How new funding will help Peterborough school and college leavers find work in jobs market affected by Covid

The money will provide courses for those school, college and university leavers aged 16-to-24 who find themselves not in education, employment or training (‘NEET’s).

The government announced last month, a £2.5bn learning package designed to get people working again after the pandemic subsides.

The courses – part of the National Skills Fund – will offer many thousands of young people and adults who have left school/college/university this summer without an A-level or equivalent, a free college course to boost their employability in the post-Covid landscape.

The ‘Lifetime Skills Guarantee’ courses will be made available from April 2021, and can be taken at a time and location to suit the learner.

With the CaPCA to receive £486,297 for the 2020/21 academic year – enough funding for two new programmes as part of the government Lifetime Skills Guarantee package, Metro Mayor, James Palmer said: “These courses will be made available through our existing education providers, and applicants will be able to contact them for more details very shortly.

“Right from the outset this funding was designed to provide education across a wide range of subjects: everything from the basics, such as learning English – something vital in the local job market especially for a multicultural city like Peterborough.

“Through to practical, technical skills such as fork-lift truck driving, health care workers and areas of heavy engineering.

“They’re aimed at anybody who qualifies, from young person’s just out of school/college or university to adults already in work requiring upgraded or updated qualifications.

“Two sums have been made available to fund the courses: £244,936 for enhanced one-year classroom-based courses for 18 and 19-year olds across the 2020/21 and 2021/22 financial years; and an additional £241,361 across the 2020/21 and 2021/22 financial years for the creation of sector-based work academies.

“These are specific courses that can be anything from 2-6 weeks long, individually designed with each employer to provide important skill specific training and job opportunities for people who are unemployed and claiming benefits.

“We’ve done a lot of things in my three years at the CaPCA, but I’m especially proud of our achievements in education, and these courses are just the latest of those.”

The government has indicated that it would also make higher education loans more flexible, allowing learners to space out their study across their lifetimes and careers and “…to support people to retrain for the jobs of the future.”

Launching the new Lifetime Skills Guarantee courses, Prime Minister Boris Johnson reiterated Chancellor, Rishi Sunak’s recent comments, that: “…while not every job can be saved, what we can do is give people the skills to find and create new and better jobs.

“We’re transforming the foundations of the skills system so that everyone has the chance to train and retrain.

“Currently, the government pays for a first A-level equivalent qualification up to the age of 23, but this is being extended to all ages for those courses deemed to be of value to employers, a comprehensive list of which will be made available in the coming weeks.”

A new set of proposals published by the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) echoes the Prime Ministers’ reasoning for funding these courses, saying: “Britain’s response to the growth in pandemic-related unemployment requires a cross-departmental approach, and the solution must start with identifying job opportunities and upskilling requirements as the core driver, not a generic skills or Work Programme with different government departments doing their own thing.

“However, this requires sophistication and close engagement with employers and sectors, utilising live rather than lagged data, and AELP argues that a simplistic approach is unlikely to work because the experiences of different sectors of the economy have varied so much over the past three months.

“The availability of opportunity will also be driven by regional requirements involving the Mayoral Combined Authorities and others using live data sets necessary to help identify which opportunities are available, where and when, drawing upon a combination of sector-driven intelligence and on-the-ground opportunities from Jobcentre Plus and other sources.”

AELP’s proposed framework has helped the government and education providers to identify the priority groups who most require support: NEET/long term unemployed before the crisis, who will be pushed even further away from job opportunities; low skilled, recently unemployed individuals as a consequence of the COVID-19 crisis; higher skilled workers displaced by the crisis primarily due to a shrinking in the economy; young talent (16-24) many of who are entering the workforce for the first time; and economically inactive individuals going back into the workforce due to economic need.

Mark Dawson, CEO AELP said: “We don’t think there’s time for new employment and skills programmes to be devised when we are plunging into what could be the worst recession in living memory.

“A sophisticated new approach is therefore needed to maximise the economic impact from existing programmes and get as many unemployed people back into work as quickly as possible.

“This means central government departments working together closely with devolved authorities and education and employment providers in a way that avoids a hit and miss approach, and which enables targeted support to reach priority sectors and individuals who need that support.”

Applicants interested in taking up these courses will be able to obtain more details from local education providers in the coming weeks.

The likely courses available will include: basic skills and needs (literacy, numeracy and digital) and areas such as mental health; employability skills: the skills needed to acquire a job (CV writing, interview skills, assessment skills, presentation skills, confidence etc.); essential skills: essential to operate effectively in the workplace/working world (team working, presentation etc); sector-specific skills determined by level eg scissor handling for hairdressers, coding for digital.

For sector-specific skills a unitised approach to apprenticeship standards may be considered, with an initial assessment and final assessment encompassing apprenticeship knowledge skills and behaviours in part or as a whole; entrepreneurial skills: as the economy shifts it is possible that there will be a shift to greater numbers of self-employed individuals in certain sectors as the economic model changes; and transferable skills that will be of use and benefit in other roles in other industries.