Student Jobs and Government Claims

According to the Office for National Statistics the number of university students in the UK has fallen from 38% to 26%.  The reasons for this are both perhaps that there are fewer ‘student jobs’ available, but also because there is more competition from non-students for what would have traditionally been ‘student jobs’.

Typically ‘student jobs’ tend to be in service industries that require staff on a part time outside of ‘office hours’, e.g. retail, catering, bars.  In recent years this has extended to include activities like call centres, paid charity fundraising, leafleting and direct selling.

There are currently around 2.5 million university students in the UK, 12% of that number represents around 300,000 students who are not gaining work experience.  

As students are counted as primarily economically inactive, while someone who is working part time in what might otherwise have been regarded as a ‘student job’ is regarded as primarily ‘employed’ this has potentially moved up to around 300,000 jobs into the private sector from not being counted, which further calls into question the Government’s claims about job creating by the private sector over the last three years.