Where do young people work?

The current policy intention, that all young people remain in some form of accredited education or training to the age of 18 by 2015, poses significant challenges. The jobs without training (JWT) group includes young people who are in full-time work and not in receipt of training leading to National Vocational Qualification level 2 (or above); knowing more about them and meeting their needs will be crucial for the delivery of the Raising of the Participation Age agenda. This paper presents findings from a study of the JWT group, from the perspective of employers, which formed part of wider research including policymakers, young people and their parents. It concludes that the label JWT fails to describe the heterogeneity of this group and the needs of those who employ them. If routes into the labour market remain open to 16- and 17-year-olds, attention must be given to supporting young people's transitions through a more active role in job placement and securing greater support for formalised training

Understanding the Growth in Welfare Benefit Receipt in Britain: A Review of the Evidence

This paper summarises the conclusions from a more extensive report commissioned by the Treasury and the Ministry of Social Policy to provide an explanation of growth in welfare benefit receipt in Britain in the period 1971 to 1997. The study is structured around a simple heuristic model of four sets of influences, 'drivers', the interaction of which helps to explain trends in claimant caseloads: the economy, demography, welfare institutions and belief systems. Four sets of claimants are considered: unemployed people, disabled people, retirement pensioners and children and families. It assembles a widely dispersed literature, in the first comprehensive review of the evidence on this issue. The conclusions reported here are supported in the full report by a wide range of data and analyses. The full report has been extensively edited, updated, reformatted and published in September 2000 by the Policy Press at the University of Bristol, under the title The Making of A Welfare Class? Benefit receipt in Britain, by Robert Walker with Marilyn Howard. Details of this publication may be obtained through the link to the Policy Press website: http://www.bris.ac.uk/Publications/TPP/catalog.htm The study concludes that, while caseloads increased across the four domains, they did so for very different reasons. While the process of de-industrialisation provided an important back-cloth to all the changes, it was only directly implicated as a major influence in the growth of unemployment related benefits. The upward trends in disability benefits were principally a reflection of the greater social awareness of the personal costs of disability, while the growth in benefits pertaining to the family was very largely a response to changing social attitudes and sexual behaviour. Demography, notably increased longevity, explains the observed growth in pensioner caseloads although the balance between contributory and means-tested pensions was the result of foresighted policy decisions made between the 1940s and 1970s.

Raising the age of participation in education or training to 18 in Wales

In England, the compulsory age of participation in education or training was raised to 17 in 2013 and then 18 in 2015. In Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, the school leaving age is 16. The idea of raising the age of participation in education or training is gaining traction in the Scottish context, as well as in Wales. The Wales Centre for Public Policy (WCPP) conducted research for the Welsh Government to explore the implications of pursuing this policy in Wales. The research considered how RPA might interact with ongoing reforms to school age and post-16 provision in Wales, and explored alternative policies which concentrate on reducing early school leaving, as opposed to policies that legally require young people to remain in learning for longer periods of time