Generation Y or Generation Why Is It So Hard To Get A Job?

 By Alvin Carpio and Ben Powell.

As part of our series of blogs introducing the Young Fabians Policy Commissions 2013 Alvin Carpio and Ben Powelllook at Britain’s continuing problem with youth unemployment.

Across Britain, one million young people are unemployed. Long spells of unemployment early on in a person’s work history can have long term scarring effects making them less employable. There is also lost productivity.

Dealing with youth unemployment is important to both our economy and social stability. We need young people to have work experience early in order to prepare them for life in the labour market after compulsory schooling. We also need to deal with it to avoid the sort of events we saw unravel in summer August 2011.

We have been called the lost generation, the scarred generation, the hopeless generation. We are not generation y, but instead generation why is it so hard to get a job?

Of course it would be wrong to paint a generic brush over all young people, in the same way that was done during the riots where all young people were deemed to be criminals. Also, we have to remember that in the 1970s, the young people growing up during Margaret Thatcher’s government were also called the lost generation too.

Still, this is an issue that affects all young people, including Young Fabians. There are many young people who are overqualified and many who are underemployed. Many young people find themselves with a degree that they were promised would make it easy to get a job. For some, their degrees are now worthless, especially for those who graduated from the new universities as the top 2000 companies in Britain mainly recruit from the old universities like Oxbridge and Durham. Some Young Fabians will be unemployed themselves.

Dealing with youth unemployment now matters because rates were increasing even before the recession. This points to structural issues and suggests that even if we were to return to growth, it would still be a problem.

The commission will consider three main questions. Firstly, why is youth unemployment so high? Secondly, how is youth unemployment affecting our members and their communities? Thirdly, what can we do to respond to youth unemployment? We’d love you to take part in the discussion and we hope you’ll join us for the commission’s events.

Alvin Carpio and Ben Powell are co-chairs of the Young Fabians Policy Commission on youth unemployment. You can sign up to be involved in the Young Fabians Policy Commissions here – http://bit.ly/11ulMLw.

Grammar schools don’t make the grade for social inclusion

We need a new language on tuition fees

44% of young people believe they need to pay tuition fees in advance before taking up a place at university, according to research conducted by the University of Roehampton.

The findings show that the government has failed to adequately explain the intricacies of the incoming loan repayment system to school leavers, and that a significant minority of young people are not receiving the necessary education on student finance they need to make a decision on university with confidence.

On the other hand, alongside figures showing that new applicants to university fell by 15,000 this year (and 20,000 in 2011), the data suggests that a certain proportion of would-be students are aware that enrolling in higher education is an expensive undertaking that saddles them with tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt.

Some school leavers are understandably shocked at the thought of taking on massive debts without the guaranteed prospect of a well-paid job at the end of their studies. However, the mechanics of the loan repayment system and the nature of the debt itself mean that repayments really do resemble tax contributions more than anything else. A student loan does not affect an individual’s credit rating or count against them when they seek to borrow from high street banks.

Clearly, while increased fees have undoubtedly discouraged thousands from taking up courses who would have done otherwise, thousands more have not applied out of a simple misunderstanding of the loan system.

Plans to rebrand student loan repayments as  a ‘tax’ may remove some of  the stigma surrounding the current regime. However, this alone would not remove the psychological barriers preventing some from taking up tertiary education

Fabian research on public attitudes to tax and spending demonstrate that support for less taxation, or at least static levels of taxation, is fairly even across age cohorts. Asking school leavers to pay more in tax if they go to university may serve as effective a deterrent from pursuing tertiary education as the current system.

In light of this evidence, policymakers would do well to revise the vocabulary surrounding tuition fees and remove some of the stigma surrounding words like debt, fees, and tax. We must remove the fear of financing university education from young people’s decision-making when it comes to their crucial next steps in life.

Louie Woodall is Assistant Editor of the Young Fabians Blog 

Boris’ vision for PE should be made a reality by progressives

Boris Johnson made the headlines once again after urging schools to provide students with two hours of PE a day as part of an ‘Olympic Legacy’.

Perhaps the Mayor has got himself a little too caught up in the Olympic spirit. Perhaps he is floating a radical policy to keep his name in lights, and capitalise on his London 2012 ratings boost. Whatever his reasons for announcing this now, he has sparked an important debate that needs to be had over how we make our children healthier, happier, and more active.

