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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
My favourite Christmas job involved decking a hall with boughs of holly. It was prickly and it wasn’t quite a hall: it was the kitchen showroom on my local high street. But, at 17, it made a change from the usual holiday gigs as a receptionist. By the time I left school I had started to have some understanding of the working world, and of how you were expected to behave in it. I’d also gained a life-long respect for those who spend their days doing repetitive work.
Few teenagers have that kind of experience any longer. Safeguarding rules, the rising levels of the youth minimum wage and a challenging jobs market all contribute (John Lewis has seen a 50 per cent increase in applicants this year for its Christmas jobs). But knocking away the first rung on the ladder has real consequences.
The growing gap between young people and the workplace is manifesting itself in employers claiming that new hires are clueless, overly sensitive or even rude. Just this week, a business founder told me she doesn’t know how to handle a recent recruit who complains that her punctuation is aggressive. Another found that a new graduate hire had done nothing for three days: she was apparently waiting for clearer instructions.
The risk is that Gen Z will be stereotyped as flaky, unreliable and too bolshie to employ.
This is unfair. But it doesn’t help that we force school pupils to keep resitting maths and English until 18, then offer so little help with deciding what to do next. Some default to university, lumbering themselves with debt on courses which may not be worth it. Far too many are written off before they’ve even started: there are almost a million young people not in work, training or education. Their anxiety deepens when the workplace is an unknown.
Only about half of today’s 18-year-olds had done work experience last year — and quite a bit of that will have been the awkward shadowing of a parent or their parent’s friend. This is far too haphazard, and cements disadvantage. Teachers in some staffrooms are reduced to opening their address books to see if they can find someone in a field a child has shown interest in.
We need a new model that makes work intelligible to young people and develops the transferable skills that employers want: flexibility, resilience, communication.
One charity is showing what this could look like. Futures For All matches schools to hundreds of employers, providing structured, high-quality work experience and handling the paperwork. The impact is impressive. The majority of teenagers report an improved understanding of career opportunities and a third of teachers notice higher engagement by those kids in the classroom.
Nick Brook, the charity’s chief executive, says that work experience used to be “all about . . . giving back. Now employers worry about the skills shortage and the talent pipeline”.
Some placements are letting businesses get eyes on potential recruits. During a four-week programme with three schools in Somerset, Clarks Shoes asked the participants to design new trainers for their own demographic. Some were so good, the company made prototypes.
The faces of the youngsters, in the resulting video, are infused with the joy of the real — the excitement of seeing a creative task well done. It’s transformational.
I’ve seen the same look among 14- to 19-year-old pupils at the University Technical Colleges, where the courses are run with employers and offer hands-on learning in specialist areas — everything from robotics to film.
Parents have been wary of technical education, fearing that a straightforward academic curriculum is more valuable. But a recent report by the Policy Exchange think-tank found that UTCs have the highest proportion of exam entries in Stem (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects at GCSE level, above any school type in England. About half of pupils at these institutions go on to university, and around a quarter do apprenticeships.
These success stories suggest that employers are genuinely benefiting from the collaboration. In Leeds, Siemens asked UTC students to help improve the supply of oil into gear units. The company has implemented their solution, which it says is saving it £24,000 a year. Two former UTC students, who met at university, have founded a business selling electronics kits that help children to learn.
There should be a UTC in every town. Skills England has estimated that in priority sectors alone, 900,000 more skilled workers will be needed by 2030.
But while the Department for Education talks about the importance of T-levels and industry placements, it has just halted plans for a proposed new UTC in Southampton, which had been backed by the previous government. This is short-sighted, and partly a product of Labour’s assault on free schools. Meanwhile the government’s recent review of the curriculum barely looked at work experience.
Labour is proposing the positive step of giving 18- to 21-year-olds access to training, an apprenticeship or extra support to find work. But we also need to address younger ages, at which disillusionment can set in.
Getting a handle on the world of work can boost confidence at a critical stage. We can either throw up our hands in despair that artificial intelligence risks eroding entry-level jobs; or we can restore the workplace as an essential part of growing up.