Verbatim report of proceedings

Monday, 7 September 2015 - Strasbourg

Promoting youth entrepreneurship through education and training (short presentation)

  Jonathan Arnott (EFDD). – Madam President, some of the challenges in this report are common to all Member States in Europe, while other vary from one Member State to another. I will talk a little bit about the situation in the United Kingdom. We actually have a very good quality education system in the UK but quite often we educate in the wrong way, in the wrong things. We push almost half of all young people to go to university but actually, in fact, there are not that many graduate—level jobs available. We need to be doing more of this kind of thing: we need to be promoting entrepreneurship, we need to be promoting the kind of skills, the kind of training, that are going to develop young people in the right direction.

Paragraph 43 of this report urges the Commission to ensure nothing impedes the free movement of workers, but often that does impact on young people and takes young people away from employment when it allows older people coming into the country the opportunity to take advantage and compete for the same jobs, and they often win.