With the latest UK unemployment figures for 16-24-year-olds now standing at over one million, youth unemployment - and how best to tackle it - continues to grab the headlines.
This week, worrying new data from the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (CCJS) highlights that where young people live continues to have a significant impact on their life chances.
The Nominet Trust-funded CCJS project, Compare Futures, reveals that young people from Middlesborough are 10 times more likely to be unemployed as those from wealthy Wokingham. Compared to the average, those from Middlesborough are almost three times more likely to be unemployed. Educational opportunities also look bleak, with only 1% of young people from Kingston Upon Hull going to a Red Brick University compared to 34% of those from Wimbledon.
There's no doubt that policy makers, youth workers, and other professionals in this space have worked tirelessly to offer solutions to youth unemployment. However, in reviewing the outcomes of these efforts, from the Work Programme to apprenticeships, it's clear that these initiatives are not going far enough to change the fortunes of Britain's younger generation.
We urgently need new approaches. At Nominet Trust, we believe that digital technology can play a vital role which is why we've launched a £2 million investment programme to fund imaginative uses of digital technology to improve young people's participation. Whether it's creating new connections that increase young people's access to resources and networks of support, or funding new ways of showcasing talent and experience to future employers, digital technology can broaden young people's horizons and improve their social and economic participation.
To see this working in practice, we need only to look at the positive work being done by the Digital Assistant Academy, an initiative enabling young, low income, single parents to generate sustainable, flexible income through an 8-week training course where they learn to become a freelance assistant working from their own home. The pilot scheme was so successful in 2011 that Nominet Trust has just funded the development of the project.
In addition to using digital technology to engage young people, we need to find ways that it can be used more effectively by those working with young people. We should, for example, think about the changing roles of teachers, youth workers and other 'intermediary roles' and consider how they can better engage with young people using digital technology.
Pockets of good practice clearly exist already but what's clear from the scale of the problem is the scale of the solution required. I'd urge policy makers and professionals working in this space to think digital and harness the huge potential of technology to improve young people's economic and social participation.