragmented
system that we have. By way of introduction to the issue of NEET,
I want to point to the complications in the system. Not only is
it fragmented, but it is difficult for young people to find their
way around it. If we are really serious about enabling young people,
particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds, to make the transition
from the world of school to the world of work, we have to make
it not only simpler, but more integrated. We really have to have
a system that takes them by the hand and leads them through it.
Q84 Chairman: Richard, your
written evidence was quite tough in its criticism of some major
Government policies. I would be interested to hear what you have
to say. The Committee is looking at the early years—Sure
Start and children's centres—at the moment, and one would
have thought, as Sonia has indicated, that that was tackling problems
in the very early part of a child's life. Many of us rather admire
the fact that there is a much more flexible route for young people
post-14—a far more flexible and diverse route than we remember
in the past. There are some interesting things going on, but in
your evidence you suggest that you do not think much of them.
Is that so?
Dr Williams: I will comment on
that. I am Richard Williams, I am chief executive of Rathbone,
a national youth voluntary organisation that works right across
the UK. Last year we worked with about 17,500 young people, many
of whom have the characteristics that Shaks described. Formally,
our mission is to work with young people aged 14 to 24. We reviewed
that recently, and our corporate plan now talks about working
with young people aged 11-plus, partly for reasons of engaging
in early intervention.
Q85 Chairman: So you are going
down to 11?
Dr Williams: Yes.
Chairman: I should declare an interest—I
always host your annual reception.
Dr Williams: Which you do very
well. Richard Pring was here yesterday, and I want to pick up
the points that he made, albeit in the context of the "engaging
youth" inquiry that we submitted along with our evidence.
The "engaging youth" inquiry was a very important part
of the wider Nuffield review. From my point of view, the significant
difference between the "engaging youth" inquiry and
most of the other research that has been done in this area was
that it was very much based on an action research model. Going
through people whom they know and trust, it engaged young people
in talking directly to researchers about their life experiences
and life circumstances. We ran 36 workshops with young people
across the UK; we also ran six practitioner workshops at the same
time. We were trying to understand, if you like, the articulation
between young people's views of their experiences and the views
of practitioners. That is what informed our evidence. We would
agree, obviously, that the whole issue of using "NEET"
as a descriptor is very problematic. Technically, it is a residual
statistical category; it is not a meaningful description of anything
that happens to young people. In the report, we say that we believe
that it has led to a deficit model of young people with complex
needs. In a sense, it has diverted attention away from worrying
about how to support them in making sense of their lives and in
finding meaningful trajectories—that includes transition
to work, which I will come on to. We also take the view that it
has very often led to preoccupation with performance management
across the country, with NEET reduction almost an end in itself.
I have now chaired two national conferences with Capita, in which
lots of people from local authorities talked about NEET reduction
in exactly those terms, saying that the objective was to get NEET
numbers off the register. Looking beyond that is much more problematic.
Our view, which echoes what others have said this morning, is
that, in a sense, that focus has led to a great spawning of initiatives
and short-term measures, which we would see as being part and
parcel of the whole problem of churn—I am sure that people
have already talked to you about that. In terms of the work with
young people, four key findings or themes have emerged from this.
One is about aspiration; often policy related to young people
described as NEET is predicated on low motivation. Our finding
in the report, having listened to young people speaking, is that
generally they have high aspirations. We say that there is a real
issue about whether a lack of motivation is a cause or an effect
of the experience of exclusion. Certainly, our view was that much
of NEET policy predicated on low motivation misses the point.
The key point is how to engage with young people to help them
to overcome the barriers that are blocking their progress; their
aspirations are very normal. Principally, they want a job of the
kind that we recognise as a proper job. They want a decent family
life, a home and financial security. The second key finding, which
comes through as much in the transcripts of the interviews or
conversations as in the report, is that many of these young people
are intensely alienated from school. Again, that is something
that is often commented on. As an organisation, we do a lot of
work with young people who are intensely alienated from school.
