Meeting of the Parliament 19 March 2014
We absolutely support the European youth guarantee. I thought that I had been quite clear about that, but maybe I can reassure the minister.
Right now, we have the infrastructure, the power and, more important, the responsibility, to do better. We have control over our education system—the single biggest driver of a skilled and balanced workforce. In Skills Development Scotland we have a skills body that has the power to ensure that every young person is afforded an opportunity. In Scottish Enterprise we have a body that is dedicated to growing Scotland’s economy, building businesses and creating job opportunities.
In short, we have control over the most powerful tools in the box for the delivery of outcomes for young people. However, we are not using those tools to their full potential. In education, colleges face an 11 per cent reduction in funding, which amounts to cuts of more than £62 million by 2015. Some 80,000 part-time places have gone since 2007, and courses and teaching budgets have been cut. What hope do we have of offering young people a place in quality education, as the European youth guarantee envisages, if we make such drastic cuts to the education system?
The European youth guarantee prioritises young people up to the age of 25, and the Scottish Government’s priority is to focus on 16 to 19-year-olds. However, we are not even giving all young people in that age bracket the opportunity that they were promised, Skills Development Scotland having lost 17,000 people from the system last April.