Nearly 1m young people out of work

That’s the Labour effect 😎

@LunaDeBallona is there anything at all that might suit on local councils websites. If she ticks she has a disability it’s usually guaranteed interview if meet essential criteria. Having been private sector now local government it’s definitely a different environment and much more diverse workforce.

Benefits should never give an equivalent lifestyle to working, and until we address that ... nothing will change.

I’m already assuming my child won’t attend university as I’m not convinced it’s worth it. The plan is to try and find a work placement so he can work and get the qualification at the same time. It’s whether Ai is going to make the job even be there by the time he finishes his A levels. Right now no one knows what’s going to happen. I’d be very concerned about running up the uni debts and if the career will be available in the end.

That’s crazy, hire someone who could be a total liability then you can’t sack them wtf?

Yeah well we're all pretty fed up tbf

Working our arses off and being taxed to the hilt

Prepare for it to get worse for entry level. Come April 2026 there will be "protections" in place for new employees covering sick leave, probation etc so you get day one entitlements. Companies have reacted by getting rid of entry level as they can't take the risk of a bad employee. Why hire someone without history that you can't get rid off. Bad news for grads (so much debt, no grad scheme), good news for contractors and experienced workers.

She has 7 gcse passes, including Maths and both English.
She went to college to do a level 3 BTec - she lasted 2 terms due to college promising that her (relatively simple) ‘reasonable adjustments’ were followed but teachers seemed to delight in ignoring the requests. She was utterly exhausted from masking constantly And coping with the terrible situations she was put in.
This knocked her confidence terribly and she has no desire to put herself through that again.
She loves animals but cannot do any ‘stable girl’ work due to spinal issues from falling off horses.
She even offered to volunteer with the animals at the RSPCA but all they wanted was someone to clean out cages and kennels -all the care/dog walking etc was done by the paid employees.
She can’t do anything on the phone .
She could work in a pub as long as they were prepared to train her -but nobody is.
Shes sensible, she drives, she has her own car. She’s intelligent and very witty.
Shes mature for her age.
She couldn’t be a cleaner as she doesn’t see ‘dirt’ in the same way a NT person does.
She can’t get a job as a delivery driver as they are all taken by the local ‘migrant’ hotel men - (please don’t say this isn’t the case as it most certainly is. The car park of the hotel has mopeds in it) the local takeaways have no interest in employing a white girl I'm afraid.
She couldn’t do McDonalds as it’s just too much - the lights, the beeping, the shout8mg, the smells , the constant ‘go faster’. She just couldn’t manage all of those things at once.
I have been to the job center about 20 times with her. She doesn’t need me EVERY time but I go with her to try and push the staff into helping her.
Shes dying to work. Dying to meet new people and to feel useful. She feels utterly useless and that she will be destined to beimg on benefits unless something changes . She doesn’t want to be a drain on society.
She just needs some understanding and she could fly -but no one will give her a Fucking chance and it breaks my heart.

edit . Thanks you @SaulJunction for your lovely post/offer. It made me cry

I understand uni debt very well thanks. I never got a job well enough paid for long enough to clear my debts due to disabilities. It hung over my head for over 20 years freaking me out every time I got reminders of how much it had grown, and every time I had to scrape together enough evidence to defer.

It was immensely stressful having it there, even though I knew theoretically it should get written off, I never believed it until the day it did. The loan company changed, letters from the new loan company got more threatening in tone. It was awful just knowing it was there. Maybe the government would change and the new one would demand it......maybe the loan company would change and the conditions would change too....maybe they would decide they want it back now......maybe I would get refused a mortgage or a loan...

You have no idea how it works.

Yes this

What does the tell you about public sentiment? We live in a democracy and there is nothing intrinsically unethical about threads such a these. We need to decide as a society how we structure our welfare state. Debate and discussion is normal. We are in an eye watering amount of public debt and have a top heavy population pyramid. Welfare is a huge burden on public finances. We absolutely should be discussing this and calling it benefit bashing is reductionist and a clear attempt to shut down debate.

"Labour are bringing in compulsory work placements"

I'm sure that I'm not alone in remembering the Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP) which then became the Youth Training Scheme (YTS).

This was a Labour (and then Conservative) scheme to give unemployed school leavers either one or two years of training and work placements.

Neither of these schemes were very successful and it has been argued that YOP and YTS trainees often replaced employees on full wages and also traditional apprenticeships as companies were subsidised to take on these trainees.

Totally agree with you. This is happening in my own family & is being passed down the generations. People deny this happens & blame it on no jobs being available etc but this is not true in every case. I honestly think the lack of job's for young people from 13 + is part of the problem, all my friends & I had various job's from 13 (paperounds, fruit shops, chambermaiding, washing up etc). Also young people who see themselves as 'above' certain jobs, I used to muck out at stables & get covered in horse shit, there is no shame in working anywhere & there should be shame if you are able to work & not paying your way in life.