The ‘two hours’ pledge is clearly a non-starter. There is no room in the curriculum timetable to accommodate such a scheme. Yet a little exercise every day can go a long way. Research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US demonstrated that school-based physical activity had a positive effect on academic performance. Among the observed benefits, the researchers found that increased time in PE classes can help children’s attention and concentration, improve classroom behaviour, and heighten academic aspirations, alongside the obvious health benefits like reducing the likelihood of developing obesity or diabetes in later life.

Incorporating more physical activity into the school day requires a broad approach to education reform. Extra PE classes cannot be shoehorned into the curriculum, and nor should they be. So schools should be given the extra time they need to add more exercise onto the timetable. One way to do this would be to lengthen the school year. At present, the English school year lasts 190 days. In Italy and the Netherlands, the average is 200 days. Both countries score more highly on UNICEF’s index of child wellbeing.

While many factors contribute to these scores, what they suggest is that lengthening the school year does not have an adverse affect on child wellbeing. And if the extra time is used to increase the provision of physical exercise, then school children can only benefit from such a change.

Progressive policies need to be evidence-based and formulated with the aim of furthering the ability of individuals to achieve their potential. Two months ago, researchers at the Universities of Strathclyde and Newcastle stated that “There is an urgent need for interventions, at home and at school, which will help primary school children become more physically active,” after a study showed that some eight to 10-year-olds were active for only 4% of the day.

The research shows that school children are not getting enough exercise, and the science demonstrates that the rewards for pupils, teachers, and parents of increased school-based physical activity are potentially enormous.

Boris may have got the debate off to a poor start, but that is no reason to ignore it. Progressives should embrace the vision behind the Mayor’s proposal and make the increased provision of exercise at schools a reality.

Louie Woodall is Assistant Editor of the Young Fabians Blog 

Spending on education: a divisive issue

Recent polling commissioned by the Fabian Society unearthed some uncomfortable truths about British attitudes towards spending on higher and further education.

The findings of the joint YouGov/Fabian poll showed that 35% of the population would prefer the level of HE/FE provision to fall and reap the benefits of reduced taxation in its stead. A further 45% believe that the balance between provision and taxation is about right, a figure that should worry HE/FE campaigners as it suggests that the electorate implicitly endorses the £449 million of cuts imposed on university budgets and £200 million taken from adult education at FE colleges since 2010.

Most concerning of all, however, was the discovery that almost as many 18 to 24 year-olds support a cut in spending on colleges and universities as back an increase. This means that the very constituency poised to lose out the most from continued budget cuts are divided on how to confront the issue.

Such findings will alarm activists working with the NUS and National Campaign Against Fees And Cuts, as two years of hard work combating the government’s restructuring of tertiary education seem to have done little to bring the majority of young people firmly on the side of opposing unjustified cuts on teaching, research, and building budgets.

However, what the findings hint at above all is the deep divisions between those young adults in education, and those out of it. Statistics from the Department of Business, Innovation & Skills show that in the third quarter of 2011, 23% of 18-24 year-olds were in full-time education, with an additional 16.2% in part-time education or training. This means that well over half of all young adults were not enrolled in any form of education at all. To put matters into even starker terms, it turns out that there were more 18-24 year-olds claiming Job Seeker’s Allowance last August (408,000) than there were graduates (320,000).

When the facts are laid out as barely as this, it can be of little surprise to find that the percentage favouring increased spending on education is so low. Those young people who never went to university, or were denied the opportunity of formal training, are more likely to favour spending on programmes to help the unemployed- since around 1 in 6 young people are currently classed as NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training).

Thus those championing increased investment in HE/FE institutions need to rethink their campaigns in order to engage those young people who do not attend university or college. One way to go about this would be to emphasise the great economic, social, and even health benefits to be reaped from a strengthened university sector. Research by the New Economic Foundation found that the public bonus generated by universities could amount to as much as £212 million per year, on top of and beyond the £33.4 billion the sector contributes to the UK’s annual GDP.

Those opposed to spending money on tertiary education should also be alerted to the fact that the sector is a massive provider of jobs, accounting for 1.2% of all UK full-time employment in 2007. In addition, as the Universities UK report highlighted in 2008, “for every 100 full time jobs within the universities themselves, more than 100 other full time equivalent jobs were generated through knock-on effects.”

Students and campaigners should use such research to argue that HE/FE institutions are powerful engines of economic growth, which foster employment opportunities for those who attend them and those who do not. They should also make the most of the ‘invisible’ benefits the sector provides, such as inspiring greater political interest among the population and encouraging higher levels of interpersonal trust.

