NEETs: (They belong to the) blank generation
Posted on Wednesday 19 August, 2009
Filed Under Society
IT’S NOT as if coining a daft new acronym makes a problem disappear; rebranding the young unemployed as NEETs – short for ‘not in education, employment or training’ – almost comes across as a calculated insult. Piss off, kids. We’re not taking you anywhere as seriously as we take out of work adults.
But this semi-mocking designation now seemingly applies to one in six men and women aged between 18 and 24, totalling 959,000. In round numbers, that’s nearly one million. There are now more unemployed youth, if you’ll excuse my failure to resort to euphemism, than when Labour came to power 12 years ago.
Things now look so bad that the young jobless are at risk of becoming a ‘lost generation’ in labour market terms, chancellor Alistair Darling has warned. As a member of the lost generation last time round – I was unemployed for the best part of two years as a young man in the Thatcher period – I am absolutely bewildered at the prospect of a re-run of the movie.
Youth unemployment costs lives. One study conducted in the north of England found 15% of under-25s not in work or at college in 1999 were dead just ten years later. With time on your hands, the drift into drugs, crime, unhealthy lifestyles and depression becomes almost automatic.
Most NEETs will find that their careers never recover. Those without a job at an age when those destined for the glittering prizes have already come down from Oxbridge – that is the term, isn’t it? – are starting out in the City and the media will find the professions are all but effectively debarred to them.
Perhaps the main reason we find ourselves back in the late 1970s is the return of recession, an inevitable feature of the present economic system, however much politicians boast of abolishing boom and bust. That capitalism automatically entails periodic bouts of massive unemployment is one of the most important arguments against it.
Whatever happens to Britain next, it won’t be frenzied growth that makes up for lost ground and then takes us further forward. One prognosis is a decade of stagnation, which means that if you are NEETed now, the likelihood is that you will stay NEETed for good.
But a shortage of jobs is not the whole story. Any government committed to the well-being of young adults needs to tackle the outcomes of Britain’s state education system, which sees too many kids spending their secondary school years playing truant for long spells before leaving with little or no formal qualifications. Working class pupils are being systematically let down, even as the parents of middle class pupils increasingly buy their offspring a guaranteed head start.
It will also be vital to address the almost total unavailability of apprenticeships anywhere other than at McDonald’s. If we are to avoid future polarisation of the most extreme kind, we are going to have to provide occupations intermediate between burger flipper and barrister.
And if we don’t? Well, you can still meet people from my generation that lost contact with society under the Thatcher governments – which didn’t concede the existence of society in the first place, of course – and never managed to reinsert themselves. They belonged to the blank generation, as the song went at the time. The last thing we need is a cover version.
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20 Responses to “NEETs: (They belong to the) blank generation”
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Hi Dave,
What’s new about the term “NEET”? We’ve been using it in Scotland for years – at least 10 probably more. In fact the current Scottish Government (SNP minority) realising that the NEET figures were going up and that they could thus be judged unfavourably in comparison to the previous incumbents (i.e. Labour/Liberal coalition) have tried to do away with the term supposedly out of similar concern to your own about the kids being labelled.
For myself I’d prefer to be able to hold them accountable by making direct comparisons with earlier NEET figures. The term may indeed be a shitty, NewLabour, blame the victims one but whatever name you gave it would eventually acquire the same stigma.
Better to make sure young folk had real choices – work with decent pay, higher education that they didn’t have to acquire massive debts to pay for, real apprenticeships paying a decent rate etc. Then we’d not to have to use the term at all.
All the Best,
Bill
I have seen plenty of media talk of this research saying that 15% of ‘NEET’ people died within 10 years, as related by John Cole, head of something or other at DCMS at a July conference, but I can’t track it down anywhere.
I think I’ve established it’s quite old research done as part of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies British Cohort Study, but does anyone know how to get hold of a copy?
There is a wealth of evidence that links mortality and health deterioration with unemployment whatever the age group.
Prohibition of class discrimination might open up a job or two.
Who knows? Without access to their traditional sinecures, it might even convince our betters to aim for full employment.
Scratch, you mean by that the abolition of class itself.
You’re right, it does all start with the education system. Unfortunately, low aspirations and a culture of hating learning / success will be much harder to crack.
I would say we have more of a culture of snobbery and elitism which sneers at the lower orders trying to better themselves.
While this will be hard to crack, it can be done.
“I would say we have more of a culture of snobbery and elitism which sneers at the lower orders trying to better themselves.’
A full-on, old skool caste system would be more accurate.
Abyssinia in the morning
Breakfast in Berlin
The song describes your current life, doesn’t it, Mr Osler?
Putting aside the constant whines that the wealthy value education so much that they’re willing to pay more for it, what do you suggest doing about the real problem; the one that politicians and social campaigners really don’t want to go near?
