Question reference: S5W-35176
- Asked by: Alex Rowley, MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, Scottish Labour
- Date lodged: 11 February 2021
-
Current status: Answered by Fiona Hyslop on 19 February 2021
Question
To ask the Scottish Government how many people it estimates will be in youth employment programmes by (a) April, (b) summer and (c) the end of 2021.
Answer
Through our additional investment of £60 million in 2020-21 we have provided funding for new opportunities, and have also enhanced existing opportunities, to support young people in Scotland as part of the Young Person’s Guarantee. These opportunities will include up to:
- 11,000 employability opportunities through local authorities;
- 5,000 places in college;
- 1,400 new apprentice pathways
Further funding of £70 million has been confirmed for 2021-2022 for the Young Person’s Guarantee. We will shortly set out further details on how this investment will be used to provide additional new opportunities for young people. This is part of £125 million funding to support young people, those made redundant, and people who have been unemployed for a long time.
These new additional opportunities will complement our existing provision through schools, universities and colleges, our person-centred employability services Fair Start Scotland, No One Left Behind and the Employability Fund and third sector support such as Discovering Your Potential, Our Future Now and Community Jobs Scotland.
The Scottish Government will also continue to ensure that apprenticeship opportunities are open to all by investing through Skills Development Scotland (SDS) and the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) to maximise apprenticeship starts, including additional investment of £21 million to deliver Foundation and Graduate Apprenticeships in colleges and universities.
Given the uncertainty facing the labour market we are looking to use our investment to give local partnerships flexibility to meet local needs and provide coherence with DWP programmes. We are working with partners to develop a rigorous measurement and evaluation framework to show how the Guarantee is delivering this range of different opportunities to support young people.
As part of this process, we published the young person’s labour market dashboard on 28 January: https://www.gov.scot/publications/young-persons-local-authority-labour-market-dashboard/ . This new, interactive tool has been developed to provide a summary of labour market measures for those aged 16 to 24 by local authority area. This dashboard, along with the annual Participation Measure produced by Skills Development Scotland, will help us to measure uptake and target opportunities and support.