ATL

A lost generation?

With fewer jobs and training opportunities, young people leaving education face a bleak future. We must do all we can to help them, says ATL general secretary Mary Bousted

This is not a good time to be a young person, particularly one leaving school at 16 or 18 looking for employment. We have heard much about the thousands of bright young people with good A-level grades who will miss out on a university place. Yes, that is hard, and unjust, but much less has been heard about those young people condemned to a prolonged period of unemployment before they have even begun their working life. These young people, typically, take up less column inches. Their parents are less likely to form a vociferous lobbying group and they are less likely to lobby for themselves.

The 1980s saw the last major downturn in the economy and a prolonged and vicious period of unemployment in which young people with low skills were particularly badly affected. This recession is likely to be even worse. Professor Danny Dorling warns, in a report for the Prince's Trust, that youth unemployment could be worse than after 1929.

The young unemployed are caught in a catch-22. They are disadvantaged in employment prospects now because they have no experience. They are unable to get experience because there are no jobs. When the economy does pick up they will lose out to those with previous work experience. As one young person caught up in this hopeless situation said to me: "I feel I'm on the scrapheap before my life has begun."

It is difficult to capture just how hopeless, how resentful and how despairing these young people are. They have no responsibility for the global economic collapse. They did not create, nor take part in the sub-prime mortgage scandal; they have not burned up the world's resources; they will not receive the rewards of a welfare state to anything like the same extent as their parents; and they will not, in all likelihood, be the beneficiary of a final salary pension scheme. The party is over and they were never invited; they didn't even get a slice of the going-home cake. And remember, time drags heavily on the young - a year without work or prospects seems like a lifetime.

So, everything possible must be done, and done now, to provide opportunities and hope for today's young unemployed. The country needs to invest, now, in educating, training and providing job opportunities for them. Extra university and college places should be provided to enable those with the qualifications to continue to further study. The apprenticeship scheme (which Labour has expanded from 75,000 places to 225,000) needs further expansion. Yes, it will cost, but pause to reflect how much more costly widespread youth unemployment will be (there are currently more than one million young unemployed).

Remember the lasting effects of the recession in the 1980s in those areas where the manufacturing base was decimated. Now the children of the parents who, because of social exclusion, turned to drink and drugs, face the same prospect. They must be given positive choices. Their lives must be valued and their potential contribution to society recognised.

Teachers and lecturers feel the waste of youth unemployment particularly badly. Their exhortations to pupils and students to complete homework and to study hard to gain the qualifications that will lead to further study or employment are likely to fall on deaf ears if the prospect of gaining a place in FE or HE, or getting a job, seem to be impossibly remote. Teachers working in schools in areas of social deprivation, where there is little or no prospect of meaningful and gainful employment, will find a difficult job made harder, as they and their work are viewed by their pupils as meaningless, unable to make a difference to their future lives as adults. At the next election, education staff will want to ask themselves: which party is going to deliver on a better deal on employment prospects for the young?

Lord Vetinari, the despot in novelist Terry Pratchett's Discworld city Ankh-Morpork, allowed condemned prisoners to be 'accidentally' left with a spoon with which they could attempt to tunnel out of their prison cell. They did not know that surrounding the cell wall was another, stronger wall. He felt that it was his duty, even as despot, to give his subjects - including the most hopeless; those about to be hanged - hope. He recognised that hope is a basic human need, without which people turn to despair.

Young people feel things most acutely. They do not have the benefit of experience to enable them to bear hopelessness, exclusion and rejection. We have a duty, as adults in a society that has served us well, to support these young people in all the ways that we can so they can participate in and build tomorrow's world