Edinburgh's unenviable record on 16 school year leavers

I was at one of Edinburgh City Council regular briefings for MP and MSPs on Monday. It included information about the general economic/employment position in the city. One piece of information was the fact that Edinburgh appears to have the worst record of any Scottish local authority for 16 year old school leavers who aren't going into education, employment or training. Given Edinburgh's relatively low unemployment rate generally, this is both surprising and shocking.

I asked if there was any explanation for this, and the Council admitted they didn't fully understand why this was the case, but were trying to do so as they recognised this was really worrying. One possibility might be that unlike other councils with traditionally higher levels of unemployment who had as a result developed schemes and projects for 16 year old leavers in this category, Edinburgh hadn't done this to the same extent - but even so, for Edinburgh to have more young people (600+) not going into education, employment or training, than Glasgow, with its higher population is staggering.

I'm certainly going to take up this issue, and will come back to it in future posts.