Welcome to the FE weekly Soundbite Edition 683! So what do people want, an Apprenticeship Levy or a Skills Levy? So we asked!

This is the weekly e-newsletter and e-journal brought to you by FE News: ISSN 2732-4095. We know life is busy, so here is a snapshot of the latest announcements and epic thought leadership articles from sector influencers and cool thinkers across FE and Skills this week on FE News.

I hope you enjoyed FE Soundbite last week... the Apprentice takeover. I think it would be good to change the perspective and view on Soundbite, so we are going mix it up a bit in the future.

So do people want an Apprenticeship Levy, a Skills Levy or something else?

We had a couple of cool articles this week on the Levy. My mate Tom Bewick got me thinking with: Budget Statement 2023: is the scrapping of the apprenticeship levy on the cards? and then Mark Cameron wrote: Transparency and understanding will help the Apprenticeship Levy debate and its potential reform.

All of this got me thinking... what do people want... An Apprenticeship Levy, a Skills Levy, to Scrap it all together or something else? So, instead of just wondering, I set up a poll on LinkedIn... the poll results were really interesting:

56% of people wanted to see the Levy become a wider Skills Levy, 26% wanted the Levy to be purely for Apprenticeships, 15% want to scrap the Levy and only 2% want something else... interesting, especially as according to the data the people who answered were MD's, Chief Executives, Owners and Lecturers.

That is a lot of NEETs!

According to the latest ONS data, 788,000 are now NEET! ... or 11% of young people! What?!

We also had a great article from Resolution Foundation today looking at both ends of the labour market... and alarmingly both are struggling to be in employment: Exploring Economic Inactivity and NEETs: What Are Their Challenges?

Ever wondered what 'Economically Inactive' means? Well check out the article above to find out more.