Current status: Answered by Fiona Hyslop on 1 February 2021
To ask the Scottish Government how many young people have signed onto the Young Person's Guarantee.
The Guarantee was launched in November 2020. We have worked closely with partners to build on our existing strong education, skills and employability infrastructure to deliver the recommendations from Sandy Begbie’s report.
We are working closely with partners from across the public, private and third sectors to progress towards our aim of ensuring that within two years, every person aged between 16 and 24 will have the opportunity to study; take up an apprenticeship, job or work experience; or participate in formal volunteering. There is no process to sign up for the Guarantee as all young people requiring help, should be able to access support.
Through our additional investment of £60m in 2020-21 we have provided funding for around 18,000 new and enhanced existing opportunities to support young people. Including provision through Local Authorities, Colleges, Skills Development Scotland and the third sector.
The early success of the Young Person’s Guarantee will be maintained next year. Additional investment of £125 million will go towards the Young Person’s Guarantee, the National Transition Training Fund and other initiatives, ensuring the future workforce has the skills needed for a green recovery and supporting those at risk of long term unemployment.
We are working with partners to develop a rigorous measurement and evaluation framework to show how the Guarantee is delivering a range of different opportunities to support young people. As part of this process, we published the young person’s labour market dashboard on 28 January. Young person’s local authority labour market dashboard - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) . This new, interactive tool has been developed to provide a summary of labour market measures for those aged 16 to 24 by local authority. This dashboard along with the annual Participation Measure produced by Skills Development Scotland will help us to measure and target opportunities and support.