The UK’s new employment scheme is failing students and graduates

As someone dedicated to helping UK students secure graduate-level jobs and embark on successful careers, you would expect me to be happy about a £2 billion commitment to help young people out of unemployment.

So why do many university career service professionals like myself feel that an opportunity has been missed with the UK government’s Kickstart Scheme? For one, there is a nagging concern that the rules around support unveiled by the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, last summer make it difficult for final-year students and newly minted graduates to engage with the initiative. More broadly, Kickstart has also missed an opportunity to harness the immense know-how that universities have in helping students into rewarding jobs.

In theory, the government’s funding six-month “job placements” – in effect, paid work experience for young people – should be a huge benefit for students. Under the initiative, employers receive funding for each placement to the cost of 25 hours per week at the relevant minimum wage, alongside pension and National Insurance contributions, as well as up to £1,500 for other training the employee may need. It is, undoubtedly, a generous subsidy for employers that recognises the gravity of the alarming post-pandemic employment market.

But the model that has been introduced makes it much harder than it should be for students to access the scheme. Take, for example, the stipulation that the young person – who has to be between 16 and 24 years old – must be on the government’s Universal Credit support scheme: that immediately creates barriers for university finalists and those graduates who have yet to negotiate the unwanted and often lengthy process of signing on.

Instead, the one-size-fits-all scheme needs an off-shoot version specifically aimed at university finalists and recent graduates given that their needs are very different from, for example, those of a 16- or 17-year-old who has left school with few or no qualifications.

My colleagues and I hear the same messages from businesses who want talented young graduates working for them. They are eager to offer graduate internship schemes, particularly if there is a fairly generous, partly subsided contribution, but they want a speedy graduate recruitment process with minimal bureaucracy.

This is where assistance from the university is most welcome. Their employability and careers services are able to draw on years of experience, including bespoke, timely and impactful innovations to link employers and students.

With this in mind, university careers services should have been central to Kickstart’s operations. The current system relies on a multitude of licensed “gateway” organisations to broker graduate internships, some of which are charities and private sector organisations with little or no prior experience. With the wealth of knowledge and innovation that universities have around finding graduate-level employment for young people, it would instead make sense for clusters of universities to form regional internship consortia and partner up to source localised graduate internships to employers. Each university would have an allocation for a set number of internships, with one university acting as the consortium’s lead organisation.

This would create economies of scale, draw on existing contacts and ensure that student data is used to help graduates most at risk of unemployment. Instead, universities and other stakeholders have been inadvertently pitted against each other, often all approaching the same employer about the possibility of internships.

This collaborative university model is not exactly new. A graduate internship brokerage model was implemented back in 2009 by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, since replaced by the Office for Students. Using the Economic Challenge Investment Fund, universities were encouraged to form regional consortia to pilot paid internships in local small businesses for recent graduates who were struggling to secure employment following the economic downturn of 2008. It was highly successful, and at the time of its cessation, many universities and employers lobbied hard for it to be continued.

It wasn’t continued, but its legacy saw many universities adopt graduate internships as a staple offer. Kickstart could – and should – have been an ideal opportunity to scale up this work.

Given the dire economic outlook for graduates caused by the pandemic, the government should be commended for thinking big. But its failure to consult universities or recognise the unique challenges and strengths of students has limited its positive impact for recent graduates. If Kickstart, which is due to end in December, is extended, universities and their careers expertise must be central to ensuring that genuinely life-changing opportunities are available to young people.

Richard Mendez is head of employability and careers service at the University of Greenwich.