Whilst in the West Midlands there was a rise, unemployment fell from September to October in Worcestershire by 327 to 10,843 on the claimant count (for some reason, the higher more widely recognised figure is not available for the County), although this is still 582 higher than a year ago. It is difficult to quote comparable percentages because the County Council use a different base population to the ONS. On the County basis, unemployment on claimant count in Worcestershire is 3.9% (with Worcester, Redditch and Kidderminster all over 4%), compared with 6.7% for the West Midlands and 5.5% for England and Wales (for some reason they don't give a figure for the UK as a whole).
Youth unemployment in Worcestershire (for 18-24 year-olds) is higher than the overall figure at 7.8% and above the England percentage of 7.4%, though below the West Midlands at 9.3%. Within these figures are some parts of the County that are consistently higher. The top ten areas vary slightly from one month to the next but are mainly from the poorer parts of our larger towns, with Oldington and Foley Park in Kidderminster pretty consistently at number one with 17.4% of young people claiming in October. The numbers involved range from 50 to 95 in the various wards, so small changes in numbers can make a big difference to percentages. This also suggests that if any local response was appropriate the numbers involved would make it manageable. However, we should not overlook the fact that the top ten wards only account for 700 out of a County total of 3220, so there are a lot of unemployed young people in the rest of the County too.
WorkCare, the Industrial Mission team in Coventry and Warwickshire have recently surveyed church responses to youth unemployment in conjunction with the Saltley Trust. Details of a recent presentation can be found here. If anyone in Worcestershire has any thoughts about doing work with unemployed young people, then I would be interested to know.
The Oldington and Foley Park percentage is 2% down from September and one might surmise from this that there is some correlation with the academic year and also the availability of training courses. But it is disturbing to see that the percentage of claimants aged 18-24 claiming for over 12 months started to increase more rapidly, from around 2% of all claimants aged 18-24 in October 2009 to 8.6% in June 2010, and although it then fell to 3%, more recently the figures are starting to rise again to now stand at 5.7%, though a newspaper report I read said that the national figure is over 30%. It seems that there must be a question of definition here as it is hard to believe the Worcestershire figure could be so much lower that the national one. The Worcestershire figures refer only to 18-24 year-olds but a recent Barnado's report says the unemployment rate for 16 and 17 year-olds has doubled over the past decade and that they were the most disadvantaged because the government is prioritising young people from the age of 18 and above.
There is talk, once again, of a 'lost generation' (including from Barnado's in their comments on the figures above). An examination of unemployment figures going back 30 years shows that youth unemployment rarely dips below 500,000, even in the boom times. In each of the recessions of the early 1980s, 1990s and now the figure doubled. What may be different this time is that many of those unemployed, or under-employed (i.e. doing jobs below their qualifications) are graduates. I am old enough to have graduated a few years before the 1980s recession, and whilst I had to apply for many jobs, I eventually got something in the line of work I expected and wanted. Although I was not directly involved in running them, I do, however, remember a few years later the huge number of young people on YTS and YOP schemes and the like. The difference, perhaps, is that there was a much smaller number of graduates then as compared with now.
Having recently made a comment about the present numbers of graduates, I was reminded that the most successful countries are those where their people are highly qualified. Does this mean that the economy is not providing the kinds of jobs for the number of qualified young people we have encouraged to take degrees, or does it mean that we need to look again at the skills that courses are providing (both 'hard' in the sense of the academic content and 'soft' in terms of personal qualities)?
This is a subject of some interest to the Church that thinks much about the education of the whole person, and I have to say that I personally react against the rather utilitarian sense of many government policies about education over the past 30 years - though I write as someone with two vocational degrees, albeit the second might be regarded as vocational only insofar as it was obtained to be used for the rather narrow occupation I now pursue!
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