Crisis in schools creates a NEET problem for FE to solve

Worsening school absenteeism piles pressure on colleges to provide lower-level post-16 courses

Mickey Symes, 18, wanted to be a plumber. But after missing out on a grade 4 in his maths and English GCSEs the previous year and feeling doubtful as a dyslexic about his prospects of ever passing, then finding his preferred college course was oversubscribed, he instead joined the growing wave of young NEETs.

The 16 to 18 NEET (not in employment, education or training) rate rose from 5.5 to 6.8 per cent of the population between the first quarters of 2022 and 2023, while the 12.2 per cent of 16 to 24 year olds who were NEET from April to June 2024 was up 0.9 percentage points on the same period last year.

In 2013 the law changed requiring all young people to continue education, employment or training until they turned 18, but the 16-18 NEET rate is no lower now than it was back then.

And turmoil in the school system, with soaring rates of exclusions, absenteeism and learners being educated at home, could spell trouble for future NEET numbers.

The rise has profound implications not just for those young people’s mental health and social isolation, but for loss of future tax revenue and increased welfare payments.

And the government’s plans to tackle the problem with a “youth guarantee”, promising opportunities for training, an apprenticeship or help finding work for all 18 to 21 year olds, could be scuppered because the demand for low-level provision is already outstripping supply.

Swamped by demand

New College Swindon was almost caught short this year after getting 56 per cent more applicants (200 more students) than it expected for its courses at level one and below.

Its vice principal of commercial, skills and partnerships, Matt Butcher, blamed the larger-than-expected rise on more young people being missing from the school system, and more “slipping below” their expected GCSE grades.

Accommodating the influx was “difficult”, he said, and involved being “creative with curriculum planning and utilisation of rooming”.

It “could have proved impossible with much higher demand”, but next year he’s predicting demand for level one and below courses to be double that of two years ago.

Similarly, Newcastle City Council found a lack of level one post-16 study programmes was “a national issue”, as such programmes have “not been an attractive financial option for training providers”.

It criticised the new North East Combined Authority (which controls local adult education budgets) for a “lack of funding for part-time alternative provision for young people at age 16” to meet “growing demand” for it in the city.

Luminate Education Group of providers in West Yorkshire says projections for Leeds indicate a shortage of at least 2,000 places for courses at level two and below. The group’s Leeds City College now operates waiting lists each year for such courses.

Luminate’s chief executive Colin Booth says the college is now “very clearly full to capacity in all of our buildings”. It will work with other providers to grow provision, but if Leeds City College and Leeds College of Building cannot “secure additional physical capacity very quickly, we are very likely to see a further rise” in young NEETs.

Leeds City College’s 14-to-16 provision which supports NEET reduction strategies is “incredibly oversubscribed, with well over 1,000 enquiries and applications for 120 places available each year”, says Booth. He claims that if those learners were not in college, “many would be in alternative provision funded at three times the cost to the DfE”.

GCSE-retakes deterrent

Mickey is not alone in his angst over retaking GCSE maths and English. Newcastle City Council found that “disillusioned” young people used their failure to pass those subjects with a grade 4 as a reason “not to enter education and training programmes”.

They were also “concerned to hear” that “many apprenticeship vacancies ask for young people to have already gained a grade 4 in maths and English”, and that “there is a disincentive for employers to accept young people who are undertaking resits”.

The post-16 grade 4 pass rates are particularly woeful for boys, with only 16.6 per cent passing maths and 17.3 per cent English last year (compared with 18.2 and 25.9 per cent for girls). The overall maths pass rate is down 3.8 percentage points on 2019, with English down 9.4 percentage points.

The exam pass disparity may help explain why the rise in NEETs is starker among 16 to 24 year old males, of whom 13.5 per cent in the second quarter of this year were NEET – in contrast to global NEET rates which are twice as high for young women as young men (28.1 per cent compared to 13.1 per cent).

The NEET rate for boys aged 16 to 17 (5.4 per cent) is more than double that for girls (2.6 per cent).

Liverpool City Region said the region’s relatively low GCSE pass rate “restricts post-16 choices for between 40 and 50 per cent of young people seeking an appropriate post-16 destination”.

Local complexities

The challenges of reducing NEET rates are compounded by the complexity of navigating the local and national funding landscape. Around £20 billion is spent each year on at least 49 nationally contracted or delivered employment and skills-related schemes or services managed by multiple Whitehall departments and agencies.

The Local Government Association says that as no single organisation is responsible for coordinating this locally, it makes it “difficult to target and join up provision for learners, unemployed people, career changers and businesses”.

Before Brexit, a “strong focus” of the European Social Fund in the UK was helping NEETs into work. But the UK Shared Prosperity Fund that partially replaced it was used to fund the Multiply scheme (focused on boosting numeracy skills), with the rest devolved locally for a broad range of purposes. The future remit of the funding is currently uncertain.

In Kent, a council report blamed the European Social Fund’s removal for a reduction in provision for 16 to 19-year-old NEETs.

