Universities should facilitate work experience

The current debate about the unpaid work experience being offered by the supermarket giants as part of the confused array of employment programmes created by Iain Duncan Smith has thrown a spotlight on the Catch 22 facing too many unemployed young people. Employers expect experience, yet you need a job to gain that experience.

Whether the sort of thoughtless impersonal screed given by Asda to those who laboured for free for a month over Christmas, as shown on last night's Channel 4 News, will impress many employers remains to be seen, though it is equally pretty hard to argue that they would be more impressed with those who spent the time watching daytime TV.

Yet there is one sector where more could clearly be done to develop work experience in people who should be better prepared for employment - universities.Yesterday's Wilson Review report made the modest recommendation that

Ideally, every full-time undergraduate student should have the opportunity to experience a structured, university-approved undergraduate internship during their period of study. Where such internships are paid, government should examine the feasibility of supporting companies that host students through a tax credit or grant mechanism. Where internships are unpaid, universities should use their ‘OFFA funds’ to support eligible students rather than condone a policy that could inhibit social mobility.

This is a pretty crucial first step towards solving a problem where too many graduates drift aimlessly home after completing a degree, with too little useful work experience and little sense of where they can best make a contribution in the world of work. If the state is to subsidise their education - and they are to face huge debts - it is not unreasonable to expect that they have gained some decent work skills in the process.

Of course, there will be objections to this proposition. Some faculties with little experience of such activity will see it as not their responsibility. While more vocational and professional courses like medicine and law will see experience as a key part of the course, arts and social sciences will not. But if they are to continue to appeal to undergraduates and to convince of their relevance in the wider world, it is crucial that they embrace this recommendation as wholeheartedly as those who are doing it already.

There is plenty that is pedestrian and potentially bureaucratic in the Wilson Review. But if nothing else is advanced as a result of its deliberations, it will have served a useful purpose. Universities should start to think creatively about how they can play their part in supporting their students' futures. After all, they will be repaying their fees as a postgraduate income levy once they do enter the workplace. Given the cost of the loans system, the sector has a material interest in ensuring they do so fairly promptly after graduation.

Lib Dem Danny's shameful bonfire of opportunities

Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary Danny Alexander's bonfire of programmes designed to give young people a genuine chance to gain work through internships and practical experience is a betrayal of everything his party claimed to stand for in the general election. It also gives the lie to the idea that the coalition is seriously interested in getting people off welfare and into work, and undermines the claims of welfare secretary Iain Duncan Smith in that regard. The Future Jobs Fund and the Jobs Guarantee for the long-term unemployed are both measures that should not be abandoned in the absence of better alternatives. Their abolition could consign tens of thousands more young people to a longer time - if not a lifetime - on benefits. It is the exact opposite of what the coalition claims to stand for, and to withdraw such programmes without any concrete alternatives in place suggests that the Lib-Con Government is more concerned with spin and macho cost-cutting than substance where reducing unemployment is concerned.

As the Guardian reported, David Cameron's chosen poverty guru Frank Field has said of the abolition of the Future Jobs Fund:

"If we are telling people their benefits will be time-limited, cut or ended, we will carry the electorate with us only if we can definitely offer someone a job". He said the requirement to take jobs enshrined in the jobs fund scheme also stopped young people from endlessly fiddling the system, making them realise it was decision time because they would have been required to take a job. "Many jobless try desperately hard to get jobs and fail to do so," he said, adding that "the cumulative effect of that failure is enormously crushing on them". "What the jobs fund was beginning to do was offer concrete jobs for people to go to, and that was a lifeline that no amount of new deal and no amount of our rhetoric ever offered them," he said. "It was one of the most precious things that the last government was involved in."

Who's right on NEETs?

At Prime Minister's Questions, David Cameron and Gordon Brown traded statistics on so-called NEETs - those young people not in education, employment or training. It is true that these figures are rising, and it is also true that there are more young people in education or employment than ten years ago. But what is less well understood is how dubious the headline NEET figures are in the first place. They are based on a snapshot, and they include, for example, gap year students. Those who are long-term NEET - and are not doing jobs or in training at different stages during the year - are actually a much smaller group than the main figures suggest, though in the recession they are a growing number. Politicians developing policies on the subject should look beneath the headline statistics and focus on those who need support most.
UPDATE: I'm pleased to see that the Chancellor has recognised this in his Budget plans to guarantee jobs or training to the long term youth unemployed.