If UK construction cannot reach a million willing young people, who can?

All over the UK, people from tier one contractors and our collective supply chain stand in front of young people who have never considered construction as a career. They run site visits, classroom sessions, work experience weeks and careers events. It is some of the most valuable work our industry delivers.

Young people who arrive thinking the industry is cold, dirty and closed to them leave having met a site manager who started as an apprentice and a quantity surveyor who looks like them. You cannot choose a career you have never seen, and shifting those dated assumptions is what that work is for.

But Alan Milburn’s landmark review of young people and work, commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions, should reframe how our industry thinks about what comes after that conversation. Its interim findings were published in May this year and the full report is due any day.

Alongside its stark figures on the number of young people classified as NEET (not in education, employment or training), the review has already shown that the widely held notion that they don’t want to work is, for the most part, a myth. More than eight in ten of those neither earning nor learning want to work.

The talent is there. It is the bridge between interest and career that keeps collapsing

The problem Milburn identifies is not willingness. It is that institutions and employers are poor at staying connected to them, services do not talk to each other, and support concentrates on delivering activities rather than sticking around for lasting outcomes. The talent is there. It is the bridge between interest and career that keeps collapsing.

The numbers tell us how much depends on that bridge. The Construction Industry Training Board expects the industry to need 206,000 extra workers by 2030, roughly 41,200 a year, and we are already carrying around 31,000 vacancies. Some trades have sharper shortages than others, with carpentry and wood trades often topping the tables, and the skills needed vary by region. Set against that, the NEET population now stands at just over a million. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says close to 300,000 of them are not claiming any benefits at all, which means nobody in the system is looking for them.

Put those figures side by side and the conclusion is hard to avoid. They have not all, at the same moment, decided they lack ambition. The pathways we have built are not designed to keep hold of them.

That points to two jobs rather than one. Most young people at risk of becoming NEET are still in school at 12 or 13, and that is where intervention does the most work, because once someone has left the system altogether the route into employment gets considerably harder. Reaching them early means going into schools well before the point at which options narrow. Early intervention cannot be the whole answer, though. A model that only serves those we reach before they leave school is only half a model.

UK construction is doing valuable work, but we make our contribution in fragments

Think about what the construction model currently asks of a 16-year-old, for example. They come on a site visit. Something clicks. Then something gets in the way. It could be caring responsibilities, a health condition, or simply not knowing anyone in the industry who could open a door. By 18, often after a social mobility organisation has done the hard work of getting them there, they are ready to act on that interest. And there is no one to contact. The relationship with our industry ended when the visit did. If they do get a start and the first month goes badly, which is where a great many placements fail, they do not come back either.

UK construction is doing valuable work, but we make our contribution in fragments. Employer outreach, however good, reaches people already sitting in a school, college or provider’s office. The ones who need us most are often the ones our delivery model cannot quite see. What we have not yet built is a mechanism to make this work every time, everywhere, and at a scale that reaches many more people.

Morgan Sindall Construction has been working on that gap for some time, starting with Knowledge Quads. These are multi-purpose training and learning facilities built inside live construction sites and now used around the country. They help people outside the industry understand what construction jobs actually involve today, and they deliver social value through skills, education, employment and discovery. But what made them work was never the positive building site experience alone. It was the local schools, colleges and third sector skills organisations who brought people through the door.

Next year we take that principle further. Rise and Build is a long-term, place-based programme for social mobility and construction careers, and its strength will be the partnerships behind it rather than any one contractor’s contribution. Private, public and third sector organisations, nationally and locally, working to a single aim: getting the people furthest from the job market into good work. We are putting the infrastructure in place, the mentoring, the practical tools, the repeat opportunities and the outcome tracking.

What that changes is the shape of the offer. Rather than a series of events people attend, it is a community people join once and stay in. Someone who comes on a site visit at 16 and reappears at 19 has not dropped out of anything, because they were never dropped. Someone whose first job does not work out can come back without starting again. Mentors come from across the partnership, our own business and our supply chain among them, and they stay with people through the early months of employment rather than stopping at the offer letter. Anyone at any age may participate, which puts care leavers, service leavers, returners and career changers on the same footing as school leavers.

Participants will be tracked for at least three years after they start work, and outcomes will be reported against each person’s starting point rather than rolled into a single headline figure, because a total tells you nothing about who was actually helped.

So the invitation to our peers and partners is not to stop what we are doing. Keep the outreach going. But opportunity is not created at the point of first contact. It is created by what happens in the years afterwards, and that is the part none of us can build alone. A million young people are waiting for an industry that stays in touch. Construction should be the one that does.

Timothy Clement is director of social value and sustainability at Morgan Sindall Construction.