Mayor offers unemployed Londoners free training to secure jobs

Londoners who are unemployed or in low paid work, regardless of their prior qualifications, can now access fully funded training opportunities at local colleges and adult education providers across the city to help them retrain, learn or upskill and help them into work that will support London’s recovery.

Sadiq today announced a total package of £11m of funding focussed on supporting Londoners into good jobs in sectors that are key to London’s recovery and long-term economic growth.

£5m will deliver the Mayor’s Academies Programme (MAP), of which £3m will support new Academy Hubs and will bring skills providers, employers and other partners together to help tackle skills gaps. The MAP aims to support Londoners hardest hit by the pandemic into good jobs in the hospitality, digital, creative, green and health and social care industries. The programme will coordinate and improve the quality of training in London, including adult education, and will also help to address the employment gap between different groups of Londoners and improve diversity and representation in these industries.

£6m of London’s Adult Education Budget (AEB) has been made available to providers working within an Academy Hub to provide bespoke support that will help these newly skilled people into work.

Londoners have been heavily impacted by the COVID pandemic. There were around 345,000 jobs on furlough in London in the middle of August 2021 and the capital had the highest take up of the coronavirus job retention scheme of any region. Provisional estimates showed that 21 per cent of the jobs on furlough at the end of June were in the accommodation and food services sector. London's unemployment rate was 6.4 per cent in the three months to June 2021, compared with 4.7 per cent a year earlier.

Today the Mayor visited Mercato Metropolitano (MM), a food and drinks market in Elephant and Castle, who support Londoners getting jobs in the hospitality industry, as well as roles in warehousing, security and management. MM is an accredited London Living Wage employer with a business model focusing on sustainability and environmental protection.

The Mayor met Tavie Agama, Paige Afum and Shevone Parris who have all recently trained in the hospitality and digital sectors. Tavie took part in a Create Job’s Creativity Works: Content Production course in Autumn 2020, which was a part of the Mayor’s Digital Talent Programme, Paige has completed levels 2 and 3 of a Catering and Hospitality course at Westminster Kingsway College, and Shevone started her AEB funded Culinary Cooking course in February 2021.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan said: “This funding will provide crucial support to many Londoners whose jobs were most affected by the pandemic and will help hundreds of people get back into work by offering them a chance to learn new skills or hone their existing ones for free, in sectors that are vitally important to the growth and recovery of London.

“The hospitality sector was one of the industries hardest hit by the pandemic. As the Government’s furlough scheme comes to an end, many workers may unfortunately find themselves out of a job that they love in a vibrant and buzzing industry.

“By working closely with adult education providers and partners, we can help support people who are in need of good, sustainable work and industries that are crying out for passionate and newly skilled Londoners.”

Mary Vine-Morris, Area Director (London) and National Lead Employment at the Association of Colleges said: “London’s colleges have been integral in the delivery of the Mayor’s Adult Education Budget, and we are pleased to see an emphasis on the importance of this learning for Londoners who have been particularly affected by the pandemic.

“We also welcome the Mayor’s Academy Programme which will build on best practice from colleges across the capital. The support provided through this programme will help to address some of the acute skills challenges across hospitality, alongside other sectors that are key to London’s recovery. As well as sector-specific training, a renewed focus on good work is needed to ensure that Londoners are able to progress into high quality, sustainable careers.”

Shevone Parris, who is training at Westminster Kingsway College said: “I started the cooking course as I was made redundant from Heathrow Airport at the end of 2020 due to the pandemic.

“The course was the most enjoyable thing I have ever done. It helped me take my cooking skills to another level increasing my knowledge and developing the art of presentation. I have learnt from this course that “You eat with your eyes”, and nothing brings people together like good food.

“Completing this course has giving me the inspiration to start my own business. I firmly believe that the culinary Skills Cooking Course at Westminster Kingsway College will help me turn my passion for cooking into a career and look forward to doing level 2.”

ENDS

Notes to editors

Adult Education Budget

• London’s £318m Adult Education Budget was delegated to the Mayor from 1 August 2019.

• The Mayor used the AEB to fund learning for 213,480 Londoners in the first year of delegation (between August 2019 and July 2020).

• The AEB supports a diverse range of Londoners to get the skills they need for life and work. In the first year of deliver, 70 per cent of learners were women, 55 per cent were from a Black or Minority Ethnic background and the majority of learners were aged 24-49 (62%).

• Since taking control of London’s AEB, the Mayor has made training more accessible for Londoners, introducing full funding of courses for people in low paid work and, allowing unemployed people or those earning less than the London Living Wage to take courses up to Level 3 regardless of prior qualifications.

• AEB learners in London usually take multiple courses. There were 424,750 learning aims enrolments in London during the 2019/20 academic year, where the most frequent course levels were below Level 1 (accounting for roughly two thirds of all aims). The most frequent subject area chosen was Preparation for Life and Work, which provides valuable skills for the labour market (such as ESOL, English and Maths skills), accounting for nearly half of all aims in the AEB programme.

Mayor’s Academies Programme

• The Mayor’s Academies Programme (MAP) is a £5m programme which aims to support Londoners hardest hit by the pandemic into good work in sectors key to London’s recovery and long-term economic growth, as part of the London Recovery Programme. It will do this by coordinating and quality marking training in London (including adult education) and providing bespoke support to help newly skilled people into work in our priority sectors.

• The MAP will also address the employment gap between different groups of Londoners and work to improve diversity and representation in priority sectors.

• The priority sectors for the MAP are:
• • Digital
  • Health and social care
  • Green
  • Creative Industries
  • Hospitality

• The current £3m MAP hub funding opportunity is available for organisations to fund staffing resource to support closer working between employers, training providers and other relevant organisations to link skilled Londoners to job vacancies. The deadline for applications is 24 September.

• The £6m AEB funding will fund existing GLA AEB skills providers who are members of a hub to deliver additional support to help Londoners into sustainable employment.

• The MAP will also be providing bespoke support for under-represented groups of Londoners in the priority sectors through the Mayor’s Workforce Integration Network (WIN). This will include inclusive employment toolkits for each priority sector.

• Find out more about the MAP online - Mayor’s Academies Programme | London City Hall