PROFESSOR EWART KEEP (PROFESSOR EMERITUS AT UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD) – WRITTEN EVIDENCE (YUN0067)

Despite the immediate crisis triggered by the Covid pandemic, it is important to bear in mind that, in the UK, young people’s transitions into the labour market and the consequences of these not working smoothly (youth unemployment) have been with us as a policy issue for a significant period.  In many senses, policy makers and practitioners continue to grapple with difficulties that have been apparent to a greater or lesser degree since the recession of the early 1980s and the wave of mass youth unemployment that followed (West, 2021).

It has been apparent for some time that underlying trends in the labour market mean that youth transitions have been becoming more complex, conditional and risky across much of the OECD.  “Today, the journey from adolescence to adulthood is far more daunting.  It takes much longer, and the roadway is filled with far more potholes, one-way streets and dead ends” (Symonds, Schwartz and Ferguson, 2011:11).  The process is no longer linear and the task of finding a place in the labour market is now often prolonged and discontinuous (Quintini, Martin and Martin, 2007), characterised by what one researcher has termed ‘pinball transitions’ (Brozsely, 2017).

It is also apparent that while the global recession occasioned by the financial crash of 2008 worsened the situation, it did not cause it. Youth unemployment levels in the UK started rising several years before recession struck (Wolf, 2011; UKCES, 2011).  It can be argued that the recession simply served to amplify the pre-existent effects of long-term structural shifts in the labour market and the employment relationship and these changes are evident once more within the economic fall-out emanating from the Covid-19 pandemic. In the UK, these trends are multiple and complex, and include, for instance, the need for more older workers to remain in employment for longer, in part due to the pensions crisis (Unwin et al, 2015).  In overall terms, the youth labour market in the UK has been shrinking since the start of the 1980s.  In 1976, more than three-quarters of 18-year olds were in employment.  By 2009, this had fallen to 40 per cent (UKCES, 2011).

The nature of the employment relationship has also changed over time.  Three pieces of research can be deployed to illuminate the problems posed by new employment models and a changing employment relationship.  The first is the UK Commission for Employment and Skills’ (UKCES) Youth Inquiry, which was launched in 2011 in response to rising levels of youth unemployment and NEETs and which explored what employers could reasonably be asked to do to help combat this.  It found that recruitment and selection (R&S) processes were increasingly taking place via ‘informal’, word-of-mouth personal recommendation from existing employees (see Keep and James, 2010a), thereby often limiting access to opportunities for those from families and communities currently excluded from work. In addition, employers were often obsessed with candidates demonstrating ‘experience’ in a similar job as a proxy for their ability to perform the job opening that was being recruited to.  This, coupled with a paradoxical reluctance to offer work experience to young people resulted in what the UKCES termed ‘the experience trap’ (UKCES, 2011).

The second set of insights from research comes from a large Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project, entitled Precarious Pathways and led by the Institute of Employment Research (IER), which explored the labour market for young people and graduates in the Midlands across a range of large to small employers (Purcell et al, 2017).  Its preliminary findings confirmed the problems noted by UKCES in terms of access to employment increasingly occurring via word-of-mouth recruitment, and also employers’ desire for experience - “prior experience…was required even for selection onto unpaid, short-term student work experience placements” (Purcell et al, 2017: 9).  It also demonstrated how different forms of work trials (e.g. internships, agency work, and various aspects of the gig economy), were being deployed by organisations as a way of checking if individuals met their criteria and expectations before offering them any more permanent form of employment (‘try before you buy’) and that this approach to recruitment was displacing more traditional textbook models of recruitment and selection, such as reliance on interviews and CVs.  The project observed that, “all employers saw different types of precarious labour as a better mechanism than interviews for identifying individuals to recruit as employees” (Purcell et al, 2017: 9).  This approach rendered learning to earning transitions complex and hard for those with limited resources, and the research illustrated how demanding and pressurising insecure work was for young people as they tried to gain a firm foothold in the labour market. The other major finding was that, paradoxically, employers on the whole, “see themselves as having relatively little power in the labour markets in which they work – even when they are one of the largest employers with over 100 applicants for some jobs” (Purcell et al, 2017: 8).

              The project’s main conclusion was that:

Many of the problems encountered by young job seekers derive

from the sub-division of work. Even the most progressive and ethical

employers we interviewed perceived themselves as constrained by market

forces, often with little alternative but to concentrate their training and staff

development on their core staff and control additional labour costs as tightly

as possible, without consideration of the wider social impact and future costs

to the community.

(Purcell et al, 2017: 35)

In a sense, the Precarious Pathways project suggests that the problems are even more deep-seated and structural than the UKCES’s Youth Inquiry had argued them to be.  They extend beyond recruitment and selection practices that implicitly produce a playing field sloping against young candidates, and also embrace models of the employment relationship and of work organisation and job design that are producing insecure and precarious work within which it is hard for young people to sustain themselves.  This problem of what Furlong and Cartmel (2004) dubbed ‘fragile labour markets’, has been visible for a relatively long time (see also Keep, 2012; and Shildrick et al, 2012), but the Precarious Pathways work suggests that it is infecting a larger proportion of employers and job openings than may hitherto have been the case.

The third set of findings come from a J P Morgan Foundation-funded, CIPD-designed project and reinforce the impression that many employers, especially smaller ones, may lack the capacity to manage the recruitment and selection process and the employment relationship more broadly in ways that are likely to be conducive to effective youth transitions.  The project’s aim was to offer free human resource management/personnel management consultancy support to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in three areas (Glasgow, Hackney and Stoke-on-Trent), with the ultimate objective of developing employers’ understanding and capacity so that they could take on young apprentices.  Unfortunately, in majority of cases all the resource was consumed simply enabling the firms to become legally compliant employers so deficient was their understanding and practice of employment relations (Atkinson et al, 2017). 