They are not necessarily intensely alienated from learning. In
the transcripts, there are lots of references made by young people
to subjects within the general educational curriculum that they
value and enjoy. More often than not, the issue with school is
an issue to do with other factors, such as bullying, the experience
of authority in school and problematic relationships with particular
teachers. One thing that we worried about in the framework of
the report is whether, in a sense, collectively we have perhaps
spent too much time reforming the curriculum, and not enough time
thinking about the nature of school and schooling and the experience
of school for some of these young people. There is evidence around
the country that, certainly at Key Stage 4, some people are experimenting
and exploring ways of making the mainstream curriculum more meaningful
and interesting for those sorts of young people. The question
of work and of transition to work is really fundamental. In all
the discussion groups that we ran, there was an overwhelming sense
of a desire on the part of these young people to have a job. That
is their primary goal. Yes, there are issues within—
Chairman: Their primary goal is what?
Dr Williams: To get a job. They
want to be employed. There are issues about skills and qualifications
but, equally, there are significant issues in different parts
of the country around structural unemployment and its impact on
young people. For example, in Northumberland, where we ran a workshop
in Morpeth, there were young people with A-levels who could not
get a job. They were not low attaining, but were blocked by the
impact of structural unemployment. Competition in the labour market—there
are people who are expert in the youth labour market to whom I
can refer you—and casualisation are part of that. We are
also worried about implications of the Apprenticeships, Skills,
Children and Learning Act 2009, in terms of its impact on employer-led
and programme-led apprenticeships and the diminution, in effect,
of opportunity for young people to make a transition into employment.
I am happy to say more about that. The other key theme that comes
through our report is the issue of transitional support. There
has been reference to churn; it is a characteristic of the lives
of these young people that often they are moving, or moved, in
and around a variety of programmes, with minimal support between
those programmes. Other than through references to Connexions,
they often do not have what we would describe as "a significant
other" who is an advocate for them through that process.
Our view in the report is that there is a need to go beyond the
objective of providing better independent advice and guidance,
and to look more fundamentally at mentoring, support, advocacy
and sustained engagement with these young people through what
is very often a complex transition process.
Chairman: That has given you all a chance
to open up. My colleagues will ask you short, sharp questions,
I hope, and you will give rather shorter answers than you did
in your preambles. Let's get on with it. I am going to hand over
to Annette to open with the first section of questions.
Q86 Annette Brooke: Everybody criticises
the term NEET. Given that it covers such a diverse group of people,
is there another way of describing the whole group?
John Copps: As you say, NEET is
a bucket term. It has lots of different things inside it, and
that has implications when you are delivering policy. The problems
faced by a teenage mother are very different from those of a young
person leaving care. Maybe it could be divided into two different
categories. One would include problems that result from disengagement
with education, which is a gradual process that builds up through
time at school and in the system. The other would be crisis, which
would cover the two examples I have just described. You need different
responses for each. I can say a bit about what works later, but
I think we know what can be successful in each of those examples.
Shaks Ghosh: I would leave it.
I think it is complicated enough as it is. NEET is fairly factual.
It is what it says on the tin: people who are not in education,
employment or training. I would leave it, as long as we understand,
as John says, that it is a very big bucket and that segmentation
is absolutely critical. You need to know what is in the bucket;
what different problems young people are facing; what brought
them there; and how to solve the problems. If your Committee were
to recommend that we call it something else, we could go through
years of trying to work that out and years of trying to communicate
it. It seems to me that it is semantics. It is a term; let's live
with it, but let's get under the skin of it, and let's solve the
different problems that are encompassed there.
Sonia Sodha: I would worry that
if you came up with another term, it would just take on the same
status as the term NEET. I would agree with Shaks that the most
important thing is to disaggregate why young people are NEET,
and to recognise the complexity of the issues that might lead
to a young person becoming NEET, rather than focusing on the terminology.
Q87 Annette Brooke: May I
just follow up with another short question? Is there anything
that all NEETs have in common?
Dr Williams: I am thinking from
our experience.
Chairman: They are all young.
Dr Williams: They are but, of
course, they are getting older, and that is part of the big anxiety
about the whole effectiveness of the strategy. I guess it is a
difficulty in relating to mainstream services. I can't think of
a sub-group of the young people with whom we work who are, in
some form, successful in the way in which they access public services
that are intended to support them.
