Meeting of the Parliament 19 March 2014
If the SNP members were completely committed to this, they would have voted for the amendment this morning.
It is easy to blame others for your own failure, but that is not good enough for young people in Scotland, who are looking to the Government for help now. Alasdair Allan may laugh, but those 15,000 young people are not laughing. The Scottish Government needs to accept responsibility for the powers that it has and the choices that it makes in key areas of youth employment, education, our skills bodies and our apprenticeships system. If we are to make a difference, we should be debating improvements in those areas regardless of whether the Government wants to have that debate. Only then will we be able to achieve the ambitious proposals for Scotland’s young people that are envisaged in the EU youth guarantee.
I move amendment S4M-09376.2, to leave out from “delivery agencies” to end and insert:
“the Scottish Government must align skills with colleges, local authorities and local employers and better distribute the spread of opportunities among young people up to 25 in education and training to account for the fact that only 2% of construction and engineering apprenticeships are taken up by women, less than 0.5% are taken up by disabled people and less than 2% are taken up by ethnic minorities, and more effectively monitor the outcomes of its key youth employment policies in light of the comments of Audit Scotland that “existing performance measures do not focus on long-term outcomes, such as sustainable employment”, and looks forward to the Commission for Developing Scotland’s Young Workforce (the Wood Commission) reporting over the coming weeks and the recommendations that it will make to improve opportunities for Scotland’s young people”.
15:07Motions, questions or amendments mentioned by their reference code.