According to data from the Office for National Statistics, nearly a million young people are not currently in work, education or training.
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00:00To say that the problem is immense is something of an understatement. We're talking about
00:06850,000 of the so-called Gen Zs, and of course they are the kids, or young people, shall
00:13we say, in their early 20s, who are also sometimes referred as NEETs, not in education, employment
00:19or training. This is a really worrying issue because these are people who are at the beginning
00:26of their working lives and careers who should be going out and starting in organisations,
00:32getting the training and the education and whatever else and the apprenticeships that
00:36certainly was commonplace when I was leaving school, dare I say, in the late 70s. Indeed,
00:43many of those people who start in low positions or lowly positions have gone on to reach very
00:48senior positions in their organisations and companies. The fact is that there is a dearth
00:54of opportunity for these young people and indeed it's pretty dreadful because of course
00:58if you get into this situation where you feel hopeless in many ways about getting employment
01:05and indeed decent employment, I should say, because it's not that many years ago, in fact
01:09not that long ago, we were talking about as an employment crisis in the sense we couldn't
01:13get enough people into jobs and indeed there are still many jobs, although when you look
01:17at what they are, they're quite often lowly paid, zero contracts and indeed not the sort
01:23of thing that's going to sustain you through your working life. So it really is a worrying
01:27situation and indeed the fact that the government are trying to take this on board is to be
01:32applauded. The difficulty is the solutions are quite hard to contemplate because we need
01:39everyone, all organisations and businesses to bring in more young people.
01:45In its Youth Guarantee Initiative, the government has said that every young person will be given
01:49the chance to earn or learn. It's reported that young men are more likely than young
01:54women to not be in education, employment or training. It's thought that young people are
01:59citing poor mental health as one of the key issues, preventing them from finding work.
02:05I've long been a fan of the sort of the German education system, which values technical education
02:11in the very same sort of way as it does to sort of the traditional academic route as
02:14it were. And indeed one of my sort of big concerns for sort of many years has been the
02:18sort of the fact that the FE colleges, further education that is, have been starved of resources
02:23because that's the place where you want to sort of to create the sort of the skilled
02:27people.