Universities and colleges need to work more closely with business to combat youth unemployment – but some are moving more quickly than others

Ben Macdonald holds two HND qualifi cations from the City of Glasgow College, in Legal Services and Events Management. He completed 200 hours of unpaid work for an events company as part of the latter course, and has even had some temporary paid work since graduating in 2011 – a fairly solid CV for someone seeking to start a career.

But Macdonald has been unemployed since September, and on Jobseeker’s Allowance since November. “I’ve had three interviews; none of them have been successful. Th at’s me now starting to apply for more unpaid work.” For a young man with aspirations of building a career and being independent, the personal toll has been as heavy as the fi nancial one. “I’ve always stayed with my parents – I’ve never been in a position where I’ve been able to aff ord to move out, which is crap because I’m 24, and ideally I wouldn’t want to be living at home. Being on Jobseeker’s, you get absolute pennies.” Stories like Macdonald’s are now so commonplace, they threaten to become the norm. Figures released in December by the Offi ce for National Statistics put the number of Scottish 16-24 year olds out of work between August and October 2011 at 23.5 per cent – the highest level since devolution, 5.9 per cent higher than the same period in 2010, and three per cent higher than in England.

Th e speed of the political response confi rmed the crisis proportions of the problem. Within days, it was announced that Angela Constance, previously Minister for Children and Young People, would become the fi rst Minister for Youth Employment, with £30m funding to support her brief. Labour and the SNP rarely share policy positions, but whether by accident or design, the fact that the announcement came just a day after calls from outgoing Labour leader Iain Gray to create the post, suggests the extent of cross-party concern over the issue.

For Scotland’s skills sector, the new impetus to tackle youth unemployment from the Scottish Government will mean responding to calls for a greater engagement with business, and a more demand-led model of curriculum development and course provision. In its consultation on skills reform, Putting Learners at the Centre, the Government made its case for colleges and universities to tailor their services to meet the needs of business.

“Th e positive link between school, training, college, university or work, is an enormously powerful force in delivering the capability that employers and the economy needs… we need to revisit our expectations, recalibrating them to meet the reality we now face,” the consultation reads. Colleges in particular, as part of the Government’s push toward a regional model for Scottish further education, will need to adapt to more business-oriented ways of working.

The progress report so far, however, is mixed.

“At the moment, we’re far from having demandled provision,” says Amy Dalrymple, policy and research manager at the Scottish Chambers of Commerce and architect of the organisation’s response to Putting Learners at the Centre.

“There needs to be a far better marrying up of good quality labour market information that identifies the skills that are going to be required with provision – and provision needs to change as those requirements change as well.

“The FE sector has been very good lately in terms of catching up in providing skills for renewable energy, for example; but particularly when it’s been the other way round – when there’s not a new industry coming in, but an old one leaving an area – and college provision hasn’t necessarily adapted to that as quickly.” Examples of skills provision that responds and adapts to changing circumstances do exist in Scotland, but they are rare – Dalrymple highlights Caithness, where colleges have tied some of their training programmes into the progress of the nuclear decommissioning project at Douenreay. “There’s been a longterm project to up-skill the local population, first of all in terms of decommissioning rather than production, and now as they’re coming to the end of decommissioning looking at what skills are going to be in demand once that’s completed.” Training in other sectors hasn’t been as responsive. “You’ve got very low demand in the construction industry at the moment, thanks to the recession, but we’ve not seen a corresponding fall in construction education,” says Dalrymple.

The areas of the Scottish economy that are growing and providing vacancies are those that talented and highly-skilled graduates should be taking advantage of. The report on jobs for the Bank of Scotland listed IT & computing and engineering & construction respectively as the top two creators of new permanent placements in Scotland. The report also confirmed the status of Aberdeen as a boom-town for job creation in spite of the lack of economic growth, with the city experiencing the greatest rise in temporary staff placements in November 2011.

There are opportunities available for wellplaced college and university graduates, and some institutions are anticipating the Government’s push for a more demand-led skills policy as part of its post-16 reforms. Carnegie College created the first Modern Apprenticeship for wind farm technicians in August 2010, with the first students on the four-year programme set to leave the classroom and begin working for private sector partner REpower at the beginning of 2012. Adam Smith College will launch a Bachelor of Science in renewable energy, to go alongside existing HND, HNC and PDA designed to feed into the full degree course.

With proposals for one of Scotland’s largest offshore wind farms being made for off the coast of Tiree, Argyll College is reportedly also considering new courses relating to wind energy.

Despite facing few of the pressures that Scottish colleges are now dealing with, both in terms of finance and governance, universities have nonetheless also moved towards more demand-led curriculum development and course provision. The most recent UK-wide Higher Education-Business Interaction Survey, run by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, all but two of Scotland’s universities responded that they involved employers and industry bodies in developing content and reviewing curricula on “some to many” courses.

That engagement means that businesses can put their workforce requests directly to universities, resulting in thousands of paid placements and job opportunities for graduates.

With funding from the ICT skills council and the Scottish Funding Council, Edinburgh Napier University plans to create 750 three to 12 month paid placements at IT companies for students from all course backgrounds.

Students will continue to be supported by tutors during the placements, building up a portfolio of work that will count towards their academic mark. The University of the West of Scotland has gone even further, responding to a call from computing and engineering design firm Honeywell by creating an MSc in Sensor Design, providing highly skilled graduates for a growing area of the industry.

Examples such as that could soon become much more common, with plans under way to bring the entire Scottish higher education sector together with representatives of Scotland’s key industries. Universities Scotland is planning an unprecedented summit meeting, inviting figures from the sectors of food and drink, energy, financial services, life sciences, tourism, and textiles to a meeting of its learning and teaching council on 21 February, made up of the viceprincipals of all 19 of Scotland’s universities. It is only the second time that the council, which oversees curriculum design and whose meetings were previously restricted to figures from the HE sector, has been opened to the business community.

Other groups within the skills sector are more cautious, however; Scotland’s Colleges produced a critical response to Putting Learners at the Centre, and NUS Scotland president Robin Parker is wary of giving the private sector a bigger role in curriculum development when labour market data is patchy and industry needs are poorly articulated. “The goal of many students coming in to education is to improve future job prospects, and it’s right that during a downturn the Scottish Government is encouraging universities and colleges to deliver on that goal. However, we don’t believe it’s the case that the most effective way to do so is to simply allow big business to call the shots,” Parker says. “Employers aren’t entirely accurate at predicting future skills needs, and we need a big-tent approach to understanding what does contribute to the economy.

“We are concerned that narrowing provision based on employer views could reduce student choice and risk narrowing access, as students may be shut out if certain courses were to be removed or reduced. Of course, courses should be relevant and applicable to the real world, but that doesn’t mean that colleges and universities should become narrow-minded conveyor belts for businesses.” Opponents of demand-led provision may well be heartened by the barriers the Government will have to overcome in encouraging greater involvement in skills development from business. “The more I’ve gone into the detail of this, the more horrified I’ve been by the complexity of the engagement methods that exist.

Some businesses are individually involved with their local colleges just because they happen to know somebody there. Quite a few boards of individual colleges have businesses on them, but that takes place in a very ad hoc way as well,” says Dalrymple. She says most small businesses fall through the gap between informal, local ties and the difficulty of dealing directly with national agencies such as the SFC.

“You’ve got the industry advisory groups that feed into the Scottish Government’s key sectors, but again, they’re not very representative of small businesses – and remember that over 90 per cent of Scotland’s businesses are small businesses.

If you’re a business and you’re saying, ‘I’m not getting the college graduates I need,’ how you go about changing that is a horrifically complicated proposition.”