TRINITY LABAN CONSERVATOIRE OF MUSIC AND DANCE – WRITTEN EVIDENCE (YUN0054)
Youth Unemployment Committe inquiry
Responses from Alekzander Szram, Programme Leader BMus and Foundation, and Joe Townsend,
Head of the BA Music Performance and Industry and Head of CoLab
For Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance
Questions
Challenges
1. What are the main challenges facing young people seeking employment today? How do structural factors impact youth unemployment, and how might these be addressed?
Students leave education without a clear pathway into employment. There needs to be an overlap between education and employment, for instance through job placements and internships. These need to be local to the student or funded, to enable students from all backgrounds to access early employment opportunities.
My unemployed neighbour used his savings to gain a driving licence and buy a used car to look for work as a driver; he subsequently found that he would only be considered for work after several years’ driving experience. While experience is clearly an asset for employers, young people are almost by definition inexperienced; the job market needs to provide, specifically, entry-level jobs that do not require experience for young workers. At the same time, these jobs need to have value. Presently, the growing gig economy provides low-paid and insecure work with companies that evade tax. This is not a virtuous circle for the UK economy, or for civil society. There are significant numbers of young people in work-place poverty, as reported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and other organisations.
Young people who were not born into families that could afford to educate them privately continue to be at a significant (and widely researched) disadvantage when it comes to accessing work-place opportunities. Universities are well-placed to ameliorate this by creating professional networks for their students that connect them to the world of work.
2. What are the main challenges facing employers in the labour market today? What barriers do they face in recruiting young workers and setting up apprenticeships and traineeships?
Networks for finding good, young workers are largely informal. A reliance on existing contacts to find and recommend the next generation of workers leads to nepotism and structural processes of exclusion that lead to a lack of diversity. Employers are aware that there is talent out there, but there is no mechanism to find it. Recruitment procedures are inefficient as they tend to attract applicants that are well connected, or those that are encouraged to see themselves in the role, not necessarily those that would perform well within it.
3. What future social, economic and technological changes are likely to impact youth unemployment? What impact might these changes have, and how should this be planned for and addressed?
The growth of artificial intelligence will have the biggest future impact on youth unemployment. Education needs to be directed towards those employments that will continue to require substantial human input. Key skills will include critical thinking, creativity, and leadership. The development of these skills needs to be addressed throughout secondary and tertiary education. In secondary education, there needs to be a greater focus on the development of individual responses based on evidence, as opposed to the memorisation and regurgitation of standardised responses. There is a conceptual gap between secondary and tertiary education; in the former, students are expected to assimilate standard responses, in the latter, they are asked to demonstrate originality. Originality and authenticity need to be encouraged throughout primary and secondary education.
4. Is funding for education, training and skills enough to meet the needs of young people and of the labour market? How can we ensure it continues to reach those who need it most?
It is difficult to imagine how the government could overspend on education, given the benefits that a highly educated workforce would have on all aspects of society and the economy. The country needs to aim for full youth employment and create jobs specifically for younger age groups to develop a highly-skilled and adaptable workforce.
The question asks how we can ensure it continues to reach those who need it most, but this presupposes that it currently is reaching those who need it most, which is a matter of conjecture. The United Kingdom has highly localised areas of poverty and unemployment that are not kept secret – this is where funding needs to be targeted.
Primary and secondary education
5. Does the national curriculum equip young people with the right knowledge and skills to find secure jobs and careers? What changes may be needed to ensure this is the case in future?
The national curriculum needs to be skills-based, not knowledge-based, and use problem-posing pedagogy to develop investigative learning skills and autonomous learning behaviours. Students need to be encouraged to become auto-didactic learners and peer-learners, so that they are able to continue learning after they have left formal education. Students need to be taught discernment and critical thinking skills to help them navigate the vast quantities of inaccurate information available on the internet.
Assessment needs to be highly flexible and adaptive to allow neuro-diverse students and those with additional needs to demonstrate their learning and their achievements.
The addition of ‘Arts’ within STEM – STEAM – would incorporate creative thinking within the application of STEM skills. Arts training is crucial as a means of developing creative thinking skills.
6. Is careers education preparing young people with the knowledge to explore the range of opportunities available? What role does work experience play in this regard?
Work experience is absolutely vital as a means of accessing the experiential learning that is required in order to prepare for employment. However, school should provide an academic experience, not a workplace experience; young people at school need placements in the workplace in order to gain workplace experience before they start employment. Ideally, the work experience should form the basis of reflective learning on returning to education.
Universities need to establish strong links with schools, assisting with careers education by showing students how their educational journey can lead to meaningful and fulfilling employment.
7. What lessons can be learned from alternative models of education and assessment? What are the challenges with, and obstacles to, the adoption of such models?
The United Kingdom begins formal education much earlier than many other countries, and there are strong, established arguments for devoting early years’ curriculum to student-led learning and a greater proportion of time devoted to free play. Students with good mental and physical health are better-placed to achieve academically, and as they enter the workforce will be more productive. Evidence suggests that models of education in Scandinavia and Northern Europe are effective than the current UK model in producing well-educated and happy young people. Shifting towards these models would need to be done slowly, with appropriate provision of staff training; a shift could begin through teacher-training curricula.
Further education, higher education and training
8. What more needs to be done to ensure parity of esteem between vocational and academic study in the jobs market and society? How can funding play a role in this?
Students should be directed towards the best pathway for their abilities and enthusiasms, and these pathways should not be subjected to cultural notions of value. I think that funding is irrelevant to this question, as there is a wide disparity of funding across different vocational professions and different academic institutions. Both forms of study need continued and extensive investment.
9. What is the role of business and universities in creating a thriving jobs market for young people? How should they be involved in developing skills and training programmes at further and higher education level?
Businesses and universities should be able to benefit from each other’s expertise. Universities should nurture thriving cohorts of students that create networks which carry them into the professional world. Government should incentivise businesses to provide job placements for university students, and these need to be accessible to all students, not those with the strongest familial networks.
The music industry needs to train mentors and train young people to mentor and support each other from an early age.
10. What can be done to ensure that enough apprenticeship and traineeship placements are available for young people? Is the apprenticeship levy the right way to achieve a continuing supply of opportunities?
Interventions need to be targeted at areas of highest unemployment and social deprivation.
Jobs and employment
11. What lessons can be learned by current and previous youth labour market policy interventions and educational approaches, both in the UK and in other countries?
On a local level, interventions need to be targeted at individuals as they are leaving education. There are too many unemployed young people in the UK, each facing a bespoke combination of difficulties that can only be solved through targeted interventions. Educational institutions should be well placed to provide students with access to early-employment support as they leave education and enter employment.
Internships, apprenticeships, and placements can be a great experience, but support is needed after they finish. At the moment, there is often a cliff-edge with no progression once the opportunity has ended.
12. What economic sectors present opportunities for sustainable, quality jobs for young people? How can we ensure these opportunities are capitalised on and that skills meet demand, particularly for green jobs?
At the moment, most jobs for young people have no job security (often zero-hours contracts) and are paid at the minimum wage. Young people in the creative arts looking for sustainable, quality jobs often seek freelance work where they are able to access higher rates of pay through offering high-quality work ( as opposed to lower rates of pay for ‘good-enough quality’ work).
13. How might future youth labour market interventions best be targeted towards particular groups, sectors or regions? Which ones should be targeted?
Labour market interventions that create well-paid, secure jobs for young people that do not have access to familial networks.
11th May 2021