Shaks Ghosh: If I were to look
for a thread beyond employment and education, I would find it
quite difficult. How far do you disaggregate it? Do you go to
the 900,000, or do you try to create smaller and smaller groups
within that? The group for which I have some concern is young
people who are in full-time volunteering. We have done some work,
together with Demos and a fabulous organisation called City Year,
on national service. One of the problems in helping young people
to spend a year in full-time national service is that they fall
across all the issues around benefits and the problem of being
NEET—not in education, employment or training. In some ways,
it is quite neat to leave it as "not in education, employment
or training," because we know that they are the only things
that NEETs have in common. They are young, and they are not in
education, employment or training—that is it. As soon as
you start to segment it further, you put more caveats on it. Having
a broad-brush term like "not in education, employment or
training" forces us to ask the question that you are asking,
which is: "What are the different sub-categories here?"
Q88 Annette Brooke: May I just follow
that up, quickly. People can combine the answers. Has Government
policy really taken on board the different categories so far?
Sonia Sodha: One of the issues
with policy over the last decade on this is that there has been,
to some extent, a conflation—an assumption, as Richard said,
that the problem is a lack of motivation or aspiration, or the
fact that there is not a good enough vocational offer. In a lot
of policy documents on the issue there is an in-built assumption
that if we expand the nature of the offer available to young people
and make sure that there is good vocational provision alongside
academic provision, that will, to some extent, get round the issue.
Obviously, the nature of the vocational offer is important. It
is also important, though, not to conflate vocational provision
with disengagement as a whole, because it is certainly not the
case that all disengaged young people are disengaged because vocational
provision is not good enough. That is one safety warning about
policy over the last decade.
Dr Williams: In a way, I would
answer that rhetorically and say, "What is the policy?",
because one might say that there is a series of policies.
Chairman: Can we turn the volume up?
Dr Williams: I apologise. I would
say, "What is the policy?". There is a series of policy
intervention strategies, but is there a single policy? For example,
we work in Scotland and Wales, and if we were talking about NEET
in Scotland, somebody would say that there is a strategy called
"More Choices, More Chances." If we were in Wales, they
would say that there was something called "The Learning Country"—there
is a single policy vision about the issue. In the English context,
it is more complex. There is not a single policy that you could
put your hand on that is about NEET.
Q89 Annette Brooke: Does England
lack a strategy?
Dr Williams: It is a different,
more complicated approach. As far as education and training are
concerned, there is conflation of the idea of a work-related or
general vocational curriculum as part of a way of re-engaging
young people who are dropping out, and a work-based view of what
should be available to such young people. There is not necessarily
a comprehensive policy. There is a tension between some of what
has happened with regard to education in the workplace and apprenticeships
on the one hand, and the curriculum reforms as they apply to schools
and colleges on the other hand. The kind of young people whom
we are working with tend to fall through the gap of those approaches.
I hope that makes sense.
Shaks Ghosh: If your question
is: "Are there any groups of young people who are falling
through the net of Government policy; are there any groups in
this NEET category for whom there are not the right kind of policies?",
the answer is yes. I could identify four or five groups of them
and say that there is more that we could and should do. Full-time
volunteers would be one of those groups; young people who want
to dedicate their lives to a year of service fall between the
cracks.
Q90 Chairman: What was the
organisation that provided this national service?
Shaks Ghosh: It is an American
organisation called City Year. It recruits young people of 16,
17 and 18; it gives them some training and forms them into teams;
then it sends them into schools in poor and disadvantaged areas
to support teachers in the school yard, classroom and so on. It
provides near-peer role models and creates an image of young people
as positive citizens, rather than the media images that we see.
