The Government is giving employers £1,000 for each young person (16-24-years-old) they offer a traineeship, as fear rises over youth unemployment increasing due to COVID-19.
On 08/07/20 Rishi Sunak, Chancellor of the Exchequer, will pledge 30,000 new traineeships which will provide young people with maths, English and CV writing skills as well as 90 hours of unpaid work experience. The Chancellor will be providing a £111 million funding boost to assist young people in England as part of this programme. Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales will receive £21 million between them for similar schemes.
Unlike an apprenticeship, employers are not required to pay a young person in a traineeship.
Traineeships give young people a placement for six weeks to six months, ideally this move will triple the number of traineeships in England with training providers receiving more money as well. The aim is for this scheme to be up and running from September 2020.
Last year (2019), 15,000 young people took part in a traineeship, where as 2015 saw 24,100.
The Treasury said:
Young people’s employment prospects are expected to be disproportionately affected by the economic fallout of coronavirus.
Expanding traineeships will be part of a wider package to support young people and to ensure they have the skills and training to go on to high quality, secure and fulfilling employment.
Dean Sadler, CEO and founder at TribePad said:
The younger generation will bear the brunt of COVID-19. Kept out of the classroom for four months, their exam grades will now be based on averages instead of how they actually perform in exams. Their futures will largely depend on this and they will continue to miss out on vital life skills and learnings while out of the classroom.
With universities only offering online classes, many school leavers are putting off going to university for a year, so that when they do, they can get maximum value. And unfortunately, we will see fewer graduate schemes on the job market – businesses cannot afford to hire people to train up, so they will look to employ candidates who already have the skills they need. This creates the perfect storm for young people – competition will be high and they may get stuck in low-skilled, low-paying jobs.
There will be a lot of businesses that survive when they really shouldn’t. These so-called “zombie businesses” will not help the economy bounce back at all. Capital should be invested in those dynamic companies that can add real value to the economy and provide jobs for younger workers.
The Government and private enterprise must look after the future of the workforce. Not providing support to young people in the coming months will do more harm than good in the long-run for the economy.
This warning comes from the think tank Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), as it believes that an extra 620,000 young people will be out of work by the end of 2020, with 410,000 young people already being out of work. When these two figures are added together it comes to over a million.
Darius is the editor of HRreview. He has previously worked as a finance reporter for the Daily Express. He studied his journalism masters at Press Association Training and graduated from the University of York with a degree in History.
