Hopes fade for the jobless generation
Challenged during the General Election campaign to say what they would do to reduce unemployment among young adults, the three main party leaders relied broadly on variations of the same answer: paid work experience after six months’ on benefit, better training programmes, and at the end of the day hoping for economic recovery.
Nick Clegg, for the Liberal Democrats, spoke movingly about a generation of graduates consigned to a pointless and depressing existence, sending off CVs and applying for jobs, but doomed never even to receive a reply, let alone an interview. Mr Clegg might have added that it is not only the younger generation that is depressed, in many cases parents who responded to a government call to increase the graduate population by urging their children to aspire to a university education, and scrimped and saved to help pay spiralling tuition fees, are beginning to wonder quite why they bothered.
The next few years are likely to be grim for public services as the government struggles to pay off huge debts incurred during the credit crunch and recession. Even before voting took place in the General Election it was clear that further education colleges and universities would not be exempted from cutbacks.
Budgets in Birmingham alone are already being trimmed by £10 million, with the loss of about 200 teaching jobs. In order to understand the scale of this it is necessary to recognise that these budget reductions account for one-fifth of the total amount spent on further education in the city.
Some of the savings are threatening the future of important research projects like Warwick University’s HRI unit, which conducts vitally important work into crop diseases, the development of pesticides and fertilisers.
At Birmingham City University, 50 jobs are to go in the Faculty of Technology, Engineering and the Environment at Millennium point.
At Bournville College, faced with saving £1.8 million, officials are considering cuts in night courses and specialist teaching.
The reaction from academics and trade unions to all of this is predictably one of bitter anger. College and university heads appear to have been taken by surprise at the cull coming their way, having innocently assumed that courses offering training and qualifications to young people would be immune from government cuts.
Norman Cave, principal at Bournville College, said he was surprised that the cuts had come at a time when training and education appeared to offer a route out of the country’s economic troubles.
It is a racing certainty, now the General Election is over, that the financial assault aimed at further education will get worse as the true state of government finances is laid bare.
For all the talk by Brown, Cameron and Clegg about seeking simple efficiency savings, the politicians know that big money can only be found by slashing jobs at hospitals, councils, schools, colleges and universities.
Britain may officially be out of recession, but misery for hundreds of thousands of unemployed young adults will continue.
