Against the backdrop of a row over unpaid mandatory work experience, new statistics out tomorrow are likely to confirm that the number of young people Not in Employment, Education or Training (Neet), was a new record high last year.
At the start of this week, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg announced plans to help 55,000 Neets with a new £126m scheme. It’s a welcome move but in the context of the numbers of young people not in work or training, it looks like a drop in the ocean.
The latest Neet stats show 150,000 teenagers aged 16-17 years old are Neet and overall 1,163,000 young people aged 16-24 year olds. This is the worst number since records began in 2000. Compared with the same period (quarter three 2010 to quarter three 2011) there were 137,000 more 16-24 year olds out of both work and training, representing a rise of more than 13 per cent.
When those stats were published, the government announced plans for a new ‘Youth Contact‘ including 160,000 job subsidies and an extra 20,000 apprenticeships. It was another welcome measure but it is still a policy yet to be implemented. Assuming there is no slippage, the Youth Contract will come on stream in April, more than a year after the abolition of the ‘Future Jobs Fund’ and the Education Maintenance Allowance.
Tomorrow’s Neet figures will show just how young people have struggled to find work or access training during that period of policy vacuum. Last week’s youth unemployment figures suggest that we will break a new record for the worst Neets in 2011, something I take no pleasure in pointing out that I predicted last summer.
Even excluding full-time students, youth unemployment is the highest since records began in 1986/7.
Being Neet is no fun at all. The Prince’s Trust show that young people who are Neets are almost twice as likely as other young people to lack a sense of belonging in life. More than a third of Neets (37 per cent) lack a sense of identity, and this figure rises to nearly half (47 per cent) for those out of work year or longer. More than a third of unemployed young people (34 per cent) feel isolated all or most of the time, increasing to 45 per cent for those who have been out of work for a year or longer. Almost half of young people not in work (48 per cent) claim that unemployment has caused problems including self-harm, insomnia, self-loathing and panic attacks. Young people are twice as likely to self-harm or suffer panic attacks when they have been unemployed for a year.
Work experience can help some young people but as Jonathan Portes argues, policy makers would do better to ensure that “work experience is genuinely worthwhile – for the participants, not for the employers – with the real, not theoretical, prospect of a job at the end of it”.
IPPR research shows that apprenticeships – and vocational education more generally – play a key role in supporting young people’s transitions into work in many northern European countries where rates of youth unemployment in these countries are much lower than in Britain.
We cross our fingers for good news from tomorrow’s Neet stats, but with the economy slipping back into negative growth at the end of last year, the chances of 2011 being the worst ever year for Neets look depressingly likely.
Richard Darlington is Head of News at IPPR and is author of Through the Looking Glass, a report on teenage girls’ self-esteem.