The Fabian polling revealed that swing voters support a decrease in funding for tertiary education. If the sector is not to be forgotten at the next election, those who champion it need to embrace those young people who do not attend university or college and encourage them to join the fight by emphasising the economic and social benefits to be gained by boosting investment.

Every young person has the right to debate their education provision. However, only by joining together as a cohesive whole can this young generation change the nature of this debate and secure the future of HE/FE for the next.

Louie Woodall is Assistant Editor of the Young Fabians Blog

Boris’s Big Idea

Amidst all the excitement about Gove’s possible changes to the GCSE system, there was very little comment on the latest idea from Boris Johnson to take control of education in the capital.

This offers Labour a difficult conundrum: on the one hand, moving education powers from the London boroughs into the hands of the Mayor enormously expands the scope of an individual Tory politician’s power over London’s schools, at a time when the majority of them are presently in Labour’s hands because Labour controls the majority of councils in London; on the other hand, there is a significant attraction in bringing London’s schools into a single system of oversight with common lines of communication between schools and the most widely-recognised political figure in the city.

Until the late 1980s, there existed an Inner London Education Authority with significant powers over schools (although its remit did not cover the same geographic area of the present Greater London Authority); ILEA was disbanded by Thatcher for allegedly being a bastion of left-wing educational practice at the same time as the Ken Livingstone-run GLC, and as a result London education was devolved to the boroughs. This creates very perverse situations where schools on the borders of boroughs are administered by one council, whilst the majority of their students live in a different one. There are significant funding differentials between boroughs with very similar needs. Then there’s the amount of local bureaucracies involved: there are 32 separate ones in London to manage the schools.

This is in stark contrast to England’s second largest city, Birmingham, which is a single educational unit and – until Gove’s 2010 Act precipitated a swath of new academies – was the largest employer in British education.

Clearly, the new landscape of academies and free schools is weakening the position of local authorities such as the London boroughs to administer education in their area. Stephen Twigg has spoken a great deal about the need for a “middle tier” between the new breed of academies and the Department for Education.

Could the Mayor’s Office be that “middle tier” in London? And if so, what role will the London Assembly play in this system? And if the powers Boris acquires go beyond those presently given to local authorities, will they be rolled out to other parts of England with directly-elected mayors?

Boris’s big idea may prove to be a very good one, but Labour needs to engage thoughtfully to ensure the system is built to last.

John Blake is a comprehensive school teacher in London and chair of Labour Teachers

The Future of Education

Amidst the hubbub of leadership questions, short-term poll obsession and questions over the future of the Union, members of the shadow cabinet have been very busy of late laying out exactly the kind of concrete policy views that some have said were previously missing from Labour.

One of the most interesting of these was provided in Stephen Twigg’s speech on reforming the education system. In it, he called for a longer school day, more teacher mentoring, and a focus on “soft skills” to better prepare students for life after school. The announcement coincided nicely with a review of the curriculum currently under way and due to be concluded later this year.

There is a broad consensus on what the outcome of education should be; namely, well- informed, well-rounded young people who have the capacity to advance themselves in whatever direction they choose. Sadly, in too many areas the wealth of a child’s parents still determines their success in life. There are serious debates taking place about the structure of schools and the deliberate attempts to carve them away from local authorities, but in this piece I want to focus on how education is delivered rather than the legal wrapper under which the school functions.

There are two examples of policies which can be implemented and cost very little that can help further both education and social progress. These are introducing debating at the heart of the curriculum and using peer-mentoring as a way to help the continuous professional development of teachers.

Firstly, we should put debating at the heart of our curriculum as a way of encouraging children to develop vital critical thinking and communications skills. People on the left often frown upon the idea of school as a place to teach workplace skills, but it is in work that we spend most of our lives, and as the one million unemployed young people in the country would surely attest, little is more dispiriting and eroding of an individual’s self-worth than the recurring rejection of unemployment.

Rhetoric and debating are typically seen as the purview of elitist independent schools, and as a skill with little relevance to daily reality. Nothing could be further from the truth. Debate is part of the curriculum in many ways anyway, from analysis of history through dissection of English and the understanding of competing scientific theories. The contestation of ideas is a vital part of what it means to get an education.

