THE PANEL
Baroness Alison Wolf, youth employment expert
Alison is a British economist, academic, and life peer. She served as part-time adviser on skills and workforce to the UK Prime Minister, from 2020 to 2023 and was a panel member for the 2019 review of post-18 education. In 2011, she completed the Wolf Report which led to reforms in vocational education and is the author of a policy paper on reforms to apprenticeship published in January by the Social Market Foundation.
Seyi Obakin, chair, Youth Futures Foundation
Seyi has been chair of the board at the youth employment what works centre the Youth Futures Foundation since September 2022 and in 2016 was awarded an OBE for services to youth skills, employment, and homelessness. He has been chief executive of youth homelessness charity Centrepoint for 15 years and is also a commissioner at the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, on the Family Commission and the national inquiry into lifelong learning.
Beth Jones, head of career programmes, Gatsby Foundation
Beth leads Gatsby's team delivering the foundation's activity supporting good career guidance. Her priorities include policy, research and implementation work focussed on the Gatsby Benchmarks, use of data, parental engagement, and adult career guidance. Prior to joining Gatsby, Beth worked for several years running science education projects, including for community focussed organisations and environmental charities.
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What is the current situation with youth apprenticeships?
Baroness Wolf: We have an odd Apprenticeship Levy compared to other countries because it's only paid by a small minority of firms and so they obviously want to use it up as much as possible for themselves.
They're in a limited number of areas and tend to have quite large, stable workforces whereas for young people, particularly those who are not academically successful and don't go onto university, their primary employer is going to be small businesses.
Nobody meant it to turn out the way it did.
The Labour government has promised to make the levy more flexible and limit the extent to which it can be used to fund postgraduate and management qualifications at Level 7. There will be overwhelming support for this – most people, when they're told that apprentices are those in their 30s and 40s doing advanced management courses, go, “I'm sorry, what?!”.
I'm pleased they have pledged to do this. It is not what the firm's lobbying them before the election wanted and some employers are pushing back hard, including public sector organisations because hospital trusts, academy chains, government departments have been using the levy to essentially upskill an already highly-qualified workforce, and they want to go on doing that.
Are the proposed changes to the levy enough or would you like to see the government go further?
Baroness Wolf: The amount of funding spent on youth apprenticeships has absolutely plummeted. The government has said it is really keen on youth employment so I think they should bring in ringfencing age and apprenticeship levels. It would be the simplest thing to do. The thing needs a root and branch reform, but if you want to do something for youth employment now the simplest thing to do is to ringfence I'd say 50% of levy funding for people under 24 at Levels 1 to 3. That would transform things. That's where we should be developing career education because you've got local authorities involved with colleges and supporting training providers – it would join everything up.
This should be about local employment needs and local authorities working with local employers. We have these things called local skills improvement plans which are about identifying the needs of the of local employers.
In England, everything is being centralised back into the Department for Education. Everybody knows that Germany has a wonderful system of apprenticeship. One of the things that's interesting about it is it's very much run locally not from Berlin.
In addition to a decline in youth apprenticeships, what other factors are contributing to some young people struggling to access employment?
Seyi Obakin: Access to apprenticeship opportunities is a critical issue for young people who struggle in education. Youth mental health is also a key factor – three out of five young people report feeling anxious or depressed. It is particularly an issue at key transition points such as from primary to secondary school and moving from education to employment.
There's also what I call a skills mismatch. There is an inconsistent connection between the skills that businesses need and what young people can offer after they've gone through the education system. If you look at the data, roughly 40% of young people say that their school supported them to develop the skills that they need for work.
So 60% of young people are coming out and saying they haven't actually got the skills they need for work or even the understanding of what employers are looking for. We need to close that mismatch.
There's also regional inequality, with nearly a third of young people reporting there are no jobs where they live.
A survey by Youth Employment UK found that only half of young people feel a sense of belonging in their community, and that disconnection makes them feel less safe or that they belong, and if you don't feel that, then that goes back into that mental health issue and it goes back into actually what you want to do with yourself.
It's a tapestry of different issues all playing out and creating this problem and yet we know from the work that YFF has done with PwC, that if the UK would match levels of spending in the Netherlands, we reckon it will contribute as much as £69 billion to the economy every year, so it would be a big win if we were to tackle the problem successfully.
Are schools doing a good enough job to support young people to prepare for work and what does the government need to do next?
Seyi Obakin: Good careers advice should open young people's minds to possibilities. That's what it should do. But it's not sufficiently sophisticated to open people young people's minds to that kind of width of horizon. And that is where we need to get better. It won't stream them into one particular area of work, but it will give them a broad range of what they might be interested in and what they could be good at.
I think it's important that we now move on to a full roll out of the Youth Guarantee with the offer to provide access to training, apprenticeships and back-to-work support.
This would particularly help young people that were hit disproportionately by the pandemic because the kind of first jobs that young people go to, such as retail and hospitality, tended to be in the sectors that were most affected by the pandemic and they haven't really come back up again.
What does analysis of the Gatsby Benchmarks tell us about how schools are delivering careers advice and guidance for students?
Beth Jones: Over 90% of schools and colleges are using the benchmark or measuring themselves using the Compass Tool. Of those surveyed, 98% agreed that the benchmarks were valuable and 85% of senior leaders said they could see the impact on young people.
We also have five or six years of data showing how many benchmarks are achieved by schools and we can now link that to outcomes data and see the positive impact for a school that achieves all eight benchmarks. The young people in those institutions are 8% less likely to be Neet and up to 20% less likely in the most disadvantaged schools. That is incredibly powerful because it's those young people who don't have the family networks and who might need career guidance the most. In 2015, when they were first measured, we had about 1.9 [of the eight] benchmarks being met. Now we're at 5.8, almost a tripling over that time.
The outcome of our two-year listening consultation was we've made updates where there was evidence that it was having an impact on young people's outcomes. Benchmark one is all about head teachers and governors whole-school strategy and thinking strategically about your careers advice programme. This isn't just an add on, nice to have – the purpose and drive of education is where young people go next and that they are ready for the next step. That they can make informed choices, be ambitious and feel ready to transition, be that into work or study.
The government has committed to keeping the benchmarks on a statutory footing but what policy changes would aid young people's transition from education to training?
Beth Jones: We're pleased to see the Labour government committing to the updates to the benchmarks and aligning them with their manifesto commitments. The updates will come in during the spring and be implemented in September.
The benchmarks don't work in isolation – it's been because there's training for careers leaders and now every school has a careers leader, there is a hub infrastructure run by the Careers and Enterprise Company. All the data on impact is because there's a digital infrastructure that's available. So, we want that continued commitment to those core elements to be retained, otherwise the bottom will fall out of the system.
Careers guidance is a multi-agency programme – it's employers, parents, community, charity organisations, all staff in schools. If each year you're not quite sure what the infrastructure is going to look like, it makes it very hard for people to engage and build those kinds of strategic systems. So, a longer-term commitment to a three-year funding cycle would be fantastic as it would add to the stability.