Let me come back to the issue of Government policy. To cut the
issue in a different way, the area that we really need to think
about—the area where, it seems to me, there is a really
big gap—has to do with what happens to young people when
they leave school. At 16, when the head teacher no longer has
responsibility for those young people and they are someone else's
responsibility, they walk through the gates of that school, and
it seems to me that we have no sense of how we support them at
that point. If we could be sure that every young person who walked
through the gates of that school left with a plan and someone
who would help them to implement that plan or guide them through
this very fragmented system, we would have a better chance with
those young people. In the old days, it might have been parents,
communities or the extended family who would have shepherded them
through that process. Particularly in our very fragmented, urban
communities, young people just do not have that support as they
go through that difficult process.
Q91 Chairman: In a number
of the schools that I visit, they will have that, but kids certainly
won't have it if they stop coming regularly at 13 or 14, let alone
15 and 16. The NEETs we are talking about are the ones that leak
out of the system, rather than march out at 16. Is that not true?
Shaks Ghosh: I think that is absolutely
right. I would say that the relationship with—let's use
Richard's phrase—"the significant other" needs
to start well before the young person is at the school gate, ready
to depart. I am talking about a support or mentoring system that
is focused on helping them to make the transition into the world
of work. That process has to start well before the young person
is 16. We need to devise a system where, when a young person is
14, we start to think about how they engage with the world of
work. I know that some of this is happening with the 14-to-19
curriculum and so on, but I am talking about somebody who is charged
with the responsibility of helping them manage that transition,
who is obsessive about it, and who works with that young person
in a very focused way to help them make that transition into the
world of work. Maybe not every young person will need it, but
it would be great if that offer were there for young people.
Q92 Annette Brooke: Would
you say that Government targets in this area have been a help
or a hindrance? Should we be using another method to assess the
policies?
John Copps: I think it is helpful
to have a grand ambition—an overall position of wanting
to reduce the number of NEETs as a whole bucket—but I go
back to what we said earlier. We need to recognise that there
are lots of problems. We need to get to the root of the problems.
When I was doing my research, I went to lots of projects and met
young people. When you sit down and speak to them, one to one,
they all have a specific problem, and it is heart-rending. It
is something that you would never wish on anybody. They are problems
that need individual attention. Having an overall policy is only
valuable if it captures what is going on elsewhere. We need to
include what the Government are doing about young offenders, children
leaving care and worklessness. An overarching target has value,
but the policy needs to realise that it is an umbrella that covers
so much else.
Sonia Sodha: I agree with John
in some respects, but one of the issues with the NEET target is
that it has been very much focused on percentage reductions. While
that is important—NEET is a category that we want to reduce—it
means that it is easier for providers working with young people
to work with those who are closest to not becoming NEET. Certainly,
as part of our research at Demos, we have spoken to a lot of charities
who work with NEET charities such as Fairbridge. They say—I'm
sure that Rathbone will echo this—that they work with the
very hard-to-reach young people, who start quite a long way away
from being able to undertake training, employment, or full-time
education. It takes a much longer period of time to work with
that young person and get them to a point where they are not NEET
than it might to work with someone who is much closer to that
point. So you need to think about the incentives that come with
particular targets. I think that you see that in other areas of
education policy, as well. For example, on schools, we know that
the threshold targets mean that some schools are focused on children
who are just below the threshold. If we focused on floor targets,
holding schools responsible for children who are performing at
the very low end of the spectrum—so that we were dealing
with the intractable, long tail of underachievement—that
would provide equal incentives for services and providers to focus
on the children who are very hard to reach. Of course, providers
want to focus on those groups, but sometimes, if you have targets
that make it difficult for you to do so, that can be very difficult.
Q93 Mr Timpson: I was interested
in what Richard said earlier about aspiration. His evidence suggests
that many young people who fall into a NEET category actually
do have aspiration. It may not be a huge ambition, but they do
have that aspiration. But when I looked at Sonia's Stitch in
Time report, one of the five key areas that it said we should
focus on is building aspiration. So I want to know where we sit
with aspiration, because it is something that people talk about
a lot. They say that a lot of NEETs don't have ambition or aspiration
and that that is something that is prevalent across the whole
NEET population and is very difficult to tackle. So where are
we on aspiration? Unless we know where we are starting from, it
is very difficult to know when and where we channel our interventions.
