Alan Milburn is guiding a metal loop along the serpentine wire of an electrical buzzer game as he explains the challenge of Britain’s youth jobs crisis. “We have got more than a million young people not in education, employment or training (Neet). Crisis is an over-used word – but this is a crisis.”
On a fact-finding trip to Dublin, the former UK cabinet minister is being shown around an Irish Rail training facility. He tells the apprentices who rigged up the game that, while things are bad in Britain, Ireland is on the right track.
“It’s about half the rate here, it’s fallen very rapidly. And we want to try to work out, what is that? Why? There’s something going on; maybe there’s something you guys have been doing that we haven’t?”
Alyx Tobin, one of the hi-vis clad trainees, chips in: “Hopefully we can get to the bottom of it together?”
Over the past decade, Ireland has achieved the fastest reduction in Neet rates anywhere in the EU, from 14.3% in 2015 to 6.1% last year. That compares with a rise from 11.1% to 12.8% in the UK. Romania is the only EU country with a higher rate.
As he prepares to publish a report into the crisis for the UK government this autumn, Milburn has brought a delegation of officials, charity leaders, industry bosses and the mayor of South Yorkshire, Oliver Coppard, with him on the trip across the Irish sea.
“We’re here really to understand what the secret sauce is,” he says.
“The life chances of young people here are being transformed. You don’t have to go far – to the outskirts of Dublin – before you find huge pockets of deprivation and poverty. So nobody here would say, ‘We’ve got it solved.’ But there is definitely something different that we can learn from.”
Back home, Andy Burnham has made tackling Britain’s youth jobs crisis a top priority, using his first weeks as prime minister to launch a series of measures to boost technical education and apprenticeships.
Labour is also preparing for a fresh attempt at welfare reform amid concerns about the £125bn annual cost to the economy and public finances from the rise in youth worklessness.
Under Keir Starmer, the government set targets to eradicate long-term youth unemployment and launched jobs programmes, grants and guarantees aimed at helping young adults to get into work.
However, business leaders argue Labour has made matters worse through tax increases, a rising minimum wage, and plans to strengthen workers’ rights. Employers have also faced other rising costs and weak consumer demand amid the cost of living crisis.
In Ireland, part of the reason for the youth jobs turnaround is down to its economic recovery from the 2008 financial crisis.
The country was among the biggest global casualties as the implosion of a property market bubble triggered a 10% crash in the economy in a single year and drove unemployment to 16% by 2012. Youth joblessness peaked at almost 30%, while many left to work abroad amid the 2010s eurozone debt crisis.
Corey Farrell’s father was among many who left for the UK when his job as a mechanic at German airline Lufthansa was put at risk. “When that shut down here, he got sniped to go over,” says the Irish Rail apprentice. “He’s worked over there ever since. I was only six at the time.”
Since then, the economy has bounced back, in part fuelled by big US tech companies taking advantage of low taxes. The country is “100% through the worst”, Farrell says. If anything, things have gone too far the other way as living costs surge. “You can see it more than anything else in how expensive everything here is.”
Milburn recognises Ireland’s progress is partly driven by economic factors. Still, Britain could still learn a few policy lessons.
At St Seton’s secondary school, to the west of central Dublin, teachers tell the former Labour cabinet minister that they get extra money from the Irish government to support children at risk of poverty, social exclusion and educational disadvantage.
Funded under the “DEIS” (delivering equal opportunity in schools) programme, there is a big focus on technical education and helping students to prepare to enter the world of work.
Sitting in the staff room, the school’s principal, Sarah Green, and its career and guidance counsellor, Cheryl Keeler, explain they are agnostic about whether a student progresses to university. Getting a job is more important.
Work experience is graded as part of the curriculum, while pupils have an opportunity to take a “transition year” (TY) before studying for either an academic or vocational leaving certificate (equivalent to A-levels or the international baccalaureate). As an optional scheme, the TY has no curriculum and typically involves work experience and careers guidance, but core subjects have to be covered in some form for two hours a week.
Calum, a student at the school, took a Chinese course for 10 weeks. After completing his applied leaving certificate, from September he will start as an apprentice for Diageo at Dublin’s celebrated St James’s Gate Guinness brewery. “It was easy thanks to the school,” he says.
In Britain, Burnham is pushing to advance the parity of esteem between academic and technical education routes. Last month he announced a new £4,500 per year per household bursary to support the take-up of apprenticeships.
At Irish Rail, the apprentices say they feel they are on the fast track while their friends at university struggle with debt. Even so, Alyx Tobin says the reputation of apprenticeships in Ireland is similar to Britain.
“If you performed above average you were guided towards college as the main option. It was like, if you did an apprenticeship you weren’t smart enough to go to college,” she says. “But I think that’s a stigma that absolutely has to be dismantled as soon as possible.
“Some of the smartest people I’ve ever met are in apprenticeships, and some of the most dithering you meet could be in college.”
At a youth centre in the north Dublin suburb of Ballymun, one of the city’s most deprived neighbourhoods, Milburn pulls on a plastic apron over his Paul Smith polo shirt to bake fairy cakes with local children.
The Reco Central Youth Facility is buzzing in the school summer holidays, as a place where young people can engage in activities. It also provides mental health counselling, careers guidance and job support.
Geraldine Comerford, the manager, says the hub works with other organisations to support the community. “You can’t work in isolation. People need so many different areas.”
Milburn says the Reco shows what Britain is missing out on. Since the 2010s Tory austerity drive, spending on youth services in England has been cut by 73%. Thousands of publicly run youth clubs have shut. Meanwhile, analysis shows children from poorer backgrounds where a youth club closed performed almost 12% worse in exams at age 16.
As part of the recommendations for his final report Milburn will call on the government to drastically boost the level of youth support, with schools expected to help identify and help pupils most at risk of becoming Neet.
“We have got to get upstream because this country, and young people, are paying the price of failure.”
With exam stress fuelling a rise in mental illness, and school attainment an indicator of Neet risk, the concern is that pushing children to sit academic qualifications, alongside cuts to youth support, the health service and jobs schemes all risk the creation of a lost generation of young people.
Dr Sarah Hughes, boss of the mental health charity Mind, also on Milburn’s fact-finding trip, says: “In the UK we use the language of kids being ‘hard to reach’ all the time. The kids are not hard to reach, it is us that are hard to reach. We have literally turned it on our head.”
