A university degree is no longer a guarantee of a good job. Tony Chapman asks: How do we equip young people to enable them to find better careers?

YOUNG people occupy a peculiar position in society: and, as far as older adults are concerned, it’s usually the ‘wrong’ one. Everyone seems to think that they ‘know what’s best’ for young people. But no matter how hard we try to prepare them the world they will enter as adults, when they arrive there, it will have changed.

This raises serious questions for those who think they can mould young minds to produce fine upstanding citizens. Birmingham University is home to the ‘Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues’ which believes that the right kind of attitudes can be taught.

As the Victorian saying goes: ‘We sow a habit and reap a character, we sow a character and we reap a destiny’. The anachronistic outpourings from the Jubilee Centre owe much to 19th Century principles of muscular Christianity, encouraging young men in public schools to sublimate base desires with lots of fresh air, team sports and cold showers.

The ethos of public schools is held in high regard by those who subscribe to character education. And with good reason - their alumni hoover up top jobs in business, media, law, politics, church and the military. The best grammar schools, which emulated their methods excelled too, for those who were lucky enough to get in. But the causal analysis is wrong. Isn’t this more about embedding privilege than shaping destiny?

Alan Milburn, Chair of the Commission on Social Mobility and Child Poverty, thinks so. He said last month that poorer young people are still “being systematically locked out of top jobs. Elite firms seem to require applicants to pass a ‘poshness test’ to gain entry.”

Exponents of character education have also got their maths wrong. If everyone got tip-top education, there’d still not be enough places in the boardrooms and legal chambers to occupy. Sad but true, class and education interact in predictable ways: that’s why the old secondary mods were so effective turning capable kids into factory fodder.

It’s easy to become fatalistic – but things do change. Social mobility mushroomed in the 60s and 70s in response to enormous growth in middle-class jobs. And many kids from modest backgrounds, who benefitted from fast growth in university places, did very nicely. About 15 per cent of school leavers went to university in 1975, now it’s nearer to 50 per cent - but the labour market hasn’t followed suit.

Some academics describe what we have now as the ‘hour glass’ economy with loads of ‘lovely jobs’ at the top and ‘lousy jobs’ at the bottom while the middling jobs get hollowed out. The result, they argue, is that well-qualified young people find themselves underemployed, pushing people with fewer or no qualifications into poorly paid, low skill, insecure jobs with few prospects for the future.

But is this inevitable? Girls and young women from less affluent families have proven themselves to be keener at school and more flexible about routes into employment than boys and young men. The Economist is not particularly sympathetic. In its recent report on the life chances of poorer white males in Britain and America, it says their attitudes must change if they are going to get jobs that need skill more than muscle.

Professor Rob MacDonald of Teesside University shows local industrial cultures leave a long shadow. Old ideas about routes into employment run deep. And all too often, with well-trodden paths into mining, shipbuilding and steel long-since overgrown, many find themselves in limbo: shifting between periods of unemployment, government programmes and insecure short-term low-paid jobs.

Some call for an ‘industrial policy’ to put things right. As if it were possible to reopen the pits and shipyards. In the North-East, we’re proud of our industrial heritage, and should be; but infusing labour market policy with sentimentality will get us nowhere.

At a recent conference at Redcar College on young people’s skills and employment organised by the Institute for Local Governance, it became clear that lousy jobs are not the only game in town. Sue Hannan of Tees Valley Unlimited shows that 127,000 new jobs will need to be filled in Tees Valley by 2022, 114,000 of which will be due to retirement. And, ironically, while youth unemployment remains quite high, employer surveys show that 42 per cent of job vacancies in the area were ‘hard to fill’, much higher than the national average of 29 per cent.

It’s rarely possible to know what’s going to happen next, but we know this much. Demographer, Professor Tony Champion of Newcastle University, shows that in Tees Valley the size of the middle-aged population will decline substantially over the next 20 years, producing openings for young people to fill gaps in the labour market. Atavistic attitudes about character building may not provide the answer – but encouraging youngsters to gain the skills to secure new routes into employment is a must.

Tony Chapman is a Professorial Fellow at St Chad’s College, Durham University