Sonia Sodha: I do not think that
we would ever want to say that a lack of ambition or aspiration
is prevalent across the whole NEET population, but what we said
in the report is that a lack of aspiration is one of five risk
factors, at the child level, for becoming NEET later on. I think
that is something that needs to be addressed. We know that some
children in schools have low aspirations. We know, for example,
that a child's aspiration is closely related to their parents'
aspiration, but that is not to say that all young people who are
very disengaged have no aspiration at all.
Q94 Chairman: I have the highest
regard for Demos and all the other organisations represented here
today, but I sometimes feel frustration with their sense of history.
Jeff Ennis, the hon. Member for Barnsley, was on this Committee
for a long time. He used to say, in evidence sessions similar
to this, that in Barnsley, a mining area, a young man coming out
of school and who wasn't very academic went into the mining industry.
He would be highly paid for relatively unskilled work—hard
work, but relatively unskilled work—and that was on offer
right across his constituency. But today, for a similar young
man coming out of school with a low level of qualifications, the
very best that he will be offered is minimum wage plus, probably
minimum wage, in retail and distribution. Young people may have
aspirations, but if they don't have the skills the truth is that
they are looking at a life on the breadline—on minimum wage.
Is there not a sense of history that that is what has happened
right across the industrial world? For people with low skills
there are no longer high-paying jobs out there. They are going
to be on the lowest jobs for a long time. Isn't that communicated
across the generations? That is the frustration that I feel—that
there isn't a sense of history in some of the research that we
are doing. Is that a silly question?
Dr Williams: Absolutely not. I
don't disagree with you. I think it is important to calibrate
aspiration as a word. What I think we were referring to here is
the idea that, in the vernacular of the NEET discourse, there
is an assumption that there are large numbers of young people
who are not motivated to do anything; they basically want to stay
in bed all day. What we were tuning into through these workshops
is that that is not the reality. What you are describing is a
very important part of the reality of the experience of the sort
of young people whom we are working with. So often, what you get
is not an expression of demotivation, but a sense of helplessness
about not being able to get where they want to be. To go back
to the young man in the workshop that we ran in Morpeth, he had
A-levels and, at the time when we were running that workshop,
had been looking for a job for a very long time. What we are saying
is that he was technically NEET, and that creates a feeling of
hopelessness, demotivation and loss of morale. But it isn't necessarily
the starting point. The issue that we were trying to pick up is
that often, NEET policy is about getting young people off the
NEET register as quickly as possible into something, without thinking
more longitudinally about the real target, which should be about
how those young people are enabled to make a transition to a sustainable
future that involves, fundamentally, a job. This is where there
is potentially an emerging disconnect between the process of educational
reform and thinking about transition into the labour market.
Chairman: Many people have tremendous
aspirations, but they are frustrated because what their qualifications
offer at that time is low pay. Who is the most famous NEET in
the world—Paris Hilton? She is an extraordinarily stupid
young woman who is enormously wealthy out of the family inheritance.
I suppose the frustration—
Mr Stuart: Leave Paris alone.
Chairman: She must be the stupidest person
in the world, but she is certainly the most famous NEET, isn't
she? She is not in employment, education or training, is she?
She must be the most famous NEET in the world. What's wrong with
it?
Mr Stuart: You should watch more daytime
telly.
Chairman: Graham, come in. Stimulate
us a bit more.
Q95 Mr Stuart: We had a group
of academics here the other day, who made a telling point. From
what I could pick up, they seemed to say that they couldn't explain
why between 1997 and 2007, when we had a period of sustained economic
growth, the number of NEETs did not move at all. They got all
their box of tricks they doubtless called for for years—the
EMA and all the rest of it. The Government gave them most of the
stuff they wanted, and they just could not begin to explain that.
They love it now that there is a recession; they can say, "Oh,
it's gone up under a recession." What they couldn't do was
tell us what happened between 1997 and 2007. The only beginning
of an explanation that I heard was that they said, "Well
actually, our understanding of the labour and employment market
now is nothing like it was 20 years ago. We do not have the understanding."
