Shaw Trust is one of over 90 signatories of an open letter to the Prime Minister on the urgent need for action on youth employment. The letter was published in the Mirror last week.
The letter said that despite efforts such as an Opportunity Guarantee and Kickstart, the crisis is still very real for young people in 2021. Young people continue to face persistent barriers and challenges in the labour market resulting in long-term youth unemployment reaching its highest level in five years. The Mirror letter urges the Prime Minister to avoid creating a ‘lost generation’ of young people, emphasising that despite government efforts, the challenge for young people is ‘far from over’.
As part of the Youth Employment Group, Shaw Trust is calling on the Prime Minister to implement the following ‘three-stage’ approach to improve the prospects of young people, by 2022:
- Ensure that all young people, whether leaving school, college, or university, have the opportunity of an education place, apprenticeship, or job.
- Invest in young people in the upcoming Spending Review to prevent long-term unemployment among young people.
- Drive forward a coordinated, cross-departmental approach to tackling short-term and long-term youth unemployment to avoid a ‘lost generation’.
With over 200 member organisations including Shaw Trust, the Youth Employment Group (YEG) is the UK’s largest coalition of youth employment experts, working collaboratively, and with governments and policy makers, to ensure that young people – especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds – are supported during Covid-19 and its aftermath. As part of our Policy Institute team, Clare Gray, Organisational Lead for Disability Advocacy, regularly attends the YEG and the Disability Subgroup to work collaboratively to ensure that young people fully benefit from government training and employment programmes to secure jobs. Drawing on Shaw Trust’s experience of the Kickstart scheme our policy recommendations have directly contributed to this call for action.
Many of our Policy Institute recommendations are aligned with the work of the YEG. We agree with the Disability Subgroup of the YEG that the Chancellor’s Plan for Jobs included several welcomed initiatives but lacked interventions specifically for disabled young people. We also support several recommendations put forward by the YEG, such as making Kickstart open to a wider group (e.g those with EHCP’s), implementing an alternative specialist employment support programme for young disabled people and creating a specialist division within the National Careers Service to enable disabled young people to receive tailored online advice and information.
These measures are needed to prevent labour market scarring effects on young people, seen in previous recessions, and will ensure that young people are not left behind as the economy begins to recover from the pandemic.