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Social Mobility and the Professions

Well, we hope so. We will have an unusual development this summer, which will see the toughest recruitment round for graduates since the big expansion of universities. We have had a steadily improving labour market overall for the past 15 years, and I hope that what the Minister says is correct and the evidence on the blighting of life chances by periods of unemployment does not apply to graduates. We will have to wait and see. Young people will be the worst victims of the recession, because they will find it hard to get jobs when they leave university, and youth unemployment is rising. But even during the boom years in the first part of this decade, and while in other advanced economies youth unemployment was falling and the proportion of young people who were NEET was falling, Britain was already heading in the wrong direction. For example, among 16 to 24-year-olds unemployment rose in the UK between 1997 and 2007 from 13.4 per cent. to 14.4 per cent., while across the OECD it fell from 15.7 per cent. to 13.4 per cent. Our NEET rate for the same age group rose from 11.6 per cent. in 2000 to 13 per cent. in 2005, at the same time as the OECD average was falling. I make that point because that tells me that some features of Government policy meant that the problems were getting worse even when the overall economy was improving. There are some lessons that Ministers need to draw from that. I can see the Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property itching to intervene, but I will give way to him when I have completed my point. My belief is that the way in which he is funding FE colleges, through the Learning and Skills Council, to churn out paper qualifications makes it harder for people who were already detached from education to go through the doors of the FE colleges. The colleges wanted people who would get a national vocational qualification fast, and increasing numbers were therefore excluded from education and training by the performance indicators and funding systems that Ministers were applying. I would be interested to hear why the Minister disagrees.