Opportunities missed over youth jobs, trainer says

Opportunities are being missed to help young people into employment, the founder of a training group has said.

Daniel Canavan, who founded The Spark Group in Stoke-on-Trent, said young people who did not achieve good results at school were struggling to get into training.

He welcomed the government's announcement of a £820m Jobs Guarantee Scheme, which offers paid roles to those out of work for 18 months, but said if more help was given to businesses then more jobs would become available.

Zoe-Lane Littlewood from the Teamworks Hub in Digbeth, Birmingham, said businesses also needed to be more willing to train young people.

Mr Canavan said demand for the training The Spark Group provided was high.

"I'm hearing anecdotally that for every one electrical apprenticeship we're getting about 100 inquiries," he said.

But he said young people who did not get the grades they needed were falling into a gap.

"Those that have got the grades, those that are work-ready, have got plenty of opportunity to get into courses and onto programmes and potentially into apprenticeships," he explained.

"But then that means those that didn't get the grades and that aren't work-ready have got much further to go and have limited options. "

He said he was working with young people who were "second or third generation unemployed" and trying to raise their aspirations.

The Spark Group works with them in small groups, trying to teach them new trades and he said young people who did not perform academically often did well in hands-on skilled work.

Unfortunately, he said: "They're trapped in a school waiting until they fail their GCSEs before they can go out and try and help us fill this massive skills gap we've got nationally."

While he welcomed the help offered in the recent budget, he said he felt opportunities had been missed because "all the effort's been put into the young person's perspective, where the energy would be better spent with the employers and the businesses".

"If you can make businesses boom, you create a lot more opportunities," he said.

Abdisalam Iman, a young man who was seeking work at an employment fair in Digbeth, said he felt there was support available, if you went looking for it.

But he found applying for jobs online to be difficult.

He said: "I used to work in railway construction, I'd been there working for nearly one year and now it went a bit quiet and I need to do something different."

While there were opportunities to work one or two days a week in Birmingham, he said he was finding it hard to find employers offering more than that.

Across the West Midlands it is estimated there are 78,000 people aged 16-18 not in education, employment, or training, which is just under one in eight people in that age group.

Zoe-Lane Littlewood from the Teamworks Hub, which helps young people find employment, said there were "not enough organisations taking a chance on them, helping them develop their skills little by little".

She said: "I think we expect people to be fully-fledged, ready to work when in actuality we've had Covid, we've had so many obstacles that people just forget what young people have gone through."

Benefits can be another obstacle, Wychavon district councillor Rick Deller believes.

He said: "They want to get back into work, but as soon as they do they're penalised by the benefits system and then we see a vicious cycle because they end up either leaving employment or they move into housing when they're not quite ready."

Kiera Elliott, is one of those supported at Merstow Place supported accommodation in Evesham and used to be homeless before moving there.

She is able to get by on benefits but said: "If I'm working I'm not going to have money, I'm going to be stuck in debt."

Mr Deller said: "As soon as a young person from his house gets a job, their benefits reduce so quickly, then they have to move out.

"The problem with that is they're not always ready."

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