MapAid is mapping youth unemployment and vocational education and apprenticeships or “easy access education,” on the basis that what you can see and measure, is what you can do something about.
Put another way, if youth unemployment problems are out of sight, then stakeholders such as you, policymakers, and unemployed people, are unable to focus their common efforts. Taxpayers resources and time are therefore collectively misspent.
The overall rate of unemployment in the UK today is 3.9% (a) however youth unemployment is 11.5% (b) or 2.9 times higher. However, the UK government only reports those people who are unemployed, as those who actually sign up, or get registered, at their Job Centre, and they also count anyone on a zero-hours contract as “employed” even if the work is very thin on the ground, and they are seriously under-employed.
Unfortunately, there is also a “hidden unemployed youth” cohort in addition to the registered cohort, that may have constituted as much as 60% of the unemployed youth, before the Covid-19 outbreak (c) and will possibly account for a higher percentage today.
These hidden unemployed youth, who are often qualified, may not be signing up due to a sense of pride. Computing the absolute numbers of unemployed youth (signed up and hidden) is tricky, but according to the government there were an estimated 763,000 young people (aged 16 to 24 years) in the UK who were not in education, employment or training (NEET) in October to December 2019 (d). On this basis, it is likely that over 1.1 million youth are now unemployed, without accounting for recent Covid-19 job losses.