Finally, underlying much of the above is the argument, noted above, that the UK has too many ‘bad jobs’ – work that is poorly-paid; repetitive; casualised or insecure; requiring of few skills; offering little opportunity for discretion, enterprise and creativity, and which provides few opportunities for progression and development (Lloyd, Mason and Mayhew, 2008; Lawton, 2009; Gracey and Kelly, 2010; Keep, 2012; Shildrick et al, 2012; Keep and James, 2010b; UKCES, 2011; Clarke and D’Arcy, 2018).  This situation provides the backdrop to the reality that young people not on the ‘royal route’ to A levels and HE face patchy and sometimes poor careers information advice and guidance (CIAG), and often complex and conditional pathways and progression routes that may have less obvious and powerful labour market payoffs (Lupton et al, 2021; City and Guilds/Research Base, 2021).  A significant number of young people end up in low-wage, dead-end jobs and struggle to subsequently progress (Roberts, 2020), and the proportion of the youth cohort who suffer this fate has been rising (Blundell et al, 2020).  Blundell et al report that there has been deterioration over time in the wage status of first occupations.

It can be argued that in the past UK policy on youth transitions and the labour market implicitly assumed that employers were competent to manage and facilitate labour market entry for young people in ways that would generally be rational, conform with legal requirements and which would also give at least some regard to wider societal and policy goals. The evidence adduced above suggests that this assumption may not always be well-founded, and that at a broader level the quality of a significant proportion of the job openings in the labour market may make the achievement of sustained and successful learning to earning transitions hard to achieve. Thus, while there remain significant problems with the design, delivery and funding of initial education for many young people, it is probable that even if all of these were to be addressed and solved this would not, on its own, remove problems with youth transitions into work. The structure and nature of the modern employment relationship and of some forms of work (as least as constructed in the UK) make smooth and effective transitions very hard to achieve.

References

Atkinson C, Lupton B, Kynigho A, Antcliff V, Carter J (2017) People Skills – Building ambition and HR capability in small UK firms. CIPD, London

Blundell, R., Dias, M.C., Joyce, R., and Keiller, A.N. (2020). ‘What has been happening to career progression?’, IFS Briefing Note BN301, London: Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Brozsely, B. (2017). ‘Pinball Transitions: “middling” young people in an hourglass economy’, unpublished PhD thesis, Leeds Beckett University.

City and Guilds/Research Base. (2021). ‘Level 2 attainment and the review of Post-16 qualifications, Research Report, London: City and Guilds London Institute.

Clarke S, and D’Arcy C (2018) The Kids Aren’t Alright. Resolution Foundation, Inter-generational Commission, London

Furlong A, Cartmel F (2004) Vulnerable young men in fragile labour markets. Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York

Gracey S, and Kelly S (2010) Changing the NEET Mindset: Achieving More Effective Transitions Between Education and Work. Learning and Skills Network Centre for Innovation in Learning, London

Keep E (2012) ‘Youth Transitions, the Labour Market and Entry into Employment: Some Reflections and Questions’. SKOPE Research Paper No. 108. Cardiff University, SKOPE, Cardiff

Keep E, and James S (2010a) ‘Recruitment and selection: the great neglected topic’. SKOPE Research Paper No. 88. Cardiff University, SKOPE, Cardiff

Keep E, and James S (2010b) ‘What incentives to learn at the bottom of the labour market?’, SKOPE Research Paper No. 94. Cardiff University, SKOPE, Cardiff

Lloyd C, Mason G, Mayhew K (eds.) (2008) Low-Wage Work in the United Kingdom. Russell Sage Foundation, New York

Lupton, R., Thompson, S., Velthuis, S., and Unwin, L. (2021).  Moving on from initial GCSE ‘failure’: Post-16 transitions for ‘low attainers’ and why the English education system must do better, London: Nuffield Foundation.

Purcell K, Elias P, Green A, Mizen P, Simms M, Whiteside N, Wilson D, Robertson A, Tzanakou C (2017) Present Tense, Future Imperfect? – Young people’s pathways into work. Warwick University, Institute for Employment Research, Coventry

Quintini G, Martin J.P, Martin S (2007) ‘The changing nature of the school-to-work transition process in OECD countries’. WDA-HSG Discussion Paper Series on Demographic Issues, No. 2007/2, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland

Shildrick T, MacDonald R, Webster C, Garthwaite K (2012) Poverty and Insecurity – Life in Low-Pay, No-Pay Britain. Policy Press, Bristol

Symonds W C, Schwartz R B, Ferguson R (2011) Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century. Report issued by the Pathways to Prosperity Project, Harvard University, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Boston. Mass

UK Commission for Employment and Skills (2011) The Youth Inquiry: Employers’ Perspectives on Tackling Youth Unemployment. UKCES, Wath-upon-Dearne

Unwin, L., Davey, G., Fuller, A., and Leonard, P. (2015). ‘Supporting an Ageing Workforce: Implications for Working Life, Training and Skills Policy in England – A Literature Review’, LLAKES Research Paper 51, London: Institute of Education, LLAKES.

West, J. (2021). Countering Unemployment in The United Kingdom, Geneva: International Labour Organization.

Wolf A (2011) Review of Vocational Education: The Wolf Report. Department for Education, London

15th June 2021