Nearly a million young people are currently not in work, education or training

According to data from the Office for National Statistics, nearly a million young people are not currently in work, education or training.

Transcript

00:00To say that the problem is immense is something of an understatement. We're talking about

00:06850,000 of the so-called Gen Zs, and of course they are the kids, or young people, shall

00:13we say, in their early 20s, who are also sometimes referred as NEETs, not in education, employment

00:19or training. This is a really worrying issue because these are people who are at the beginning

00:26of their working lives and careers who should be going out and starting in organisations,

00:32getting the training and the education and whatever else and the apprenticeships that

00:36certainly was commonplace when I was leaving school, dare I say, in the late 70s. Indeed,

00:43many of those people who start in low positions or lowly positions have gone on to reach very

00:48senior positions in their organisations and companies. The fact is that there is a dearth

00:54of opportunity for these young people and indeed it's pretty dreadful because of course

00:58if you get into this situation where you feel hopeless in many ways about getting employment

01:05and indeed decent employment, I should say, because it's not that many years ago, in fact

01:09not that long ago, we were talking about as an employment crisis in the sense we couldn't

01:13get enough people into jobs and indeed there are still many jobs, although when you look

01:17at what they are, they're quite often lowly paid, zero contracts and indeed not the sort

01:23of thing that's going to sustain you through your working life. So it really is a worrying

01:27situation and indeed the fact that the government are trying to take this on board is to be

01:32applauded. The difficulty is the solutions are quite hard to contemplate because we need

01:39everyone, all organisations and businesses to bring in more young people.

01:45In its Youth Guarantee Initiative, the government has said that every young person will be given

01:49the chance to earn or learn. It's reported that young men are more likely than young

01:54women to not be in education, employment or training. It's thought that young people are

01:59citing poor mental health as one of the key issues, preventing them from finding work.

02:05I've long been a fan of the sort of the German education system, which values technical education

02:11in the very same sort of way as it does to sort of the traditional academic route as

02:14it were. And indeed one of my sort of big concerns for sort of many years has been the

02:18sort of the fact that the FE colleges, further education that is, have been starved of resources

02:23because that's the place where you want to sort of to create the sort of the skilled

02:27people.