On Monday 22nd June and Tuesday 23rd June Youth Employment UK attended the Aelp Conference 2015 with some of our youth ambassadors. We went and sat in to observe some speakers on day one such as Dr Ann Limb’s speech and Jack sawyers’ speech. We learnt about the South East Midlands LEP and Ingeus.
Later on Monday Skills Minister Nick Boles MP talked about the governments new “Productivity Focus”, he indicated that this will be a key theme of the next budget and that the skills and education sector would be part of the governments focus on driving up productivity.
The Skills Minister talked about the value apprenticeships bring to the Country in monetary terms – they found for every pound spent on a Level 3 Apprenticeship its return was £28 or £26 for a Level 2 Apprenticeship. He said that there was a need for traineeships to make sure people are ready for apprenticeships and that the Job Centre Plus must integrate with providers. The Minister suggested that Colleges would be affected by the priority and budget changes to come.
On the Tuesday we went to some of the workshops to see what other people were experiencing. I went to the Traineeship workshop and in the discussions found that there are some real barriers to overcome. These were – getting Ofsted to grade them on the traineeships they provide, trying to get funding for starting traineeships, getting young people or employers to understand traineeships, they found that only 8-12 week placements worked better because then young people don’t become disengaged, having to look at the pathway of a traineeship such as an apprenticeship, to better combine traineeships and apprenticeships, to try to understand the traineeships from a youth perspective and to try to relay the benefits to parents or families for their children.
In the afternoon on day 2 Laura-Jane and I took to the main stage to join a panel of speakers which included John Woodcock MP, Shadow Minister for Young People, David Russell from The Education and Training Foundation and Paul Steer from OCR.
This was the first time I have spoken on behalf of YEUK and talked about my own journey into employment. It was nerve racking but really rewarding. I had some great feedback and lots of tweets, you can find those with the conference #aelp2015
We spoke about the issues young people face making the transition from education into employment, LJ spoke passionately about the need for quality over quantity when it comes to apprenticeships and that organisations working in the space should give everything the “parent test”. Our key point was that to design any service for young people successfully they must be consulted, Youth Voice should be at the heart of this sector and everything going on in it.
It was an exhausting two days but we really did meet lots of great people and got the chance to spend time with some of our existing members and patrons which was great. A big thanks to Aelp for organising such a great conference and making YEUK part of it.
