What our intern wants Andy Burnham to know about graduate employment
Chap Patefield-Isacoff, Cause Communication intern and graduate looking for employment
At Cause Communications we work with a number of clients that support young people - including Sir Lewis Hamilton’s Foundation Mission 44 - supporting young people to thrive in school and access great careers in STEM, OnSide - a national network of youth zones that offer young people opportunities, activities, and a place to belong, and our longest standing client the Disabled Children’s Partnership - a coalition of more than 130 organisations campaigning for improved education, health and social care for disabled young people in the UK.
What all of these organisations have in common is their mission to support young people to have better opportunities, and where possible, into employment.
When the Millburn Review -a report looking into the rising number of young people in the UK who are Not in Education, Employment, or Training (NEET) - revealed that roughly one million young people are currently locked out of the labor market, our founder and comms guru, Sam Carlisle decided to offer one lucky intern a peek into the inner workings of Cause and learn from one of the best in comms campaigning.
After a successful application via LinkedIn, last week we welcomed graduate Chap Patefield-Isacoff to the office and were truly impressed. His research skills are excellent, he is creative, enthusiastic, polite and punctual.
So when he mentioned his thoughts on new PM Andy Burnham’s appointment and what it might mean for the young NEETs in the UK we told him to write it up as a blog. Take a read below - we think it’s an interesting insight into the problems facing so many young people right now.
Oh, and if anyone's looking for a graduate researcher, please get in touch with him.
To Andy Burnham: What you should know about graduate employment
Dear Andy,
Congratulations on the keys to Number 10. Youth unemployment has been all over the news this year, and you've been clear that education and opportunity for young people are among your top priorities. I wanted to write to you directly about what that crisis actually looks like from the perspective of a recent graduate with so much to offer but who is struggling to find his footing.
I achieved a First Class BSc in Politics & International Relations at Southampton in 2022, then an MSc in Sociology & Social Policy with Distinction at the end of 2023. I was awarded Dean's List four times over, and gained the top post-graduate dissertation mark in my department. Since graduating, I've sent more than 300 job applications. Only a quarter got any response at all, primarily rejections. 15 informed me that I had been shortlisted, but ultimately went nowhere, and only two have led to an actual interview.
This hasn’t just been affecting me; too many of my fellow graduates are in a similar situation, either NEET or working minimum-wage jobs to get by. Your government's own Milburn Review has already laid out the problem: there are fewer entry-levels roles available, administrative and customer service positions have collapsed by double-digit percentages since 2022, and graduates now compete for a fraction of the positions that used to exist.
UK job vacancies fell below 700,000 in January this year, the lowest since the pandemic, and graduate roles specifically are down 45% year on year, with graduate recruitment at its lowest level in 13 years. The standard route into work through platforms like Indeed and graduate job boards is still sold to students as the way to a career, but each listing now draws hundreds, sometimes thousands, of applicants each. Understandably, employers default to whoever already has experience, leaving no obvious way for an untested graduate to become a tested one.
The only progress I've actually made has come from ignoring that process almost entirely: cold-emailing organisations that weren't advertising and turning up to networking events that offer no pay and no guarantee, just proximity. That's how I ended up interning at the PR company Cause Communications, an opportunity I only discovered through a contact I made last year. That access came at a cost: you end up in a cycle of years working in hospitality or retail, where possible, to pay bills and save enough to afford unpaid placements, which delays a professional career and stalls development in the fields you hope to pursue.
Here’s what I ask of your government. First, a wage subsidy for employers who take on graduates. Even a modest one narrows the gap between "affordable risk" and "why would we bother" that's currently filtering out anyone without a placement year (something I missed out on due to Covid) or prior experience. Second, paid apprenticeship-style schemes that extend beyond the trades and into the fields graduates often study — policy, research, communications, the social sciences — so the alternative to a degree-plus-experience trap isn't just more unpaid internships dressed up as opportunity.
The Milburn Review found that for every £1 spent on employment, support for young people, roughly £25 goes on benefits. That's a sign of a system paying to manage the consequences of exclusion rather than prevent it. Graduates aren't asking to skip the queue. We're asking for a queue that isn't a thousand names long with no way to move up it except unpaid labour we can't all afford.
My fellow graduates have talent, we have aspirations, but no outlet for the passions and skills we developed through education. Watching that go to waste, application after application, is deeply frustrating and demoralising in a way that doesn't show up in any of the statistics above. The Milburn Review itself put it best: this is a generational fault line, and a generation being failed.
I'll keep applying, and I'll keep taking unpaid opportunities where I can afford to. But I'd like to see a government that makes that affordability less of a precondition for a career.
Yours,
A graduate still waiting for his big break
