A little more about what we do to tackle the poverty of ambition and expectation is on our web site –and I hope that this week to have a short film describing what we do on this site
www.employmententerprise.co.uk

We deliver programmes for a wide range of people in central Scotland who have many barriers to finding work - personal, location, skills, communications, alcohol/drugs misuse, disability, homelessness, health and so on. All are able to progress to far better futures if we can spend a short time with them to enable them to do what they want to do. We achieve the outcomes required for our funders and we also achieve the personal development outcomes for individuals who participate.

I believe that there are 3 major pillars in the construction of a society which can set its aims to eradicate the poverty of ambition and expectation — Employment, Enterprise and Education

Our education system is designed to take students through a ’sausage machine’ and come out the other side able to proceed on their journey through life with qualifications. This does not happen very often though, with all the personal aspirations for their lives which students wanted at the start –consider that still more than 50% of our graduates go on to work in an area in which they did not study!! How many Modern Apprentices achieve the Vocational Qualification - fewer than 40% in the construction industry. Around 16% of school leavers in Scotland go on to nothing –and this figure is rising daily.

I have said that the path which we could follow begins with establishing what an individual ‘wants’ to do –to consider this carefully and to build ambition and expectation. Then encourage self enterprise, community enterprise, social enterprise and business enterprise in our society in order to enhance the ambition and expectation.

Education is then only a tool to provide the necessary skills to achieve the goals.
Many people in our society including politicians do not fully grasp the situation facing us, that perhaps as many as 25% of the working population are ‘workless’ in those communities which are described as ‘deprived areas’
When the overall Unemployment figures say that it is 6% of the country who are affected by unemployment, the politicians, media and public assume that because 94% are working then everything is ok — it is the human trait of  ’I'm all right Jack’ which causes this response and so the problems faced by 250,000 people in Scotland for example and their families, is a subject not to be worried about for long
If I am wrong then where then are the programmes designed to help this situation? Is funding being increased to meet this problem where the official unemployment figures for the UK are predicted to rise over 3 million?
The answer is no.
Our company will endeavour to raise funding from all sources possible to facilitate the return to work for so many of the communities we are able to assist.
There must be recognition of the facts that millions of our populations will be forced to live in poverty, debt, isolation and hopelessness for many years to come –many do already.
There are many other priorities in our society today, I accept.
But is there any more important than the welfare and future of our own people?

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