Government to boost graduate skills with ‘gap year’ trips

4th August 2009

Simon Harding

The UK government is to subsidise ‘gap year’ style trips abroad for unemployed graduates, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills confirmed yesterday. £500,000 has been allocated to help 500 young people under the age of 24 go on overseas projects run by Raleigh International, the organisation which oversaw Prince William’s 10-week trip to Chile. The 500 lucky graduates will find themselves building schools, teaching children and working on community and environmental projects in remote parts of India, Costa Rica, Borneo and Nicaragua.

The placements will help graduates develop the ‘communication and leadership skills that are so highly valued in the workplace’, said Higher Education Minister, David Lammy. This will give them an advantage in the increasingly competitive jobs market. Currently, there are 48 graduates applying for every graduate job.   

The Raleigh International partnership is the latest in a series of government initiatives to tackle the problem of graduate unemployment. Last week, the government announced 2,000 new internship placements and launched a program aimed at creating 47,000 new jobs for graduates. The economic downturn has seen graduate jobs dry up, whilst the numbers leaving university continue to increase.

Wes Streeting, President of the National Union of Students (NUS) welcomes the government’s ‘creative thinking’. ‘With youth employment reaching the one million mark, funding opportunities for skills development is surely better than the soul destroying experience of sitting at home, watching Jeremy Kyle, on the dole,’ he said.

This latest scheme is, as Streeting points out, ‘creative’. It will put sheltered graduates in new and challenging situations, helping them to develop not only leadership skills, but also more tangible skills, such as foreign languages. However, ‘gap years’ are particularly beneficial when taken before university, as they give teenagers the opportunity to work, travel, become more independent before taking up university places. They make teenagers aware of the issues of adult life, the value of money and how it is earned. Sending young, independent graduates abroad fails to capitalise on the main benefits of the ‘gap year’. The negligible developmental impact of most ‘gap year’ projects on their host communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America is also worth noting.

With graduate unemployment tipping 40,000 last month and due to rise throughout the summer as degree courses finish, the scheme’s 500 placements will make little more than a dent in the problem at large. Rather than subsidise foreign placements in the hope in boosting a set of loosely defined skills, the government might consider expanding existing graduate employment schemes or placing promising graduates with successful small businesses. This would provide a direct boost to the British economy by helping small enterprises to grow and furnishing graduates with UK relevant business skills. The government could also go as far as encouraging graduates to establish their own businesses by providing training, mentoring schemes and small loans. There are numerous initiatives which the government could fund, most of which address the issue of graduate unemployment more directly than subsidised ‘gap years’.

Also see:  ‘Graduates to get gap year money’, BBC News, 1/8/09, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8179565.stm