What’s the problem?
• Youth unemployment
• Skills deficit
• Lack of resilience in Public Services & National Infrastructure
Solution?
A national programme to engage young people 16 – 25 in a new “National Effort” to build back better across public services and national infrastructure. In return participants will benefit from real world training, building skills and experience across a range of roles from trades/engineering & scientific to clerical sectors.
What are the key objectives?
Create a new intermediate level workforce between full-time education and full-time work, aimed at giving young people new skills and a practical introduction to the world of work. Giving future employers a much more job-ready workforce pool from which to choose.
At the same time this 2-year programme would create a huge task force to help deliver improvements to services and infrastructure nationwide.
How will it work?
Volunteers: will be given 13 weeks of residential “basic training” covering the objectives of the programme and the various benefits to all participants. Each volunteer would have to choose from a list of streams to follow upon completion of their basic training. Each stream would be formally sponsored and supported by public and private sector organisations who would ensure the volunteers get the relevant training and experience with a view to hiring them on completion of the 2 years. Volunteers would receive a guaranteed income throughout the scheme.
Sponsors: will sign up to the scheme to have co-funded volunteers available to help them deliver various sanctioned projects in return for formal on-the-job training. Involvement in the scheme would provide sponsors with priority access to government funded and sanctioned projects. How will it be funded? DWP would provide standard UC to each volunteer and this would be supplemented by the sponsors to the full pay of 3 times standard UC rates. This approach means that the costs for each volunteer is net neutral as they would probably be receiving UC if they had not volunteered.
Operation & administration costs would be funded by central government but would be cross charged to the various programmes & projects delivered through the scheme. All central and local government departments would be encouraged to participate in the scheme as they should benefit from the pre-trained workforce pool following completion of the 2 years service.
Desired outcomes
250K+ young people each year graduating from the scheme with enhanced skills and experience leading to greatly improved career prospects.
1,000’s of public & private sector organisations supporting the scheme each year benefiting from access to the talent pool for project delivery and ultimately hiring decisions.
Employers would see an increasing pool of more mature, skilled and experienced young people to hire and the volunteers would have a wider base of knowledge and a sense of public service and increased self-esteem when entering the job market following 2 years national service through the scheme.
Project selection
In support of the Government’s “Levelling-Up” agenda, many of the projects selected for full/partial delivery via the scheme would be submitted by local councils with the support of residents. The management of the master project list would be centralised, but the delivery of each project would managed locally. The project list for the scheme would be an evolving list of priorities and progress would be reviewed and published to ensure continued public support for the scheme as a whole.
1373-11