Isn't the Chairman right? It is just that the jobs have gone,
and the jobs you do get are rubbish. You churn between them and
you can't find a sustainable and reasonable status within your
community job, which would give you the opportunity to bring up
a family and live on it. Aren't we today again talking absolutely
as if there is something wrong with these young people? There
are going to be some people who don't do that well, academically
and in other ways. It seems to me, as a policy response, we have
to somehow turn back the clock and provide employment. Is it our
massive de-industrialisation? If we are the worst in Europe, is
it because all the jobs have gone from here more than anywhere
else? It's not that the young people have changed; it's not as
if there are loads of stupid people, or that they lack aspiration
or that their families are so awful. The truth is that there is
no decent work for them, and we are making it out as if it is
a problem with them, when actually it is about the offer. Either
we create the employment or we send a very harsh message that
none of this—the EMA or any of this stuff—is going
to fix your lives, and the only message that we can send to families
is, "You had better get your kids higher up the academic
ladder than they ever have historically, because otherwise they
are stuffed, because there aren't going to be the jobs."
That would be the message that needs to be given at primary school
level. At that point, we have to tackle educational under-performance,
because the truth is, there is nothing much you can do at 16,
17 or 18 with people who do not have the skill set.
Shaks Ghosh: It does seem to me
that the economy is on a twin track: there is the knowledge economy
and there is the service economy. There are very few other opportunities
for young people. If a degree-level qualification isn't right
for you, the only option might be the service industry. But if
you are not a highly sociable individual and do not have that
sort of social skills, what is there for you? That is a deep structural
problem that we have had ever since we started exporting our manufacturing
and low-skilled jobs to India and China. I absolutely see that.
If that is an issue that we want to tackle, bring it on; let's
think about that. In the meantime, however, I think that there
are lots of things we can do to prepare young people for the jobs
that are there, but we are not doing that.
Mr Stuart: It sounds as though that might
be more about lowering our aspiration rather than raising it.
If the jobs that are there are the ones that the Chairman described,
they are going to change.
Shaks Ghosh: It is about re-orientating
it and everything that Richard was saying. These are not enormously
high aspirations, are they? They are balanced, normal aspirations.
When I was at Crisis, we ran a centre for homeless people and
we would ask them, "What do you want from your life?"
They would say, "I'd like a home and a girlfriend."
It would break your heart, because we should be able to deliver
a home, a job and a girlfriend. Richard is not saying that they
all want to be brain surgeons or astronauts. They want a job.
The jobs are, or were, there, so how can we connect them? That
has to start with the school system and with our preparing young
people to have the right kind of aspirations for the world of
work. I have another couple of quick points on the issue of aspiration,
which I think might be helpful. I think we use the language of
aspiration very loosely. There is a bunch of stuff there around
motivation and, as you were saying, Chair, around skills. So people
have these aspirations. That is what they want, but they do not
quite know how they are going to get there, because they do not
have the skill set to get them there. I think there is also something
about horizons, which goes back to the work that Sonia has been
involved in.
Chairman: Horizons?
Shaks Ghosh: Horizons. Last week,
I visited a school in Tower Hamlets and asked the head teacher:
"What is the biggest challenge that you and your kids face
going forward?" She said: "The big problem for the kids
in this primary school is that their horizons are very limited."
They rarely get out of their local area. If they are leaving Tower
Hamlets, they think they are going abroad. The people they meet
are largely unemployed. So when we talk about aspirations, we
are talking about young people who actually have not seen how
big the world is and how exciting and thrilling it can be. It
was amazing that the head teacher said that it was not about targets
or all the things that the Government expect her and the school
to achieve; it was about, "How do I get these 250 kids out
of Tower Hamlets to have visibility on the big, wide world out
there?"
Chairman: Low mobility of a certain class
of people. Quick ones from everyone else, please, because I want
to move on to Paul. Sonia?
Sonia Sodha: Sorry, but could
you remind me what the original question was?
Chairman: God knows. You can answer anything
you like.
Q96 Mr Stuart: We are focusing
on the supply side rather than the demand side. How much is it
the demand side, and how much do we as policy makers need to be
looking at the demand side to inform what we are talking about?
Do we need a major look at the youth labour market before we come
to conclusions that basically suggest it is all about something
being wrong with these kids?
