Hansard

Obviously, arithmetic was not Allan Wilson's best subject when he left school. The reason for having policies such as ours is to tackle another issue that his Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council identified two or three months ago. Although we have had 10 years of a Labour Government and seven years of a devolved Government, only 14 per cent of people from poorer backgrounds in Scotland get into higher education—the same proportion that got into higher education 50 years ago. That is why it is important to have a range of policies that will allow that 14 per cent figure to get much nearer the 50 per cent figure for better-off areas.

The other problem that we face is in school itself. We have heard about the back-of-an-envelope proposals for skills academies from the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Mr McConnell. The way in which the proposals are being presented is as if to say, "If you're no bright enough to go to university, you must be pretty dull and so you should go down the vocational route." That is entirely the wrong way to present proposals. In Northern Ireland, the Costello report proposed that young people in second, third and fourth year at secondary school should receive one third academic training and one third technical training and be left to decide the other third on the basis of their own priorities and abilities. Adopting such a formula seems like a much more sensible approach to the problem than setting up skills academies, through which we would be in danger of reinventing the two-tier education system that we thought we got rid of with the introduction of comprehensive education.

There are initiatives for which I think the Executive has been unfairly criticised by the Tories, such as the education maintenance allowance, which the Tories are committed to abolishing. All the evidence is that initiatives such as education maintenance allowance that target poorer sections of the community encourage young people to stay on longer at school.

There are major flaws and contradictions in the Executive's strategy. The third line on page 1 of the executive summary of "More Choices, More Chances: A Strategy to Reduce the Proportion of Young People not in Education, Employment or Training in Scotland" is:

"Our objective is to eradicate the problem of NEET the length and breadth of Scotland."

At the bottom of the page it states:

"We propose seven NEET hotspot areas."

The Executive is either going to target the problem in hotspot areas or throughout the whole country—there is an inherent contradiction there. None of the hotspot areas is a rural area; yet there are parts of rural Scotland where the NEET problem is proportionately greater than it is in parts of urban Scotland.

The other big flaw in the strategy is that it almost totally ignores the services provided as a result of reserved powers, particularly by the Employment Service, and how they integrate. The danger is that we have a multitude of agencies and initiatives and that young people do not know where to go, whom to go to or how to get into the system that maximises the support that they require. Given what is happening with the careers service, Jobcentre Plus, the new deal and all the other initiatives, there is a need to streamline the organisation so that young people know that there is one place where they can go to get the help that they need.

The point of contact in an urban area is often in the town centre but many of the young people who need to use it never go into the town centre. When I was a social worker in Dundee, I came across a lady who had lived in the Kirkton estate for 30 years and had never been in Dundee city centre. People like that are likely to be in the NEET category. We can learn from previous initiatives—some of which have now been binned—that located jobcentres and similar services in places such as Ferguslie Park so that young people had easy access to the services.

A range of issues needs to be addressed and there is scope for taking a much more imaginative and ambitious approach than the Executive has shown. However, we welcome the initiatives that the Executive has taken to date.

I move amendment S2M-5098.3, to leave out from "and endorses" to end and insert:

"regrets the poor performance of the current Scottish Executive which has led to far more of our young people, compared with their European peers, not in education, employment or training; calls for a fresh approach to engage schools, colleges, voluntary organisations and employers in Scotland to recognise the importance of early intervention for children, particularly those from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, to realise their potential in later life and so secure the opportunities that other young Scots enjoy, and recognises that, for Scotland to achieve a situation where every 16 to 19-year-old can have the opportunity to secure a place in education, employment, training or volunteering, it will require a concerted national effort and support from all sectors in Scotland."