Inquiry into ethnic minority female unemployment Friday, December 7, 2012 - 11:08

NIACE warmly welcomes the All Party Parliamentary Group on Race and Community report on Ethnic Minority Female Unemployment, outlining twenty four recommendations to improve levels of training and employment amongst Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi women.

Unemployment amongst Black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi women has remained consistently high since the 1980s. Pakistani and Bangladeshi women are particularly affected; 20% of these women are unemployed compared with 7% of white women. The Inquiry reported a number of barriers to employment – discrimination, language issues, cultural attitudes, qualifications and lack of social capital. Childcare was also a problem.

The Group identified English for Speakers of other Languages (ESOL) as a key solution to some of these barriers. Women wanted women-only classes in familiar venues at appropriate times. There are three recommendations on ESOL which NIACE can wholeheartedly support; that ESOL providers are supported to deliver courses more suited to these women’s needs, that pre-courses be introduced in areas of high need and that Government should encourage more work-focused ESOL classes for women who want them.

Chris Taylor, ESOL lead at NIACE, said:

"We were very pleased to submit evidence to the APPG on Ethnic Minority Female Unemployment. We believe appropriate, accessible ESOL provision delivered locally with childcare support is essential to supporting women into employment. Through A Woman’s Place, NIACE developed tools to do this and provided a range of models for outreach and delivery, which ESOL providers will find useful today."

The report also made key recommendation regarding apprentices. The APPG is concerned that now that the work of the 16 Diversity pilots has come to an end, there is no clear indication of how the work of the pilots will be implemented. NIACE shares this concern. The pilots were supposed to generate outcomes of 2,500 starts over the academic years 2010/11 and 2011/12, but they only generated 771 starts.

The apprenticeship message did not appear to reach Black, Asian and other minority ethnic communities. Barriers included a lack of promotion of apprenticeships in schools, a culture in some communities for progression in education rather than training, a dichotomy whereby individuals were either encouraged to aspire to professions or to aim for the family business and finally, a lack of awareness among parents, employers and the community more generally of the apprenticeship route.

Ian Bond, NIACE lead on apprenticeships, said:

"NIACE agrees with the APPG on apprenticeships. We welcome the National Apprenticeship Service’s intention to embed the good practice of the Diversity pilots into its work going forward, and share the APPG’s hope that NAS will pay close attention to the specific needs of minority ethnic young people and particularly the needs of minority ethnic women in its diversity initiatives."