Sonia Sodha: I think you are absolutely
right to say that we should be looking at the exact nature of
low-paid and low-skilled jobs. There is probably a lot that can
be done around that and around employment advancement and skills
training in low-skilled jobs. I think there is something important
there, but I would stress that eight in 100 children still leave
primary school without being able to read properly. That is shocking,
and it is shocking that some children do not have the behavioural
skills that they need to do well out of school. So I think yes,
we do need the emphasis and focus on exactly what jobs we expect
our young people to do. That is important. But we also need to
make sure that our system is equipping young people with the skills
that they need. Some of the work we have been doing at Demos has
looked at the importance of what are commonly known as soft skills.
These include motivation, the ability to apply yourself to a task,
empathy and self-regulation, meaning the ability to self-regulate
your behaviour. We know that those skills, over the last 30 years,
have become much more important in the labour market. That is
probably because, as you rightly say, the nature of the labour
market has changed, there are far fewer established career trajectories
and there is a lot more low-skilled work available for young people
straight after school, which they churn in and out of. It is important
to focus on the supply side of jobs, but we also need to focus
on the skills that we are equipping our young people with and
ask whether the education system is equipping them not just with
academic skills, but with some of the soft skills that we like
to call character capabilities, or social and emotional competences.
Those are skills that young people need to do well in the workplace.
Chairman: John?
John Copps: Looking back at the
historical perspective, there have always been a lot of structural
changes in the labour market as well as many other big changes,
as we have been discussing. However, as far as I have seen—and
if you look back at the data—there has always been this
10% of young people out of work and out of education. We can look
at the changes to the labour market but there are still some problems
that we are just not dealing with, and have never really made
much headway with.
Q97 Mr Stuart: You could conclude
from the lack of progress between 1997 and 2007 that all the policy
interventions that everyone had wanted—and many of which
were implemented—were in fact wrong. Or it could be that
if we had a better understanding of the labour market we would
say, "Well, it would have been so much worse if we had not
made those interventions." The understanding of whether what
we have been doing is incorrect and we have to find an alternative—even
though we do not know what it is yet—or whether what the
Government has done in many ways has been good is important for
what we recommend, and for what any Government does, is it not?
Chairman: Come back quickly, John; then
I will move on.
John Copps: It is difficult to
say which side. We have talked about aspirations and we have talked
about understanding the labour market better—you have to
work on both sides.
Chairman: Shaks, do you want to go on
briefly?
Shaks Ghosh: I wanted to say something
about serial failure, which is particularly the obsession with
six-month programmes for young people and what that does to their
aspirations and motivations. Six months, if you do not have a
lot of numeracy, literacy and the soft skills that Sonia was talking
about, is not a long time to find a job but also hold down a job.
That is really what we are expecting people to do with this six-month
roll-on, roll-off. When I visit some of the projects that our
charities run in Newham and talk to these young people, it breaks
my heart that their whole life is about this holding pattern of
getting one six-month placement, then another six-month placement,
then another. It seems that Government policy and employers are
colluding in keeping young people in this holding pattern. Every
time they end one of those six-month placements without finding
a permanent job, it is another piece of failure that goes on their
record chart. I can only imagine how destructive that is for their
aspirations and motivation.
Chairman: Richard?
