Home / Updates / North East work on skills development recognised in House of Lords youth unemployment report

North East work on skills development recognised in House of Lords youth unemployment report

As the House of Lords Youth Unemployment Committee publishes its Skills for every young person report, Ellen Thinnesen, Chair of the North East Local Enterprise Partnership’s Skills Advisory Panel comments on the recommendations.

The North East Skills Advisory Panel and the North East LEP’s Skills Director, Michelle Rainbow, have been involved in putting forward evidence and recommendations for this report and we’re pleased to see today that our recommendations have been included.

We particularly welcome that the report recognises careers education, information, advice and guidance as a critical component of young people’s education and that it should be introduced at primary school level, using the Good Career Guidance Benchmarks as a framework. Here in the North East, we’ve recently completed a successful two-year pilot project to translate and test an adapted set of benchmarks as a framework for primary schools. The results, which will be published next week, show a significant, positive impact on both pupils and teachers and we’re now scaling up the programme in the North East LEP area beyond the initial 70 primary schools involved.

We also welcome the recognition that effective engagement between businesses and education providers supports young people’s progression into the workplace. This is a key focus of the North East LEP’s North East Ambition programme and our work with schools, colleges and employers throughout our region, whilst acknowledging every area is different and requires specific intervention.

The recognition of the importance of engaging school governors in supporting schools to embed careers guidance throughout the curriculum also reflects our own experience, and we were the first LEP in the country to sign the School Governor Champion Charter.

A particular strength of the North East LEP is that we’re well placed to help create strong partnerships between the education and business communities. This has helped us to focus on skills development for young people that reflects the skills priorities of industry, making sure that schools and colleges are setting young people up for a successful future. To implement this in the North East, we’ve supported employers to co-design and deliver the T-Level curriculum and we’ve commissioned research into skills gaps in industry so we can ensure young people are being equipped with the skills they’ll need in their future careers.

The recommendation of a Career Guidance Guarantee to ensure that every disadvantaged young person has access to tailored, one-to-one careers guidance is also welcome and reflects what we learnt through our two-year Opportunity North East pilot, which has highlighted the impact of more intensive career guidance and the importance of robust data to inform careers guidance and education.

And finally, recommendations from our apprenticeship group around policy changes and the removal of barriers, which we hope will enable more employers and young people to benefit from on-the-job training, also feature in today’s report that you can read here.

Find out more about the work of the North East LEP on this agenda here.