Last night I watched Channel Four news which presented the grim reality of many young people in certain parts of the country facing hard times. Ironically, Nottingham isn’t an Opportunity Area
Click on this link to watch and listen to the voices of young people:
Now, you might expect that opportunities for young people to get training and find jobs would be more in abundance around the towns and cities in the south of the UK.
Well according to some new figures from the Learning and Work Institute – seen by Channel 4 News ahead of their release – it appears that the north – south divide is a thing of the past.
However, the chances of getting a foothold in the world of work do vary widely from region to region with urban areas not necessarily scoring better than rural ones. Channel Four’s economics correspondent, Helia Ebrahimi has been to Nottingham which ranks as the most difficult place in England for a young person to find employment and training.
Careers support services for young people are essential. This has to move up the priority listing sooner rather than later. I’ve constantly highlighted the need to pay greater attention to young people who leave school or college or apprenticeships and lose their way.
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Focus on youth employment welcome but beware misleading headlines
I welcome the Learning and Work Institute’s new Youth Opportunity Index, published on the 24th October. It is a comprehensive piece of work showing how young people have varying chances of success depending on where they live. It combines new data and analysis on education and training, including achievement at age 16 (Key Stage 4), attainment of A Level equivalent by age 19, access to higher education, take up of apprenticeships and the number of 16-17-year olds not in education, employment or training. If the persistent issues of restricted social mobility are to be tackled, we must tackle the broad range of issues featured within the report. Whilst it is not ground-breaking for the report to highlight that poverty and deprivation are the clearest predictors of poorer performance, promoting the range of issues in such a comprehensive way is a helpful step forward. We now need to quickly focus the debate on how to address such persistent issues.
Whilst I’m conscious of the Ronald Reagan quote: ‘if you’re explaining, you’re losing’, I do feel that it’s important that we understand some of the nuances behind the index if we are to move into solution focus. Local authority boundaries are one nuance that need to be understood. As Jessica Rabbit once said: ‘I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way’. Nottingham’s tight boundaries of mostly deprived wards could be compared to those of Rutland with its contrasting affluence – and corresponding juxtaposition in the index. Whilst the issue of boundaries is a reality and makes it difficult to draw comparisons, it is not the type of nuance that I particularly want to focus on in this article. My focus is on NEET levels, as this is one of the specialisms of the organisation that I run, Futures. We provide NEET prevention services in Nottingham (which came bottom in the overall index nationally) and Nottinghamshire, which was roughly mid-table at 73rd. Whilst elements of our work differ in each local authority area and we are always conscious of improving outcomes in both, our work in Nottingham City is of equal pride for us as the outcomes in Nottinghamshire.
Why would I think this, when headlines screamed: ‘Nottingham is the worst place for a young person to access work’ following the publication of the Index?
The main reason is that NEET levels indicate the number of young people who are without a place in learning or work but for whom activity is taking place by a local authority; or as in our in case, their chosen delivery partner; to support them back into a positive situation. Whilst being NEET is clearly not good, being classed as ‘Not Known’ is unfortunately, in my view, a far worse situation, as it indicates that no-one is following these young people up and they are lost to the system. The similarity with the off-rolling scandal in schools is stark. Just as schools have been accused of ‘gaming’ the system by removing certain students from their rolls in advance of exams, pressured Councils classing young people as Not Known can artificially improve their NEET results. Interestingly, Windsor and Maidenhead, who were placed in the top half of the Index for NEET, were placed in ‘Special Measures’ for their Not Known results by the DfE at the time of the data being extracted for the report, on the basis of their incredibly high Not Known numbers, which stood at 42% in March 2017.
The fact that Nottingham’s Not Known rate, at 1.5% is the lowest of any core city, is my source of pride. None of the summer 2018 Year 11 leavers from Nottingham schools were left ‘unknown’ and without support. We know young people in Nottingham when they become NEET and when they fall out of education too – an issue that we’ve identified we have a greater prevalence of than some cities. However, as NEET young people, they receive our support to help them back into a positive outcome, something that doesn’t happen when individuals are classed as Not Known. For this reason alone, I believe that the not known indicator should also be used as a key measure in promoting the critical issue of young people’s employment and learning prospects.
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