Dr Williams: I personally think
the whole issue of the youth labour market is fundamental. I would
say that in shorthand, there needs to be a much more pragmatic
Government response to enable and support young people to get
into the labour market, on the basis that it, if you like, equalises
their chances. There are two points: first of all there are, at
the moment, about the same number of young people in jobs without
training—about 200,000—as are formally NEET. That,
as a category, is derided by policy makers, who generally think
it is the worst possible outcome. However, Exeter University did
an interesting study in the south-west at the time we were doing
this work, which found that most of the young people they talked
to valued the opportunity to have a job because it was the first
step on the ladder towards getting experience. Often a job without
training is not really a job without training; it is a job without
a formal vocational qualification. As an example of pragmatism,
when I first came to Rathbone, five years ago, I met a chronically
dyslexic young man in Felling in Gateshead, who had just got his
first job painting and decorating. In that context, he was going
to do an NVQ in painting and decorating, which was his first formal
qualification. At the time, 2005-06, the Learning and Skills Council
decided to focus on apprenticeships and so stopped funding freestanding
vocational qualifications in the workplace. The significance of
that is that as policy develops, it often diminishes rather than
enhances opportunity. The Chairman said that we were fairly critical,
but I think the same is now happening with the wider approach
to apprenticeships and the clause in the Bill, now the Act, that
requires an apprentice to have employed status. In our organisation,
we have about 1,200 young people, some of whom gave evidence to
the skills commission that the Chairman chaired which showed how
important employer-led apprenticeships are in levering young people
into the workplace. Nationally, based on the last Learning and
Skills Council statistics, for 2007-08, 14% of 16 to 18-year-olds
on apprenticeships were employer-led, programme-led apprentices.
That category of apprenticeship has now gone and an implication
is that many of those young people will end up back in the NEET
pool. So there is something to be said for a more case-sensitive,
pragmatic approach to how Government uses the opportunity to intervene
in policy terms to create opportunities to enable young people
to make these transitions. My final point is that at the moment
we have a very simplistic approach: the idea that young people
should remain in formal education and learning in order to prepare
for work, or do an apprenticeship, rather than, as is the case
with most of the young people we work with, make the transition
into work in order to learn. That is a fundamental but really
important distinction and we have not really got that grounded
in policy terms.
Mr Stuart: I'm sorry, Chair; I didn't
follow what was said about the 14%.
Dr Williams: That was the figure
we got through a Freedom of Information disclosure. The last figures
from the Learning and Skills Council for apprenticeships are for
2007-08 and in that year, there were just over 107,000 16 to 18-year-olds
in apprenticeship, of whom 14,600—which in round figures
is 14%—were on employer-based, programme-led apprenticeships.
That is quite different from the just under 5,000 who were in
a college doing an apprenticeship.
Q98 Chairman: They are programme-led
apprenticeships?
Dr Williams: Yes, but—
Q99 Mr Stuart: Does that mean
that 86% did not have employment and only 14% did?
Dr Williams: No, it means that
the majority were apprentices with employed status, but there
was a significant percentage, 14%, who were programme-led, but
in employment. The significant point, however, is that, for example,
of the two young people that we had who gave evidence to the chairman
of the skills commission inquiry on apprenticeship, one, as it
happens, was chronically dyslexic and the other had serious issues
of emotional vulnerability. Both those young people became extremely
successful: one went on to do an advanced apprenticeship; both
of them got jobs. All I am saying is that as a result of recent
legislation that opportunity has now gone, and effectively, about
14% of 16 to 18-year-olds in apprenticeship are now at risk of
passing back into the NEET group. It is necessary to think of
policy in the round, from the viewpoint of what we are trying
to do for this group of young people.
Chairman: I remember those two; they
were very impressive. We should have called Paris Hilton at that
session.
Dr Williams: You should have—our
young people would have been infinitely more impressive than Paris
Hilton.
Mr Stuart: Don't let our misogynist Chairman
attack another young woman.
Chairman: Is there anything misogynist
about calling Paris Hilton a NEET? I don't think so. Someone find
me a male NEET. Who is a male equivalent of Paris Hilton as a
NEET?
Dr Williams: The more serious
point that I am trying to make is that we have, at the moment,
a very limited view of work-based learning and very limited policy
instruments for enabling young people to make the transition into
learning at work. We have a presumption that containing young
people in mainstream educational institutions is the best thing
for them, and that is not necessarily the case.
Chairman: One of the chaps who gave evidence
to us basically said that he was not academic and wanted to do
something with his hands. I remember him saying it. When he got
the chance, he was good at it.
Dr Williams: Absolutely. The point
that I am trying to make is that this whole issue of the youth
labour market—how policy can be developed actively to support
young people in what is an increasingly competitive part of the
labour market—is really fundamental, and not enough is being
done about that at the moment.
Chairman: Good. That was a very long
session, and Annette really led us astray. Over to Paul now.
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