Skills: Importance for the UK Economy and Quality of Life

Baroness Valentine Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Valentine (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Aberdare for introducing this topic. We have the economic challenge of building relevant skills for the future and the social challenge of one in 10 youngsters being unemployed. I shall focus on the need to join these two thoughts up by finding ways of upskilling these people for worthwhile jobs—both for their own quality of life and for the sake of the economy.

The most recent government skills survey found that skills shortage vacancies have grown from 6% to 10% in the last five years. Prominent examples include a shortage of 200,000 employees with green skills, three-quarters of businesses with digital skills vacancies, and more than half of our manufacturers struggling to find skilled workers. On the other hand, only 11% of UK workers have advanced digital skills. Last year, the number of young unemployed increased by 10%.

Through my work as a director of Business in the Community, I see at first hand the challenges that young people face in forgotten places across the UK. Let us take, for example, Claremont ward in Blackpool, where there are 480 unemployed individuals in just 12 streets. There is a concentration of families in slum housing where there is a subculture of many youngsters not leaving their bedrooms post-Covid.

Last week, I visited Eastwood primary school in Keighley to understand the challenge in enabling children just to learn to read—a fundamental skill, if they are to go on to get a good job. The school provides a haven of calm for children in an area where parents dare not let them out on the streets. It provides food for families, clothes and a safe place for parents to learn cooking skills. It also ferries children to the dentist because there is not one locally. There are four year-olds with rotten teeth and abscesses which keep them off school. Sadly, these challenges and interventions are common to schools in Claremont, North Earlham, Foleshill and other places where we work.

Looking outside the school system, Pillgwenlly, in Newport, is an ethnically diverse community—more than 32 languages are spoken at the local primary school. On the streets, county lines are commonplace and there is a red light district opposite the police station. Community organisations such as the Newport Yemeni Community Association and Kidcare4U run catch-up clubs for more than 120 children on Saturday mornings. However, funding is due to end in August.

Let me turn to some practical steps that might help. These fall into three categories: first, finding realistic routes to help the young unemployed into work; secondly, helping those in secondary school to understand work and future job opportunities better; and thirdly, supporting heroic teachers in challenging primary schools, so that children can leave feeling confident in themselves and able to read.

Extensive work carried out by the Rank Foundation in Claremont suggests that we need an intermediate labour market to provide opportunities to get the youngsters currently sitting in their bedrooms into work. This involves working eight to 12 hours a week in real work situations, paid at a living wage, which provide dignity and purpose. It would help further if the Department for Work and Pensions considered talking to these people online, rather than insisting they come into the office.

The apprenticeship levy has not been fully spent. I encourage the Government to double down on apprenticeships, making them as flexible as possible but also advising companies that they can pass the levy on to their supply chain, a fact of which many companies are unaware.

In Sheffield, we have recently launched a campaign with local businesses to provide routine and frequent employer encounters for all the schoolchildren in the area. This is based on robust analysis by the Careers & Enterprise Company which suggests these contacts can reduce future likelihood of unemployment by 20%. The advantage of this approach is that businesses can talk directly about current skills needs such as digital or manufacturing.

Finally, national government needs to recognise the challenges and support schools on the front line. I have just one small ask: to provide genuinely accessible NHS dental services to these children. Who knows, one of them might be inspired to become a future dentist.

Vulnerable Teenagers

Baroness Valentine Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Valentine (CB)]

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate. I work part-time for Business in the Community where, as director of place and levelling up, I aim to facilitate long-term and transformational change in some of the UK’s most deprived neighbourhoods. I cannot pretend to be an expert, so will focus my remarks on conversations with a range of experienced individuals who I admire.

First, they all welcome the report, and its focus and interesting proposals. Several remarked that it was good to see a report focusing on funding as well as what needs to be done. They liked the idea of long-term funding sourced from crime and orchestrated by a group of charities. Indeed, Scotland already uses a version of this approach. While they all welcomed the concept behind Sure Start-plus, they flagged two hazards. The first was that it needed to be partnered with reintroducing the original Sure Start to pick up children earlier in their development and throughout. Rashid Bhayat at the Positive Youth Foundation said that problems often start at six or seven; schools are underresourced to deal with them and it is often after years of working with a teenager that Positive Youth Foundation finally builds enough trust to find the root of their trauma.

Many said that more important than new approaches was long-term funding. Programmes and funding that are short term lead to stop-start behaviour and to people being parachuted in who disrupt the local support network and sometimes do more harm than good. The funder Esmée Fairbairn was mentioned as an example of good practice.

The overarching theme was the need for a long-term approach that aligns multiple service provision and is really grounded in the community. It is almost too obvious to need saying but, when dealing with vulnerable teenagers, one needs to build trust, they need to be supported as early as possible in their lives, and we need to stick with them for as long as it takes. Many solutions do not satisfy these criteria. For instance, in many local authorities there is a significant drop in the amount of support available to children in care once they turn 18 and become care leavers. From that point on, the statutory requirement is only that they are seen once every eight weeks by their personal adviser. This is often the most critical period in their development and when support is most needed as, we hope, they enter the world of work or go on to further and higher education.

Conversely, in north Birkenhead, children and family services, health, the youth sector and education are being brought together in the Cradle to Career programme supported by Right to Succeed. Interestingly, because of the siloed nature of these services, at the beginning they cannot even agree on the teenager’s address. In Keighley, in Bradford, and a few other wards with high deprivation levels, an Alliance for Life Chances programme is being rolled out to provide a child-centred and seamless service provision from a young age.

I was struck by the strong contribution that the voluntary sector makes. I used to support a charity called Aspired Futures, in Blackpool, which welcomed children who had experienced extensive trauma and began by providing four-on-one support. The children could then continue to visit the centre for as long as they liked, and several ended up as mentors themselves. This approach of alumni mentors is also supported by the Positive Youth Foundation. Sadly, during Covid, Aspired Futures ran out of funding and closed its doors.

The good news is that the staff transferred to Boathouse and the Magic Club, which, although they have a less intensive approach, both do excellent work supporting teenagers. Magic Club points to supporting extracurricular activity, such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award or art work, as being important for those who do not settle at school. This approach is shared by Element, a social enterprise supporting care leavers. It combines non-judgmental creative courses with a long-term network of support, including opportunities for paid employment. Both organisations comment on the resulting increase in self-confidence.

In the same vein is the support given by businesses to schools and community centres on preparing for work, such as CV writing and interview skills. The Positive Youth Foundation is supported by the local McDonald’s franchise, after its owner decided to do something more constructive than tell a load of layabout teenagers to get out. Coventry Building Society spends millions around the country, but in particular has a deep focus on three schools in Foleshill and Longford, a deprived area of Coventry, with measurable improvements in confidence and aspiration. It would say that work experience and placements are invaluable for those whose families are distant from the workplace.

Many commented on the dearth of talent in youth provision. With the closure of youth clubs during austerity and unreliable funding, many have migrated to jobs elsewhere in the sector. This is good for the sector as a whole but, as recommended in the report,

“The recruitment of an army of Youth Practitioners to inspire, support and guide young people in their community”


would be welcome.

It is essential that young people have a voice in the solutions provided for them. For many, grinding poverty is daily life and can be one of the main drivers of exploitation. The trauma they experience, giving rise to what we would call mental health challenges, is their norm. They are remarkably resilient, but we owe it to them to provide hope and aspiration.

Lastly, I have a question for the Minister about NEETs. I am unclear where responsibility for NEETs now sits within government. I am aware that it has, at times, sat with opportunity areas and the DfE, and at others with levelling up. Please will the Minister clarify which department now has responsibility for them?