New Education Initiatives and Runaway Children
An ongoing area of interest I have is the perennial problem with NEETS. (That is those Not in Education, Employment or Training). When people aged between 16 and 25 do not fall into any of these categories, it presents a real challenge as a lot of these people will move into long-term unemployment. The new government proposals offer a number of measures to tackle this problem, they will make mentoring more available to school-leavers as well as extending Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA’s), which provide up to £30 a week, through to all forms of educational training.
This reminds me of a Private Members Bill I introduced earlier this year which aimed to give this kind of help to young people upon leaving school. I said that I wanted to give them what wealthier people have- a personal trainer and a life coach! I believe that all young people post-16 should have a mentor who keeps an eye on their educational training and how they are getting themselves ready for their future. What we can see from the Leitch report earlier this year is that the number of unskilled jobs in our economy is rapidly diminishing. This number is estimated to fall as low as 500 000 or 600 000 in the by 2020 and this will have major implications. We need to think about the number of unskilled people coming out of our educational system. This is the big challenge that the Government is trying to address with today’s announcement. Another issue that I have been involved with over the past few weeks is the campaign on runaway children that Helen Southworth, the MP for Warrington South, has been very involved with. There are a large number of runaway children in most constituencies, many of whom are not documented as there is no central register, and it is therefore very unclear what happens to these children. Helen and I have recently been to see the Prime Minister about this and a two day quasi-Select Committee enquiry into it has been held, the report of which is coming out soon. This is a good campaign and I think we are eventually going to get there. I led a campaign on the subject of young people being drawn into underage prostitution around five years ago and in that case we had to push very hard to get the law changed but we eventually managed it and I believe we can achieve something similar with this campaign.
