12 March 2013
6:00 – 7:30pm, followed by a drinks reception to 8:00pm
13-14 Cornwall Terrace (Outer Circle), London, NW14QP
In the UK, young people with low or no qualifications make up 39% of all young people unemployed and not in education, and 47% of those inactive and outside learning, despite only accounting for a quarter of the youth population. Tony Wilson, Policy Director of Inclusion, which delivers research and new approaches to policy that promote social inclusion in the labour market, will talk about the UK’s policy of intervention and provision of training to improve the employability of British youth. His recent publications include the BIS research paper (Number 101) Youth Unemployment: Review of Training for Young People with Low Qualifications (Dept. for Business Innovation and Skills, February 2013).
From the 1960s onwards, Japan’s rapid economic growth generated internationally low levels of youth unemployment. This changed in the 1990s however, and by the 2000s, youth unemployment was recognised as a serious concern. Japan’s Emerging Youth Policy (Routledge, 2013) is based on extensive fieldwork that draws on both sociological and policy science approaches, and is the first book to investigate in detail how the state, experts, the media, and youth workers have reacted to the rise of youth joblessness in Japan. The book argues that entrepreneurial youth support leaders in Japan can provide sustainable, attractive solutions to the dilemmas that virtually all post-industrial nations currently face but have not yet seriously addressed. Dr Tuukka Toivonen, the author of the book, will discuss Japan’s emerging youth policy and attempt to bring evidence from Japan into a dialogue with the realities in other advanced nations, such as the UK.
Dr Tuukka Toivonen
Dr Tuukka Toivonen is Junior Research Fellow at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, and is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Global Communications Centre (GLOCOM), the International University of Japan, Tokyo. He holds a DPhil in Social Policy from the University of Oxford, and is a graduate of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan. He has held visiting positions at the universities of Kobe, Tokyo, Kyoto and Keio. He is a sociologist by training and has published several articles in world-class journals that comparatively analyse policy-making processes, youth problems and social innovations. He is also the co-editor of A Sociology of Japanese Youth: From Returnees to NEETs (Routledge, 2012). Currently, he is carrying out fieldwork on the evolution of social entrepreneurship and related innovation communities in Japan. Alongside his purely academic work, he also engages in social innovation activities himself as the founder and representative of Kansai RISE, which promotes young people’s creative involvement in public improvement and policy-making at regional level.
Tony Wilson
Tony Wilson joined Inclusion as Director in October 2011. He has more than ten years’ experience of policy and research, project management and delivery across a range of roles in HM Treasury, the Department for Work and Pensions and Jobcentre Plus. Since joining Inclusion, Tony has led on a range of projects including a feasibility study on developing a new employment programme in Northern Ireland, assessing approaches to tackling youth unemployment, the fragmentation of services for young people, and evaluations of programmes to increase employment among inactive groups. Most recently, Tony led on employment policy and delivery at HM Treasury: advising on labour market trends, policy responses to the downturn, delivery of welfare-to-work programmes and benefit reform. Prior to this he was responsible for the design and delivery of a number of Department for Work and Pensions employment projects. These included overseeing the development and introduction of the Future Jobs Fund, which created over 105,000 temporary jobs for long-term unemployed people. He was an expert policy adviser to David Freud on his independent review of welfare-to-work, published in 2007.
Organised by The Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
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