EDUCATION, TRAINING AND EMPLOYMENT STRATEGIES
You hardly need an economics degree to know that COVID is having a devastating impact on our economies and employment. And just like the virus itself, the impacts are not being felt equally, with most of the economic pain being felt by the young, the poor and women. With the numbers of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) already stubbornly high due to structural changes over the last 50 years, this is yet another barrier for young people in care and care leavers to face.
In my part of the world, New Zealand and Australia are now both officially in recession. In the latest quarter Australia’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) declined by 7% and New Zealand’s by 12.2%.
This will be the third recession that I will have lived through as an adult. While the New Zealand one during the Global Financial Crisis was shallow and the effects were quite short-lived, the two in the UK each lasted 15 months and as importantly they both took more than 3 years for GDP to return to pre-recession levels. However, remarkably most of those of you in Australia will have little or no experience of working in our sector during a recession, as your last one was 30 years ago.
This time Australia and New Zealand join all seven G7 countries and most of the world in recession including the US (-9.1%), Canada (-11.5%) and the UK (-20.4%). We have all seen job losses already with more to come when various employment subsidy schemes come to an end, and governments across the world are projecting high levels of unemployment for years to come.
However, while I think of myself as a realist about both the pandemic and recession, I am not pessimistic. And if ever there was a time to put more time, energy and focus on education, training and employment, that time would surely be now. Indeed, I am optimistic that together we can all improve education, training and employment outcomes and better contribute to care experienced people leading a life that is for them more meaningful.
In brief, here are my top 9+3 strategies.
1. Compensatory education for children in care to address schooling gaps and additional support needs.
2. Build knowledge and understanding of, and connections in, Vocational Education and Training (VET). Most of us took a university rather than a VET career pathway, and with some notable exceptions we know lamentably little about this.
3. Young people having work experience will be even more important than ever whether that be part-time, the gig economy, through school, or volunteering.
4. We need to aspire to closing the education, training and employment gap between young people in care and the general population. Just now, many of those who succeed do so despite us rather than because of us and what we do.
5. We need to understand what employability skills are and how they can be developed. There is a critical overlap between these and preparing young people for transitioning from care.
6. We need to ‘scale-up’ internships from government agencies, NGOs and the private sector.
7. Wherever possibly consideration should be given to delaying young people’s entry into the job-seeking market until conditions are better, whether that be staying on in alternative education, school, further education, university or postgraduate study.
8. NGOs and philanthropic entities can develop new social enterprises with a focus on new meaningful training opportunities. There are already some existing examples out there that are working (e.g. KibbleWorks in Scotland).
9. In New Zealand, this would not be a great time to try and get into the tourism sector. However, while it will be different across countries, there are some sectors that have been unaffected as well as others where there has been an increased demand for workers.
10. Extending extended foster care to more young people – do I need to say more?
11. Learning placements. We’ve generally struggled to make foster care and residential placements as educationally-rich as they could be, whether that be helping to instill a love of books in toddlers, recruiting foster carers and residential workers who value learning, or having higher aspirations.
12. Reflecting on the challenge presented by the recent Scottish Independent Care Review and helping children and young people in care to develop more, and deeper, relationships and connections with: siblings; parents; extended family; family friends; own friends and they families; foster carers and their friends; and yes, professionals too.
I do realise that most of you will still be very focused on the very important work of managing your response to the pandemic. However, I would encourage you as part of your strategic overview to consider how you could build or refine even just one of these strategies.
I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can email me at: iain@betteroutcomes.co.nz
Kia kaha (Stay Strong).
Iain