Teachers often worry about anarchy in the classroom if they allow students to debate, but many programmes both here and in the US have shown that students, when given ownership of a position and the right to advocate for it, are more likely to take their education seriously. Indeed, a major review of education conducted by the Irish Economic and Social Research Institute showed that across a multitude of regions and cultures, interactive classroom learning is the most effective way of teaching students.

With some schools failing to teach students basic reading and writing skills, focussing on oral presentation is an alternative way to engage reluctant students. There is nothing like the fear of making a fool of themselves in front of their peers to make students work hard. Debating also has the added advantage of teaching exactly the kind of “soft skills” that Stephen Twigg talked about. Recent talk of getting Britain manufacturing again is heartening, but Britain’s comparative advantage lies in services, and the more children are able to think and provide in these areas the better their chances in later life will be.

Mentoring for teachers is another area where there have been promising results of late. Teachers do receive training, but it is rarely based on observation of their classroom performance. In a thought provoking New Yorker article, Atul Gawande discusses the parallels between teaching to surgery and how, even as a top surgeon, he sees many opportunities to improve. Teachers should not view mentoring as an imposition, but rather as an opportunity to improve their performance. Experienced teachers should be encouraged to offer their services as mentors, in order to perpetuate best practice among new recruits.

These are just two ways in which education in Britain could be improved. There are many others out there, and politicians should start listening to them. Together, they point the way towards a more open, student-centred and successful school system.

Stephen Boyle is a Young Fabians Member

Government retreats from University reform

On Monday, students, lecturers, and education activists the country over won a major victory when the government shelved its widely opposed plans to allow big business into the university sector.

As The Daily Telegraph reported, “the new legislation was designed to make it easier for private colleges, including big American education firms, to set up new universities in Britain.” Universities Minister David Willetts wished to ‘level the playing field’ in tertiary education, restraining public universities in the medium term while giving private providers a leg-up into the system.

The Coalition gambled that the storm of protest triggered by the tripling of tuition fees would satisfy students’ appetite for conflict, leaving the way clear for it to implement radical and far-reaching reform of the sector. It underestimated the ability of students to grasp what these reforms represented, and their ability to organise and agitate against them.

Students realised that by permitting private providers into the university sector, the government was allowing predatory businesses to undercut established public universities. As private competitors muscled into the market, a full scale battle for students would have been triggered. The most prestigious new establishments would be able to charge stratospheric prices for entrants, and the more metropolitan universities – those located in the cities that traditionally attract more working class students – would be forced into a race to the bottom as private colleges offered bargain-basement courses at bargain-basement prices. The right to a quality education would become just another commodity, readily available to the rich and forever out of reach to the poorest in society.

A foretaste of the incoming system was provided by A.C. Grayling’s New College of Humanities, which promises an Oxbridge-standard education for the astronomical cost of £18,000 a year. This College was founded not on the principle that education is a public good that every member of society is entitled to, but on the market principle that education is something to be purchased.

Private providers would also have been able to enter the university system by more insidious means. The White Paper promised to relax restrictions on degree validation agreements, thereby allowing businesses to strike deals with existing universities. Private companies would be able to produce their own degree programmes, have them approved by an established university, and sell them to various Further Education Colleges at a profit. Such a system promised to turn university courses into mass-produced products and public education institutions to business lackeys.

Opposition to these proposals came from all quarters. Independent experts stressed that the government was flying blind into unknown territory by unleashing private competition in the university sector. Students railed against the idea that companies could hijack popular courses that public universities could no longer afford to provide. Many were aghast to learn that the plans would allow private companies access to the student loan scheme, thus allowing big business to get their hands on public funds. Lecturers were incensed by the notion that their contracts would bind them to validate outside degree programmes, and perhaps even to lead seminars on foreign campuses where such programmes were to be taught.

However, it was action rather than words that defeated the government’s privatisation agenda. 10,000 students marched on November 9^th against the proposals, and in the weeks that followed dozens of universities played host to student occupations. Lecturers launched an offensive in the national press, with an open letter to the Telegraph attracting the signatures of nearly 500 professors.

This victory represents a battle won, but the war continues. The government has postponed the plans, rather than ejecting them completely, and the remaining sections of the HE White Paper will continue to make their way through the Commons, without the need for primary legislation to enact them. Liam Burns, President of the NUS, underlined the scale of the challenge to come, and told students that “there are many reasons for us not to celebrate.”