We, as a country, voted for Brexit in order to have a high wage economy. What has changed?

oh goody, another benefit bashing thread.

I’m with you. We are a shitty generation of adults - and I’m talking about all the parents of children in their 40’s upwards - who have utterly let the next generation down. We protected the elderly - who, quite honestly, have had their time, and could protect themselves by isolating - but instead, locked everyone down and kept our kids at home for months and months. We sacrificed the wellbeing and development of a generation as a result. We now have a generation of kids who either can’t cope, won’t cope, or can’t work because there is none, even if they are resilient and want to work. We have set them up for that by taking them out of school, socially isolating them and then exposing them to stupid alarmist fucking news broadcasts on the number of rising deaths, played on repeat, day after day. And we have done fuck all of any value to really help them recover as a result. All those old people we protected in doing so died or will die anyway, but vast numbers of young people have a long life of uncertainty, borderline poverty and pessimism to look forward to. All while never moving out of home because they can’t afford it.
On top of that, they also have loads of middle aged people who had way more advantages and possibilities as a generation now telling them they’re all workshy and useless. And all this, largely from Gen X’ers, who are the first to wang on about how great we are as a generation, despite the fact we are the very generation that put mobile phones and iPads into our kids hands from a young age, yet now wonder why they can’t function like the generations before did 🙄

We should be ashamed, really.

And before some pro-lockdown person tells me how bad it all was, and how wrong I am, I worked front line. It was still a pile of shit, handled appallingly, which we sleepwalked into and the biggest losers were our kids.

Honestly, we are finding the same with student teachers.

We see six student teachers across the year. Of the six who came to us last year, only one was of the calibre you saw 10/15 years ago. One was in a different keystage to me and I didnt know him. I honestly thought he was there on work experience because, whenever I saw him, he was sitting there doing nothing and looking sullen.

In some respects, I quite admire the students who are confident about putting boundaries in place around excessive workloads etc. But there is an increasing number who come in and sit at the side of the class and won't do anything unless explicitly directed by the class teacher, who refuse to mark work, who don't plan properly and think they can wing it by using chatgpt to create lessons which are just unteachable and inaccurate, who don't turn up if they don't fancy it and don't always let us know, who clearly haven't ensured their subject knowledge before teaching a class. The list goes on...

There's a real learning your craft element to teaching and the impetus and, to be quite honest, capacity just isn't there with a lot of them.

Whilst I agree that this isn't ideal, what is the alternative? Ultimately we have a need for more carers than people than that want to be carers. To some extent we need to use carrot and stick to encourage people to take these roles otherwise where will we be? Lots of people won't have their needs met at all which is far worse than someone getting their needs by a reluctant and less than enthusiastic carer. Obviously safeguarding would have to be strong but the idea that we have some untaped pool of highly motivated people desperate to care for our vulnerable is nonsense. Compulsory placements are a good idea on this field in my view.

There are several issues causing numbers to sky rocket;

• increase to NMW and Employers NI
• the impending Employment Rights bill which makes decisions around employment far more considered
• AI

Sorry, I might be going off at a tangent here and you may well have already considered this.

Have you thought about offering the position as something like a level 3 or 4 apprenticeship?

Anecdotally, I'm aware of numbers of young people locally who are particularly searching out apprenticeships.

Sorry, if this is something that you have already considered and found not to work.

YABU to describe the need to claim survival money while trying to get started in a system that is utterly rigged against anyone under about 32 as “a life on benefits” as if it’s some kind of lifestyle choice.

But YANBU to worry about the situation where we have so many young people NEET. It’s genuinely frightening . It’s going to affect their entire lives, and our retirements and their children’s entire lives too.

There are many, many causes but the main one is bloody Brexit and the resulting flatlining of the UK economy. We are the only nation destroying our young people this way. It’s depressing beyond belief. I hope my kids move abroad when they are old enough.

Yes it’s a ln extra problem Labour are creating unnecessarily for young people. In answer to the pp it’s a cost issue. You can see the impact with the youth unemployment going up.

Yep, agree with Rangers or Scouts or sport - life skills beyond school/home so vital.

Absolutely. I 'earn' 2.8k a month but tax/NI etc takes it down to a lot less. Families living solely on benefits can earn as much as me or more, but don't pay any tax. What is the (realistic) answer?

@grimupnorthnot What dc should do, and can do, are two different things unfortunately. Where I live, it’s who you know. Many dc witk out they need to do something, but struggle to get it. We have three grammar schools in my nearest larger town, 4 secondary schools there and a secondary in my little town plus another one only 5 miles away. There just are not sufficient employment opportunities for school age dc. My view do something in a leadership role, or rangers, music or sport. Volunteer if possible but paid roles are like hens teeth.