The unemployment rate for school-leavers has dropped from 14.4 per cent to 11.5 per cent over the past two years. However, the latest Annual School-Leavers' Survey shows that second-level students with no qualifications remain much more likely to become unemployed than those with a Junior or Leaving Cert.
It also shows that unqualified school-leavers who find jobs will earn far less than their better qualified contemporaries.
The survey says the mean gross hourly earnings for all second-level students who left school in the summer of 1997 was £3.51p an hour. This is significantly below the proposed national minimum wage. For school-leavers with no qualifications, the hourly rate was only £2.47p. Employer groups are likely to use the figures to argue that the new national minimum wage should not apply to younger, less-qualified workers.
The 1997 survey, which was conducted by the Economic and Social Research Institute, shows that only 11.5 per cent of second-level students failed to find a job within 12 months, or move on to third-level education. The percentage of 1996 students who were still unemployed in the summer of 1998 was 12.7 per cent. The figure for 1995 students was 14.4 per cent.
The figures are a dramatic improvement on the 1980s, when up to 25 per cent of school-leavers spent more than a year on the dole, but they also show that the economic boom is failing to have an impact on early leavers and those students who fail to do well academically. More than 56 per cent of young males who left school without qualifications in the summer of 1997 were still unemployed a year later. The figure for females was higher at almost 68 per cent.
Even school-leavers with pass marks in less than five subjects at Junior Cert level were twice as likely to have found a job by this year than those with no qualifications. However, their unemployment rate, at 30 per cent, was still twice the average.
Some 41 per cent of students went on to third-level education, 3 per cent emigrated and another 3 per cent were unavailable for work.