Ireland’s Neet rate fell to 6.1% as UK’s climbed to 12.8%
Alan Milburn, a former UK cabinet minister, is preparing to publish a report into Britain’s youth jobs crisis for the government this autumn. This week he has been in Dublin with a delegation of officials, charity leaders, industry bosses and South Yorkshire mayor Oliver Coppard, studying how Ireland turned its youth jobs market around, The Guardian reported. At an Irish Rail apprentice training centre in the Inchicore district, trainees had rigged up an electrical buzzer game that Milburn tried as he described the scale of the problem at home.
“We have got more than a million young people not in education, employment or training (Neet),” he said. “Crisis is an over-used word – but this is a crisis.”
Ireland has recorded the fastest reduction in Neet rates anywhere in the EU over the past decade, from 14.3% in 2015 to 6.1% last year. Over the same period, the UK’s rate rose from 11.1% to 12.8%, and Romania is the only EU country with a higher rate.
At the training centre, Milburn told the apprentices that 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, replied: “Hopefully we can get to the bottom of it together?”
Milburn said the delegation came to understand what Ireland is doing differently. “We’re here really to understand what the secret sauce is,” he said. “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.”
At home, Prime Minister Andy Burnham has made tackling the youth jobs crisis a top priority, using his first weeks in office to launch a series of measures to boost technical education and apprenticeships. 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. Labour is also preparing 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. 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 rising costs and weak consumer demand amid the cost of living crisis.
Ireland’s turnaround is in part down to its economic recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. The collapse of a property market bubble triggered a 10% crash in the economy in a single year and drove unemployment to 16% by 2012, while youth joblessness peaked at almost 30% and many young people left to work abroad amid the 2010s eurozone debt crisis. Corey Farrell, an Irish Rail apprentice, said his father was among those 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. He’s worked over there ever since. I was only six at the time.”
The economy has since bounced back, in part fuelled by big US tech companies taking advantage of low taxes. Farrell said the country is “100% through the worst”; 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,” he said.
Milburn said Ireland’s progress is partly driven by economic factors, but Britain can still learn policy lessons. At St Seton’s secondary school, west of central Dublin, teachers receive 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. The school’s principal, Sarah Green, and its career and guidance counsellor, Cheryl Keeler, said 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, and pupils can take an optional “transition year” (TY) with no curriculum of its own, typically involving work experience and careers guidance, before studying for an academic or vocational leaving certificate equivalent to A-levels or the international baccalaureate. Calum, a student at the school, took a Chinese course for 10 weeks and, after completing his applied leaving certificate, will start as an apprentice for Diageo at Dublin’s St James’s Gate Guinness brewery in September. “It was easy thanks to the school,” he said.
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 said they feel they are on the fast track while friends at university struggle with debt. Even so, Tobin said the reputation of apprenticeships in Ireland is similar to Britain’s. “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 said. “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 the Reco Central Youth Facility in Ballymun, one of Dublin’s most deprived neighbourhoods, Milburn pulled on a plastic apron to bake fairy cakes with local children at a hub that offers mental health counselling, careers guidance and job support during the school summer holidays. Manager Geraldine Comerford said the hub works with other organisations to support the community: “You can’t work in isolation. People need so many different areas.”
Milburn said the facility shows what Britain is missing. Spending on youth services in England has been cut by 73% since the 2010s Tory austerity drive, thousands of publicly run youth clubs have shut, and analysis shows children from poorer backgrounds where a youth club closed performed almost 12% worse in exams at age 16. His final report will call on the government to drastically boost youth support, with schools expected to help identify 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,” he said.
The trip comes amid concern that pushing children to sit academic qualifications, alongside cuts to youth support, the health service and jobs schemes, risks creating a lost generation of young people. Exam stress is fuelling a rise in mental illness, and school attainment is an indicator of Neet risk. Dr Sarah Hughes, head of the mental health charity Mind, who joined the trip, said: “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.”