Just caught up with this morning's announcement's from Ed. Means testing JSA for 18-21 age group seems stupid. It will cost more than it saves and it will push the "them vs us" agenda further among young people and workers who are already subject to a lower minimum wage.
Above all else, they need to make work pay for young people currently on the dole while also making sure they have the skills to come into the work place.
My current workplace has cancelled its school leaver programme because of the poor quality of candidates and lack of enthusiasm for it from school leavers. We now recruit pretty much from the industry or via the graduate programme with a few exceptions of personal brilliance (we had a would be analyst who emailed his own analysis of a high profile company, it was highly detailed and he showed great foresight so my manager and I decided to give him a chance, he previously worked in Starbucks and had no industry experience or specific qualifications in finance, maths or a related subject).
What the government, Labour or Tory, needs to work on is basic maths, English and deduction. We have a generation of kids who don't know how to think big, they don't know how a decision made in one part of a business will effect the rest of it. Teaching people how to deduce an answer from a bunch of variables is not easy, but it is a skill that is completely lacking in the next generation. Schools are too obsessed with teaching to the test, and tests have become an exercise of who has the best memory, which helps no one.
The whole schools system needs to be geared towards understanding, deduction, reasoning and thinking critically rather than facts, "creativity" and rote-learning for tests. I was lucky that my school taught all of the former. Means testing and removal of benefits for a generation of kids that has been completely let down by the schools system just seems idiotic. More practical apprenticeships (not in management or whatever they call them these days), attendance based support, technical schools and partnerships with businesses to take on apprenticeship leavers for a set amount of time so they can gain work experience with no obligation to keep them on (giving people an incentive to impress and work hard in that time and get into the habit of doing good work).
The German and Swiss model should be the one we aim for, but both parties seem more interested in talking about reform rather than implementing it. There is no doubt that businesses would resist a slightly more rigid labour market based on hard apprentice qualifications because it would lock out immigrants from a lot of the labour market, pushing up wages, but it would ensure significantly lower youth unemployment. In Switzerland there is an apprenticeship for literally everything (seriously, being a sales assistant usually requires one) but it means that young people who are not academically inclined or do not have any technical ability will still have a good chance of getting a job if they work hard in apprentice school and then in their final placement. Over here kids like that are left on the scrapheap of unemployment and then cajoled into working for £2.50/h for a few months and then thrown back onto the scrapheap.
We need all new thinking when it comes to youth unemployment, tinkering around the edges with the current system won't make much difference to our high youth unemployment rate.