What can be celebrated, though, is the role that direct action and public pressure have played in the campaign against the reforms. Students and activists opposing government measures in new forums, such as occupations, flash mobs and social media, have achieved tangible results. By bringing the fight against the Coalition onto territory they are unfamiliar with, opponents to their plans gain an advantage over the Tory propaganda machine. Activists campaigning to protect other public services would do well to heed this lesson.

Louie Woodall is Assistant Editor of the Young Fabians Blog

Why I Marched

On November 9^th, approximately 10,000 students, lecturers, and members of the public marched through central London in protest against the government’s white paper on education.

I marched because the proposed legislation comprises a fundamental attack on the principle of the public university. The White Paper, shamefully entitled ‘students at the heart of the system’, in reality has corporate interests first in mind. It contains provisions allowing for-profit companies to infiltrate higher education and undermine existing universities. Corporate interests will be given licence to develop and market courses with an eye on the financial bottom line, rather than the social good. By surrendering universities to the private sector, future students will be confronted with low quality, ‘off-the-shelf’ degrees as corporations compete to offer popular courses at discount rates.

Public institutions will struggle to stay in the game, as the government has withdrawn all central funding for arts, humanities and social science departments and slashed expenditure on many others. These losses will barely be made up for by the tripling of tuition fees, and commercial pressures will inevitably lead universities to conserve resources by cutting departments. This is already threatened at my university, Royal Holloway, where the Classics, Modern Languages and Computer Science departments are facing significant cuts over the next few years. 

The reforms also threaten to choke off access to higher education for thousands of young people by creating an artificial market in student numbers. The government has altered regulations, now allowing universities to snap up as many top-performing students as they like (those achieving grades of AAB and above) while imposing a new cap on the recruitment of all other students. The expected result of these measures is the evolution of a two-tier system, where elite universities hoard the highest performing students while those that fail to attract enough AAB students find themselves out of pocket, unable to make up numbers as they used to. The prize institutions will be able to be more selective in recruitment, while middling universities compete tooth and nail in a battle to attract students. Some will inevitably succumb to a dearth in funding and collapse, while others will be forced to offer second-rate courses at knock-down prices.

I marched because this legislation will corrode the very foundations on which higher education is built and put a rapacious commercial system in its place. I marched to stop it.

Louie Woodall is a member of the Young Fabians and Assistant Editor of the Young Fabians Blog

The Promise of Britain? Gauging support for Labour’s Education policy

If the issue is worth talking about, then people will come. At least this proved to be the case for the Young Fabians’ breakfast fringe meeting during Labour Party Conference. The 8am start a couple of days into conference didn’t prevent young people attending in force to discuss the multitude of issues faced by the squeezed youth.

Taking the title of the Young Fabian Policy Commission ‘Securing the future of the next generation’, and looking across a range of short and long term policy areas, the fringe sought to address how Ed Miliband’s Promise of Britain could be realised.

I chaired a panel featuring Joani Reid, Young Fabian member and chair of the aforementioned policy commission, Andy Slaughter, MP for Hammersmith and Shadow Justice Minister, John Woodcock, MP for Barrow & Furness and Shadow Transport Minister, Rosie Cooper from Catch 22, and Fatima Hassan, from our partners ICAEW.

Amongst the themes that emerged from panel and audience discussion were: the need to replace what is looking like a process of managing decline with a positive agenda characterised by hope; an optimism in young people and for young people; the desire to reduce the gaps between young people and the world of work, particularly be exploiting opportunities for collaboration; utilising models for involving young people in strategic decision-making; acknowledging the importance of local government where many services are accessed; and that more of the same is simply not going to cut it – Labour needs to start early in formulating new policy that it can implement as a government after the general election.

And there was also plenty of opposition to the new Labour position on university fees, with puzzled voices unsure why the leadership had nailed its colours to the mast of £6,000 fees, a sum not inconsiderable to most young people and their families.  I don’t have the answer to that one, it seemed somewhat arbitrary to me – though the problem initiated years ago when Labour in government abandoned the principle of education free to the user. It was inevitable then that the argument just becomes about numbers. A shame.

What the policy has in its favour is its simplicity. And answers that are easy to understand and easy for politicians to explain have the potential to serve the party well. But they are not always right, and not always enough. The Young Fabian fringe demonstrated that the problems themselves that young people face are many and complex – but there is a lot of appetite to resolve them.

I look forward to seeing the final outcomes from Joani’s Young Fabian policy commissions – watch this space over the next few weeks.

Adrian Prandle is Chair of the Young Fabians