Agenda and draft minutes

Please provide an outline of the roles and responsibilities that your post involves, and an overview of the services supplied by Education Business Partnership Kent.

I am the Executive Director of EBP Kent, which is a limited company.  Some 17,000 other companies work with us.  We work with young people between the ages of 4 and 24, and we link to 67 Schools for Work Experience and a further 25 who contract purely for activities around employability.  We are funded in small part by commissioning fees from KCC but most of our income comes from schools which purchase our services.

I am pleased to have been invited to address the Select Committee, as EBP Kent has been working on the Student Journey for 10 years.   We work with pupils in Key Stages 1 – 5, and with university students.   We work on the principal that every student is ultimately aiming to enter employment, whether at 16 in an apprenticeship scheme or after graduating.

We base our work on the need for employability skills such as customer awareness and teamwork, which are needed in all jobs, rather than technical knowledge, which will change frequently and require constant re-training.

We currently work with 35,000 young people from Key Stage 1 onwards, addressing issues like motivation, attitude and employability.  We find that it is good to start early with softer skills.  We use a range of different programmes. For example, 1,000 Primary school children will visit Turner Contemporary with EBP Kent to take part in workshops and science schemes, and we also go into schools to deliver inspired learning programmes.  We start on these initiatives very early, with our enterprise partners.

Our aim is to let employers see young people’s scope and how they could develop them.  Employers tell us that young people are simply not fit for employment when they leave school, and they need preparation, so we provide employment professionals to act as a link between young people and potential future employers to address the need to enhance their work-readiness.

We instil confidence in employers and run mentoring and skills events across Kent.  From these and the comparisons we are able to make with other areas of the UK, we have seen that Kent is well developed and more advanced in some aspects of this work than many other areas.

We work with the Kent Federation of Small Businesses, universities, the Youth Offending Service and 40 special schools. The pack I have handed out lists examples of what we do, and also includes some examples of feedback from students.

We are not funded for what we do – we have a basic budget of only £3,000! – so we rely on the goodwill of universities, colleges, employers, etc to support our work. For example, one of our projects - ‘Special Choices’ – was funded by Sue Dunn’s directorate. This enables such activity to take place and the EBP is very grateful for such support. We deliver very good  ...  view the full minutes text for item 13.

Please introduce yourself and outline the roles and responsibilities that your post involves.

I am the Director of the Kent Foundation, a post which I have held since 2007. I am not involved in much operational work, as the front-line delivery of services to young people is not my responsibility.

What is the Kent Foundation and what are its objectives?

The Kent Foundation was originally a charity, set up by the KCC in 1985 to help young people to set up in business. It had a Board of Trustees and used to work with the Princes Youth Business Trust, but the interests of these two bodies diverged.  The Kent Foundation offered low-interest loans to young people wishing to set up their own businesses.  This arrangement ended five years ago as loans were not being repaid, and the KCC was losing money as a result. It felt it was no longer able to support young people if they were not disadvantaged in some way, and so its focus changed. 

In 2007, it did some research on where else it could direct its funding.  I started in this post in 2007, with funding of £400,000 and a small office.   One objective of the Kent Foundation is to sustain itself. It developed its resources and services, and now has 3 full time equivalent and 5 part time staff.  We make use of volunteers as far as possible.  Our role is now more strategic and includes bringing money into the KCC. Last year we supported 2,000 students.

We have just launched our ‘Fourth Option’ Business Plan, which we developed as we feel that young people go though education seeing just three options ahead for them: university, a job, or unemployment. The fourth option is to set up your own company.  We are addressing how to get the message out about this fourth option, as widely as possible, and overcome the difficulties. Our mission statement is to support the economic development of the county.

Please provide data in relation to young people and self-employment in Kent.

I can only tell you my own figures.  I know the Kent Foundation has about 60 young people on its books at the moment.  It is difficult to say how many of these are successful, as the first businesses started in May 2008 and it is too soon as yet to see what will be successful.  I am planning some research next year to look at the success rate of the businesses we support.  Business development is necessarily something which has to be looked at in the long term.

What are the barriers and enablers for young people who want to set up their own business in Kent?  What are the conclusions of the “EmPOWER” report? 

There was some research undertaken in 2008 on the barriers that young people experience when setting up their own businesses, and the main reasons are included in the EmPOWER report, which Members were sent with the agenda for this  ...  view the full minutes text for item 14.