'It's different for young people now' - Young adults in Shropshire battle rising tide of youth unemployment
A series of events designed to get young people into work kicked off this week, part of a scheme to tackle rising levels of youth unemployment in Shropshire.
Youth Employment Week got under way on July 7, a national initiative organised by not-for-profit organisation Youth Employment UK, against a darkening backdrop of Government statistics.
Latest government figures show that across the UK during February to April there were 625,000 young people aged 16 to 24 who were unemployed and not in education, 42,000 more than the previous year.
The unemployment rate also for young people was 14.3%, up from 13.6% from the year before.
As part of a local programme designed to coincide with Youth Employment Week, a group of young people from across the county dropped in to Telford's new state-of-the-art £9 million fire station - the first in a series of employment and skills events taking place across the county.
Around 10 young adults aged between 18-24 attended the workshop with Shropshire Fire and Rescue, the start of a "sector tour" around Shropshire, where they will experience opportunities in public sector roles, construction, agriculture, leisure, retail, and health and social care.
The programme has been backed by the Department for Work and Pensions and Shrewsbury Town's Community Foundation, which runs a youth hub aimed at boosting employment prospects for young people in the county.
"Our team will support around 350 people in a year, and our team of mentors have hand picked this group of people with the knowledge that an intensive week of support from a number of different angles will firstly try to get people out of the benefit system and then also to sustain their employment," said Louiza Skinner, youth hub manager at the foundation.
"A modern career pathway doesn't look like just one route of progression and then you follow it until you get a pension - it just doesn't look like that for young people any more and it's important for us to embrace that and for us to encourage them to explore in that way.
"Everyone's pathway is different. This whole week has been designed to progress those individuals by giving them an oversight of various different sectors."
Shropshire has some acute issues around the proportion of 16 to 17 year olds not in education, employment or training (NEET), although Telford & Wrekin is doing better than the national average, according to latest Government figures.
The statistics show around 6.3% of school leavers under 18 are not in education, employment or training in Shropshire, around 4% in Telford & Wrekin - against a national average of around 5.4% for England.
"We've been working with the DWP and the foundation for a couple of months now looking at the opportunities that the fire service can provide to support the youth hub and the DWP, " said Marc Millward, Head of Service Delivery at Shropshire Fire and Rescue.
"It's about understanding who's out there in our communities and what sort of challenges they face when getting into employment. We're hoping it might spark a bit of an interest in the fire service as a career, and not just as an operational firefighter.
"It's also a chance for us to say 'don't give up', keep going, because it'll be worth it in the end."
Youth Employment week runs between Monday, July 7 and Friday, July 11.
