Conclusions and recommendations
1. The Department is still learning how best
to use its resources to prevent young people falling out of education,
training or employment at 16.
Over the past 3 years, the Department has reduced funding for
16- to 18-year-old's education and training. In 2013-14, the Department's
budget was 8% lower, in real terms, than its spending in 2010-11
and in September 2014 it reduced the basic rate of annual funding
for an 18-year-old from £4,000 to £3,300. The data suggests
that the change in the law has had a significant impact on increasing
participation beyond age 16. But 148,000 young people were still
in the NEET group at the end of 2013. This is in spite of the
Department introducing a range of new initiatives to encourage
young people to continue in education and training. With scarce
resources it is vital to understand which initiatives are proving
most effective and why, yet the Department has little understanding
of the impact of these initiatives and programmes.
Recommendation: The Department should evaluate
the relative effectiveness of its individual initiatives and use
the results to shape future decisions about how to engage hard-to-reach
young people.
2. The Department and local authorities have
more to do to identify over 100,000 young people who are off the
radar. Too many young people simply disappear from all the relevant
public systems. Local authorities have
a statutory duty to track the activity of 16- to 18-year-olds,
but some local authorities do not know whether young people are
participating in education or training or not. Nationally, 7%
of young people's activity is unknown. In some local authorities
the proportion is as high as 20%. If the activity of young people
is unknown to the local authorities where they live, they are
unlikely to receive targeted help if they need it, for instance
support from the Youth Contract. The Department recognises it
could do more, working with local government, to identify and
disseminate good practice, on tracking young people's activity.
Recommendation: The Department should work
urgently with local authorities to identify and disseminate good
practice on the most effective ways to track young people's education
and training activities.
3. The key intervention for the hardest-to-reach
young people, the Youth Contract, is ending in 2016 and the Department
has no plans to replace it. The
Youth Contract provides extra support to 16- and 17-year-olds
who are the hardest to reach, to move into education, training,
or work with training. The Department had estimated that there
were some 70,000 who could benefit from the Youth Contract. However
the programme is only expected to help 35,000 individuals, half
of the original ambition. These young people were NEET and also
either had few qualifications, or were young offenders, or were
or had been in care. The Youth Contract will stop recruiting in
March 2015 and, disappointingly, the Department has no specific
initiative with which to replace it.
Recommendation: The Department should establish
how it will build on the positive impacts the Youth Contract has
achieved and set out how young people will receive similar help
in the future.
4. Longer and better quality apprenticeships
are welcome, but it will also be important to guard against increasing
barriers to young people and smaller firms participating.
We have previously recommended changing
the delivery and funding of apprenticeships, including making
them longer and getting employers more involved, in order to enhance
the experience for young people. We welcome what the Department,
along with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills,
have done to address our previous recommendations. However, while
the number of young people aged 16 to 18 starting apprenticeships
of 12 months or more increased in 2012/13, the total number of
new apprentices aged 16 to 18 fell in both 2011/12 and 2012/13.
Currently, only 29% of firms that employ under 50 people provide
apprenticeships and the new model may be inherently unattractive
to them if they perceive that both the administrative burdens
and costs will grow.
Recommendation: The Government needs to
learn from the early pilots and trials of its new model for apprenticeships,
particularly if they create new barriers that prevent the engagement
of SMEs in the scheme. They will need to adjust their plans to
have regard to this.
5. Many local authorities do not help 16-
to 18-year-olds with the costs of travelling to school or college,
which means some young people are disadvantaged.
Local authorities must have a transport policy
setting out what arrangements they have to
support 16- to 18-year-olds in accessing education and training.
This policy does not have to include providing financial assistance
and, in 63 local authorities where transport costs are relatively
high, young people do not get help with these costs. Local authority
decisions on support for transport costs will impact on the participation
rates in education and training. If young people cannot afford
the travel costs they may drop out. Also, some young people receive
support from the Bursary Fund—to help pay for things like
transport, clothing, books and other equipment. They will have
to spend it all on transport, with less available for other things.
This variation in local policy reduces access and choice for some
young people and creates a potential postcode inequity, and the
Department accepts that it does not know enough about these policies'
impact on participation.
Recommendation: The Department should examine
the impact of variation in local authority transport policies
on its objective to increase participation and should review whether
and how to intervene where this is a significant barrier to participation.
6. Despite many different approaches over
the years, most young people still do not receive the careers
advice they need. Over time many different
approaches to careers advice have been tried and have failed.
The Department has now placed a statutory duty on schools to provide
independent and impartial advice. Despite the Department's belief
that schools are best-placed to provide the right advice, Ofsted
found only 12 out of 60 schools doing so when it inspected. The
Department agrees that, over a year later, advice remains patchy.
It is hard to see how some schools will ever offer independent
and impartial advice about the choices students have when they
have a vested interest in retaining pupils in their schools. Meanwhile,
staff in small schools may lack the breadth of skills and knowledge
to advise students well and employers may not be sufficiently
involved.
Recommendation: The Department should articulate
what actions it will take in future when a school's careers advice
is shown to be poor. It also needs to find ways to encourage schools
to work together to provide advice with more employer involvement.
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