By Stacey Dingwall

The UK Commission for Education and Skills has released a new report, Catch 16-24: youth employment challenge, which suggests that today’s young people are facing a ‘postcode lottery’ when searching for work experience.

According to the UK Commission’s analysis, most English regions are lagging behind Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in terms of the number of employers offering work experience opportunities to young people. The Humber, with one of England’s highest youth unemployment rates, is identified as being a particular work experience ‘blackspot’, with only 29% of employers offering placements.

The new report comes a year on from the publication of another report from the UK Commission, Not just making tea: reinventing work experience. This outlined the vital importance of work experience not only for young people, but for employers themselves, and dispelled common myths that often deter employers from offering opportunities. Multiple case studies showed the benefits enjoyed by companies, large and small, when they invest in young people through work experience.

Why then, a year on, does the UK Commission’s latest research still indicate that only 20% of employers across the UK currently offer work experience to schools, and only 12% to colleges?

A barrier to social mobility

The report suggests that location is not the only factor hindering young people’s chances of obtaining work experience – personal contacts also play a significant role. The need to ensure that employment outcomes for young people are not constrained by their social or ethnic backgrounds (“it’s not what you know, but who you know”) has also been raised by both the Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission in the last year.

The Sutton Trust’s Internship or Indenture? briefing supports the UK Commission’s description of London as the “internship capital of the country” and places the total cost of undertaking a six-month unpaid internship in the capital at £6,081 (including transport costs) and £5,078 for doing so in Greater Manchester. The importance of undertaking internships and work experience placements in order to gain entrance to professions such as law and finance is highlighted, alongside the fact that only those from wealthy backgrounds are likely to be able to bear the costs of working for free for any significant period of time.

In order to tackle ‘elitist Britain’, the government’s Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission recommended that both schools and employers should do more in order to ‘close the gap’ in the provision of work experience opportunities to pupils from less affluent backgrounds.

Employers want new recruits to have work experience

The ‘catch’ for young people in terms of work experience is laid bare in the UK Commision’s new report: 66% of employers rate experience as a ‘critical’ or ‘significant’ factor when it comes to recruitment decisions yet less than a third of this figure are currently prepared to offer opportunities.

The impact of this on the UK’s continuing high rate of youth unemployment is highlighted – the UK has “German levels of adult unemployment but Eurozone levels of youth unemployment”. The UK Commission has previously used case studies of the work experience systems of countries including Australia and the Netherlands to show the positive benefits of integrating work experience into education for youth employment rates.

So, what will it take for UK employers and educational institutions to adopt closer relationships in order to improve the work experience offer for young people?

Improved collaboration

Despite indications that the number of employers taking on apprentices is increasing, and encouraging examples of collaborations between schools and employers, Katerina Rüdiger of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) believes that the government should do more to facilitate employer-education relatationships. Reacting to the new UK Commission report, Rüdiger called for the government to “create a role in local authorities so they can work with the National Careers Service to provide resources and broker relationships between young people, schools and employers to generate routes into work”. The involvement of government in facilitating this type of collaboration has also been described as vital by the UK Commission.

The UK Commission has described the December 2014 announcement of a new careers and enterprise company for English schools (with the aim of encouraging employers to link directly to pupils throughout their education) as “promising”. This follows its previous call for the rest of the UK to follow the lead of the Scottish Government which, through its commission for developing Scotland’s young workforce, is aiming to achieve links with employers for each of the country’s secondary schools over the next three years.

Whether these initiatives will have the required impact on the UK’s work experience offer for young people remains, of course, to be seen in another year’s time.

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Further reading

The Idox Information Service has a wealth of research reports, articles and case studies on work experience and youth employment. Items of interest include:

Work experience: benefits and impact (Series briefing note 44)

Undergraduates’ memories of school-based work experience and the role of social class in placement choices in the UK

Making work experience work: top tips for employers

Work experience doesn’t work, says Wood Commission

The effects of work experience during higher education on labour market entry: learning by doing or an entry ticket?