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| All in a day's work - The Young Foundation's Summer Update |
From the Director Last week the Association of Graduate Recruiters announced that 70,000 graduates remain unemployed. Graduates with good degrees should be well-placed to get jobs as the economy limps back into life. But our work has shown that universities often do a poor job in preparing young people for the world of work. This affects young people from disadvantaged backgrounds disproportionately because, in the words of 15 year old Hiran Adhia, they often lack the “social capacity, networks, leadership skills and confidence to pursue dreams”. To tackle this problem we developed Fastlaners which helps graduates who’ve got talent and qualifications but lack the right connections to find the best route into good jobs. Fastlaners is being run out of our new office in Canary Wharf and is an example of what we see as an important new approach – fast, intensive support with a strong emphasis on social and non-cognitive skills. The results so far are very promising. No-one knows if unemployment will start falling, or if a double dip recession will push it up again. But we can be fairly certain that jobs will be high on the public agenda for the foreseeable future. It will be more important than ever to ensure that everyone's talent and potential are used and not wasted. Over the last two years we’ve been developing many projects focused on work – from new models of apprenticeship to intensive courses for unemployed teenagers. Our research teams are looking at long-term unemployment and the challenges of nightwork. Working Rite is being backed by the government as the model for 100,000 new apprenticeship places. And our first Studio Schools are on track for launch in September. But the jury is still out over whether we will see another ‘lost generation’, who’ll finish school or university not to step onto a career ladder but rather onto a treadmill of unsuccessful applications and killing time. |
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From our work |
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Working Rite For the past year the Young Foundation’s Learning Launchpad has been working with Sandy Campbell from Working Rite, an award-winning Scottish social enterprise with a novel idea for a modern rite-of-passage for young people. Pairing disengaged young people with self-employed tradesmen, Working Rite has designed a fundamentally different kind of learning experience to those offered by traditional employment schemes. It is based outside the classroom, in a real working environment. At its core is a six-month working relationship between the young person and their first boss. This formative relationship is the basis for learning not just technical skills in the construction and other trades, but crucially the transferable life lessons about the importance of being dependable, hardworking and a good team player. It teaches the very SEED (social intelligence, emotional resilience, enterprise and self-discipline) skills described in our 2009 publication Grit: The skills for success and how they are grown. Our work with the social venture has seen it grow to be operating across Scotland, securing further investment, and actively recruit a new Chief Operating Officer ahead of the idea being disseminated across England via the Coalition Government’s commitment to 100,000 work pairing placements, announced earlier this year.
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"When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world." George Washington CarverWhat is Social Entrepreneurship?Statement of Faith
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