This is with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

Sainsbury’s has just launched a plan to give 10,000 young people work experience opportunities to help them “develop skills, build confidence and gain insight into future careers”. Andy Burnham thinks it’s a great idea, and he’s probably right.

Our new Prime Minister said: “I encourage more businesses across the country to do the same. Access to opportunity and work experience shouldn’t depend on who you know; it should be within reach for every young person wherever they live – and that’s what I’m determined to deliver.”

The background of the rising numbers of young people not in education, employment or training (Neets) has been widely reported. It’s a huge global problem, as the International Labour Organisation recently reported.

While the UK is by no means top – or perhaps it’s better to say the bottom – of the global league table here, we now have a higher proportion of Neets than the EU average, whereas a decade ago we were lower. The worrying point here is that while our overall unemployment level is lower than the EU (though higher than the US), our youth unemployment rate is over 16 per cent and heading in the wrong direction.

What’s to be done? There are really two ways of tackling this and we probably need both.

The Sainsbury’s initiative is a great example of the first: show young people what work is really like, coach them on how to present themselves, build their confidence, and so on. Ten thousand is a decent number to take on, and if other companies pitch in, you could envisage the total being 10 or 20 times that total. But there are now more than a million Neets in the UK, and these are not even temporary jobs, let alone permanent ones. You show up and hopefully you learn something. But you don’t get paid. And I am afraid that these schemes are only really useful for young people if there are jobs afterwards they can take up.

Which leads us to the other way of looking at the whole issue, which is to boost the number of paid jobs for young people. The summer’s just coming to an end, and the long school holiday has historically been the time when many people get their first pay packet.

There is certainly strong demand from teenagers for jobs. And in spite of the mood music, the online banking group Monzo’s report on the job scene was pretty positive.

It commissioned research from Censuswide, which found that 65 per cent of the 2,000 UK 13 to 20-year-olds they surveyed were hoping to get a job this summer. As for the supply of jobs, there were certainly a lot being advertised, with the top six recruitment areas being hospitality, retailing, transport, education, administration and health and care. Pay? This ranged from just under £13 an hour in Manchester to over £16 an hour in London, so not bad by current standards.

But it’s a mixed picture. That data was collected back in May, so it reflected job expectations and advertised offers rather than how things turned out. Summer jobs for teenagers are at or close to all-time lows. The evidence is mostly anecdotal, but according to the recruitment agency Indeed, this year’s summer postings were running 30 per cent down on 2025 and 70 per cent down on 2023.

The reasons cited by employers are what you might expect: rising costs generally, the increase in employers’ national insurance contributions, regulations, Sunday working limits, and so on. The hospitality industry, a huge employer of teenagers in the summer season, has been particularly hard hit. There is also likely to be greater competition from adults: why hire a teenager you have to spend time training when you can get experienced staff for not that much more?

But the big message surely is how much teenagers like being paid for doing work. That is why two-thirds of them want a summer job. We all like earning money, but there is something special about that first pay packet. You never forget it.

We have to tackle youth unemployment, and it’s no comfort at all that this is a global problem, not simply a British one. The Sainsbury’s initiative is an encouraging example of what large employers can do to demonstrate what jobs are like, and how young people should prepare for them. The Government will try lots of projects, currently bundled together under its Youth Guarantee scheme, which it claims “will ensure that young people have access to further learning, help to get a job or an apprenticeship”. Burnham has rightly spotted that this has to be a real priority.

But this is all top-down stuff. What matters just as much – in fact, I believe it matters even more – is the bottom-up availability of work for young people. Schemes like this will only work if there is real economic growth, because it’s growth that generates the jobs.

And there’s no point training people for jobs that don’t exist, or will be swept away by technology in a couple of years’ time. That’s why the model of summer jobs for teenagers is so vital. You’re not shadowing someone else working, or sitting in a room being told how to shape up for an interview. You are doing something and getting paid for it. That’s how you learn. And you don’t simply learn what a job feels like, but also what you really, really enjoy doing and what you absolutely hate.

So let’s figure out how to remove the barriers to part-time work for young people, not just in the summer but more generally. Let’s build on the thrill of the first pay packet.

Need to know

It’s fascinating for all of us to think back about what we learnt from that first job, quite aside from the pleasure of at last being paid.

For myself, there wasn’t really any holiday work. I was brought up mostly in Ireland and in the 1960s it was an economic backwater, a far cry from the booming economy now. So aside from a trip to Cork for my father’s little textile business (for which I got half commission), my first paid work was on the as an editorial trainee.

So what did I learn? I think the first thing that was that the newsdesk had to know where you were. It mattered much less if you were held up as long as the news editor knew. So you rang in, and if they needed to reassign you, then you went to wherever they told you to go.

The second thing was to be right. Do not make it up. If the story was boring, they would spike it and that was fine. Third, the only person that really mattered was the reader. You were their representative, asking the questions they would want to ask, and being (politely) sceptical about what you were told.

I do remember being yelled at, of course, and quietly criticised too. But I think the most lasting lessons came from the other trainees a bit further down the line. The most important one of those was when I was laying out a page and found an advert had been cancelled. The space shot up from a four-column top to an eight-column one. I didn’t have enough copy to fill it. What on earth to do? Terror. Mercifully, a young colleague was also on the stone (as we called it) and was passing by.

“Well,” he said, “um, why don’t you bump up that quote? It could stand a fuller head; you’ve a smashing pic there that could go up to six cols, and you should be there.” Saved. The reader didn’t need to know I was in a jam. All they saw was the actually rather better finished product.

He was Ray Connolly, who went on to be the hugely successful showbiz reporter, biographer of Elvis Presley and John Lennon, writer of noted film scripts, celebrated novelist, and much, much more. I saw him recently and I love that man to this day.

The big point here, of course, is that we all learn from the people around us, and those very early lessons are the most memorable of all.