Decline of the Saturday job as young say they’re too busy revising
FEWER young people are taking up Saturday jobs because they are too stressed by school exams, it has been suggested.
The number of child work permits issued to businesses who want to employ children aged under 16 fell from 29,498 in 2012 to 23,071 last year, according to data released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The figures, released to the BBC, show a steady decline in the number of licences issued by local authorities in the past five years.
Experts said that the change was partly because young people increasingly spend their time studying and revising for examinations.
Worries about their job prospects in adult life meant children did not want to be distracted from academic success, said Dr Angus Holford of the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Essex University. “Teens are being told evermore that you need to get good GCSES and A-levels to get a good job in the long term,” he told the BBC. “Passing the exams you need now is looming larger in their concerns.”
Figures released earlier this year showed that the number of counselling sessions carried out by Childline about exam stress had risen by 11 per cent to more than 3,000.
Councils also said that the permit numbers had fallen because there was less demand for the types of job usually carried out by young people.
Middlesbrough borough council said that fewer permits were issued to children aged 13 to 15 because there were fewer paper rounds in the area.
In 2011, the local authority issued 101 permits to children in that age group, compared with just seven in 2016.
The area with the highest proportion of children with the permits was Norfolk, where more than five per cent of 13 to 15-year-olds had one in 2016, equivalent to 1,376 permits.
Earlier this year, figures released by the Office for National Statistics showed that young people are increasingly likely to be volunteering because they believe it will help their careers.
The average time per day spent volunteering by 16 to 24-year-olds increased from nine minutes each day to 17. Experts said this was because teenagers were often told volunteering was necessary for them to get a job later on.
A 2015 report by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills found that older teenagers, those aged 16 and 17, were solely focusing on their studies and less likely to be working.
In 1996, 42 per cent of people in the age group said they were mixing parttime work with studying, compared with just 18 per cent in 2014. More than half of those who responded said they were focusing on their academic work instead of taking up a Saturday job.
Some schools or colleges were actively discouraging pupils from working, the paper added, by deliberately time-tabling classes to make it hard to combine a job with studying or by limiting the number of hours they were allowed to spend in paid work.
Young people also said there was a lack of suitable jobs in their area or that available roles had unsuitable hours.
Research has suggested that staying out of the labour market can be detrimental to young people later on, because they then lack the workplace experience that employers look for.
Far fewer youngsters are taking on Saturday jobs. In the past five years the number of those under 16 with part-time jobs has fallen by a fifth, partly because of fear of doing less well in school work and exams. We can’t help feeling sorry for these teenagers – not that it was always enjoyable for those of us who spent hours on Saturdays gutting chickens or delivering leaflets in the rain. But then, much of life was awkward: coping with parents and teachers, living without much money and above all dealing with the opposite sex. A Saturday job brought a more realistic attitude to all these areas of anxiety. By a paradox, the obligation to work regularly for a bit of money brought not serfdom but freedom. Extra algebra coaching is not likely to prove as valuable as working in a café or doing a paper round.