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Somehow or other, we have to help, nudge or push young people into their first jobs – into the habit of working. We all know that, and there is a string of ideas on what needs to be done. The Tories have just come up with the idea of halving employers’ national insurance contributions for workers aged between 21 and 24.
The Government has for several months had in place a national Youth Guarantee policy, with extra apprenticeships, youth hubs, a youth guarantee gateway, more work and training opportunities, and so on. There’s more to come, with Pat McFadden, the Work and Pensions Secretary, telling the Labour conference that there would be “decisions to make and responsibilities to take” on the benefits system, a signal that the Government was planning to restrict payments to young people who didn’t have jobs.
So lots of things going on. A few days ago, Alan Milburn, the former Labour minister who has been charged with writing a report on how to get young people into work, came up with what is surely a novel idea. It is that the whole idea of getting a job should be introduced to children when they are at primary school.
Primary school? Four or five-year-olds? Well, yes, for as he put it in a BBC interview, “in primary school, it’s really about opening their eyes and giving them a sense about what is possible”.
It is, of course, easy to see the problems. It would be one more thing that teachers would have to find time for, and something else would have to be dropped. Trying to frame a curriculum would be tough. Teaching is a noble task, but it may well be that schoolteachers are not the ideal people to talk about the broader aspects of the workplace. And there are enough problems with the present system of getting older pupils to do work experience that maybe the focus should be on the 14-16-year-olds who are unable to get a placement.
But it is a really interesting idea because, for a lot of us, it was in those very early years that we got our own feeling for how people live their lives – what our parents did or didn’t do, and what their friends did. And that experience led to our own early thoughts about what we might ourselves become when we grew up.
For some people it’s straightforward. They do the same sort of job as their parents. There are nearly a million people in the UK in broadly the same occupation as the principal breadwinner in the home in which they grew up. A study a few years ago by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development showed that there were more than 90,000 teachers who were children of teachers themselves – and that’s an underestimate because it doesn’t count those who had a parent who was not the main earner. Around 20 per cent of our medical professionals come from medical families.
For many, this works fine. The current furore over “nepo babies” shows that there is a bit of pushback against famous mums and dads giving their children a leg-up in show business. A study by The Economist last month calculated that more than a quarter of young American film actors had parents in the entertainment industry. It seems to work in politics too.
But quite aside from concerns about nepotism, and conversely that children may find themselves pushed by their family into careers that they don’t want, the job market is changing so fast that doing a similar job to people in your family might be a road to nowhere. In any case, what do you do for children who come from homes where no one, for whatever reason, is in work? Trying to introduce young people to the world of work as soon as possible is surely a worthwhile exercise.
How to do that is another matter, and the way forward is probably to try lots of different schemes and see what children enjoy doing, rather than a top-down “initiative” by the politicians. But what is beyond dispute is that young people want to discover how the world works. At the very least, they can learn what they really, really don’t want to do, and that’s a start. Is four or five too young? Well, maybe. But think of this. Children like to earn money. Much better to feel you have got it as payment for doing a job like washing the car than simply getting a handout called “pocket money”.
So a fair wind, Alan Milburn, for your intriguing idea.
Need to know
The shift in the structure of work – what jobs are being created and which ones are going – has been one of the enduring realities of the world economy since the Industrial Revolution.
Until then, things changed fairly slowly. In 1500 some 60 per cent of UK workers were in agriculture, and by 1750 it was still more than 40 per cent. Then came first the surge in manufacturing and subsequently in services. Now agricultural workers make up 1.3 per cent of the UK workforce. If you look at individual industries, the shifts now can be huge, with the most extreme example being coal mining. The mines employed 1.2 million people in 1920, and 700,000 in the 1950s. Last year, it was 267.
It’s always easier to see job losses than job gains, but it is clear that the fastest-growing areas of employment in the UK right now are associated with AI. There is a PWC report here that chronicles what is happening. Ask AI itself, and it suggests that “the direct AI workforce is projected to explode from 158,000 jobs to 3.9 million by 2035, capturing nearly 12 per cent of the total UK”.
Of course, I should acknowledge that this is not a wholly reliable source. But I think the word “capturing” is the appropriate one, because it does convey both the scale and speed of what is happening, and that there may not be much we can do about it.
But the main point I want to make is the need for flexibility in thinking about both how to earn a living and how one really wants to spend one’s life. One thing has not changed at all over the centuries: most people will have to do some sort of work. However, what that work is going to be has changed beyond belief and will go on changing throughout our lives.
So somehow, if primary school children can be introduced, in a simple and fun way, to those two core points, they will be better able to cope with whatever is thrown at them later in life.
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