8000 school leavers in West Lothian go on to ‘positive destinations’

West Lothian ^[1] council has tracked more than 8,000 of its school leavers to record their positive destinations.

It often meant staff working after hours and “ chapping doors” to speak to youngsters who have joined the workplace, the council’s Education Policy Development and Scrutiny Panel (PDSP) heard.

It means more teenagers than ever leave school and go into further education, training or into jobs.

Councillors heard headline statistics that in the last year 8,509 16 – 19 year olds from West Lothian were counted. This was an increase of 245 compared to the year before.

The dataset showed 94.8% of 16 – 19 year olds were recorded as participating in education, training or employment in April 2023. This was 1.4 percentage points more than in 2022, and places West Lothian 13th in Scotland.

“This was the best result we have ever achieved, and was one percentage point better than the Scottish average,” said Stuart McKay, the Education for Work Officer.

He added: “The gap between the least and most deprived 20% has closed from 12.9% to 7.2% this year.”

The team had recorded the destinations of all but 94 of the group of school leavers, whose destination is classified as “ unconfirmed.”

All schools operate a robust tracking system to track young people’s initial post school intended and actual destination. A Participation Partners Group which was set up 5 years ago to reduce the number of young people with an unconfirmed status has continued to expand, involving more partners. This group has put in place a variety of systems and staff to more effectively track the post school destinations of young people.

Councillor Andrew McGuire Executive Councillor for Education, chairing the meeting said: “How do we have so much success, where unconfirmed is the lowest ever and significantly lower than the Scottish Average. What are we doing differently?

Mr McKay said: “We have been working with a number of partner organisations plus a number of teams within West Lothian Council involved in tracking these young people and we resort to chapping doors at the end of the day to find out where they are. Staff have been prepared to go above and beyond to track destinations.”

He pointed out that young people working tend to be working between 9am and 5pm so council staff had altered their own working hours to carry out surveys of the school leavers.

In his report to the PDSP Mr McKay said: “Historically it has been more difficult to ensure that 19 year olds are in a sustained positive destination. This year saw an improvement in the number of 19 year olds classed as participating (90.7%) with an increase of 3.9 percentage points compared to last year. This age group also historically had the highest number of young people recorded as unconfirmed but again saw an improvement with only 44 young people unconfirmed compared to 67 last year.

Councillor McGuire said: I’d just like to put on record out thanks for the hard work that goes into this both in education establishments but also to get the reporting figures to make sure we leave no stone unturned to find out the destinations where young people end up in, so thank you.”

References

^{^} West Lothian (www.edinburghlive.co.uk)
^{^} BA ‘sorry’ after sending Edinburgh woman’s suitcase to wrong airport after name mix-up (www.edinburghlive.co.uk)
^{^} Edinburgh couple transform abandoned ‘squint’ office space into ’boutique’ hotel (www.edinburghlive.co.uk)
^{^} Edinburgh Live (data.reachplc.com)