How do you make certain groups value education, when at present they quite simply don’t? It’s no good blaming it on poverty, or the oppression of the working class, plenty of poor people and working class people do see the value in education. Lack of wealth isn’t a cause of not valuing education, otherwise we wouldn’t see such wide ranging levels of attainment both between and within disadvantaged groups. Broad brush generalisations about disadvantaged groups and educational attainment may suit the business cases of certain professional rent seekers, but don’t explain why some are so oppressed they can’t get a reasonable education whilst their contemporaries can under similar or need identical circumstances (subculture excepted)?
Is the implicit expectation that those who do give a f*ck about education should bear responsibility for those who don’t? Is the argument about wealth and education just part of a distraction from asking why some don’t give a f*ck and it’s really not caused by lack of wealth or otherwise?
MJW
I’ve been thinking along similar lines. I’m planning some reading on the issues in the next couple of days.
Watch this space. But if anybody – especially educational professionals – have ideas, I’m all ears.
Do the wealthy really value education? What education in the general sense, i.e. the act of learning and gaining knowledge and advancing humanity? In this sense they clearly do not value education and never have as they try all attempts to keep quality education the preserve of their class and their class only. They couldn’t give a toss about other peoples education; they want their offspring to have an advantage over other people’s offspring. What you really describe is the greater need among the wealthy to keep hold of this position and the apparent willingness among some sections to remain poor.
I would argue this is a crude view of complex relationships influenced by history culture etc and is the kind of mindset I would expect from the Daily Mail reading right.
*Lengthy sea of blah*
MJW
Oh, what a luvverly combination of bald assertion and unexamined assumptions.
Britain’s state education system
Britain doesn’t have an education system – Scotland has one, England has one… If you’re going to write about education, don’t you think it might be an idea to acquaint yourself with some rudimentary facts first? Just saying like…
Quite correct, Shuggy. Slip of the keyboard.
Scratch, JOHNNO,
There are constant claims from the left that the rich are removing themselves from poor people in the provision of education, but they just don’t add up to anything more than a red herring.
Private education has two things going for it that state education doesn’t, one is that they focus on a classical education, rather than the politicised education that is flavour of the month with whatever stripe of administration is in power. The second is related, they don’t sit at the bottom of layers of bureaucracy and quangocracy that siphon off their own cut before the cash gets anywhere near a classroom.
Anecdotal evidence; but I know people on low incomes who’d give their right arms to get their kids as good an education as they can find, and I know people on low incomes who couldn’t the proverbial about their children’s education. The simplistic argument is that educational attainment has a causational relationship with wealth (and it’s an argument based on correlation at best).
I’ve also seen certain rent seeking “professionals” make sweeping claims about institutional racism or depravation as factors, but then fail to explain glaring inconsistencies and contradictions in the detail (that’s if there even really prepared to go into the detail), like why white boys from low income backgrounds do worse than most other groups, or why boys from black-African backgrounds do better than boys from black-Caribbean backgrounds, or they don’t explain why girls from low income backgrounds do better than boys from the same backgrounds etc. If we’re not going to be simplistic then we have to have solid explanations for the inconsistencies and contradictions.
However you want to call it there detail says educational attainment is down to more than simple socio-economic factors.
MJW
Your comment was chock full of sweeping statements.
I was challenging the view that the wealthy care about education, they don’t, they care about elitism.
What does classical education mean, are private schools not using computers, pretty fucking stupid I would have thought and damaging for Britains future in the competitive world market!
You have asked many perfectly acceptable questions as to why some groups attain certain levels and others don’t and why there seems to be inconsistencies and contradictions. The real answer is the capitalist sytem itself and all the inconsistencies and contradictions it creates. You are as anti capitalist as anyone here, you just don’t know it yet!!
I agree that CAPITALIST state education is appalling, thanks for pointing that out but if you take China as an example, they easily beat our attainment levels (public and private) in Maths and Science and they have a state system.
Now I agree that we can’t rely on the ‘elite’ to provide education for us, I argue and so do many socialists that we need to create and develop our own schools and universities to challenge the elitism and prejudice of the likes of you.
I also believe that this development of co-operative society will begin to change the culture of capitalism itself and many of the cultural/economic/social factors that lead to some of the problems you highlight within CAPITALIST education and CAPITALIST society, will begin to diminish.
Self evidently, China is run by an elite.
Modernity,
I agree mate, which is why I finished by providing my own opinion, which is a million miles away from the chinese model!
They do have a state system though.
JOHNNO, by “classical education” I mean an education that actually focuses on genuine literacy and numeracy, and real understanding of sciences and humanities. You can call it whatever you like, but what it definitely isn’t is an “all must have prizes” approach where the courses are so devoid of real teaching that exams are presented as multiple choice papers requiring only common sense.
It’s all very well and good setting the bar low so that as many as possible can get over, but they’re still going to be hindered at the next level, where employers and further/higher educational establishments are only too aware of the deficiencies. Dumbing down education is supposed to get more people over the bar, but on the other side it doesn’t fool anybody, and those pupils are at an immediate disadvantage to those who have been taught the subjects proper.