Challenges reducing the NEET rate are particularly stark in Kent, where an average of 80 pupils were permanently excluded from secondaries every month in 2023-24, more than treble the council’s target, and there were 5,228 children missing from education in June 2024 (compared to 2,710 in 2021 and 3,600 in 2022).

Some of the provision losing funding is “very niche alternative provision”, and there is “little existing rolling provision for students needing to access education later in the academic year”. Between three and five of the county’s 12 districts have no NEET provision available at any time. 

The council says the reduction in provision, along with the “regrading of GCSE boundaries”, has led to NEET rises “across Kent”. 

In Liverpool City Region, mayor Steve Rotheram pledged four years ago that every young person out of work, training or education for more than six months would be offered a job, apprenticeship or training programme – similar to Labour’s youth guarantee.

He’s now offering £3,000 wage incentives to local employers recruiting young people, and expanding mentoring services. But he has a considerable task ahead, with the 16 to 17 year old NEET rates rising across all its six council areas in the year to 2023, and local authorities since then “indicating a continual rise”.

The combined authority blames the withdrawal of traineeships last year as “undoubtedly having a negative effect” on those not achieving a level-two equivalent by age 16, and criticises the “national desire to move away from entry-level apprenticeships for young people to higher level apprenticeships”.

The region has seen a “significant fall” in 16 to 18 year olds starting apprenticeships – down 40 per cent on 2016-17 levels.

The combined authority raised concerns that training providers are under “significant financial pressure”, with “many” “trimming their provision” and “some leaving the market altogether”.

School absence links

The current worrying rise in pupils’ persistently absent from school (missing 10 per cent or more sessions) could see NEET numbers spiral further.

Numbers of key stage 4 children persistently absent more than doubled between 2017-18 and 2022-23 (from 172,368 to 367,720), while the numbers ‘severely’ absent (50 per cent or more) more than tripled (from 15,881 to 51,791).

Persistent absentees are 3.9 times more likely to become NEETs aged 16 to 18, research by the Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre found. Persistent absence was the biggest predictor of NEET status – bigger than SEND support or free school meals eligibility.

Liverpool City Region says the rise in young people persistently absent in year 11 is “presenting challenges with accessing the appropriate support and provision for them when they reach 16”. It also linked previous persistent absenteeism in schools to a recent rise in 19-24 year olds needing “additional help” getting into work, because of “their complex and multiple barriers”.

Furthermore, the rate of permanent exclusions has not only risen in schools (from 0.06 to 0.11 per cent between 2013-14 and 2022-23) but in the alternative provision intended to give troubled youngsters a fresh start in life – from 0.10 to 0.34 per cent in that time.

Those exclusions, along with a lack of available alternative provision placements, has contributed to a 23 per cent yearly rise in children missing education (not registered at school or receiving any other suitable education), to 30,400 on census day 2023.

The numbers being electively home educated were up 14 per cent to 92,000 that year, while the share of local authority alternative provision placements that were one-to-one tuition was up from 3.9 per cent in 2017-18 to 11 per cent in 2023-24.

There’s evidence that being educated at home makes it harder for some young people to make a subsequent jump into further education or work, due to their lack of social interaction.

Newcastle City Council found a third of those educated at home went on to become NEET in November 2022. Officials had recorded a “significant rise” in young people in the city being educated at home, and it said “many” of those “out of mainstream education for some time” need “additional support to re-enter education, training or employment”.

Butcher says the rise in young people not in the school system means “we’re struggling to get access to some learners – they come through very late as and when the local authority or other agencies become aware of them.”

In the last 18 months, his college has ramped up its communication with Swindon Council and the police, who have “young people they’re aware of who they would want to be in college for their own wellbeing and safety”.

He says colleges like his are also engaging more with schools than they’ve ever done previously, giving them “early lines of sight of who’s coming through, their school attendance and potentially significant mental health challenges”.

Because many NEETs “aren’t ready to engage” in full-time programmes, his college is “looking at much more part-time provision as a route back into education”.

Alternative provision

One alternative to a rigid study programme is the sort of vocational alternative provision provided to NEETs by Engineered Learning in Derby, which is turning youngsters’ lives around and helping to plug skills shortages.

Its workshops in fabrication, welding and vehicle maintenance gained the approval of equalities minister Seema Malhotra, who visited earlier this year (when she was shadow skills minister).

Its chief executive, Dan Read, has however fallen out with at least one local headteacher in Derby as he “won’t be told what to do by someone who hasn’t left school”.

But Read’s eyes well up as he describes how he couldn’t give up on Aaron, a boy excluded from school, because “all I could see was a mirror image of me at his age”. Aaron has since built an “incredibly successful” career in welding, and “always knows he can come back here anytime he wants”.

Another student, Taylor, who “tried to chuck himself under a train”, later “ended up welding on HS2”. “I’m insanely proud of those young people,” Read says.

He is looking to franchise his model to other areas and there appears to be ample demand for it;  Placements by local authorities into alternative provision rose 108 per cent between 2017-18 and 2023-24, from 23,086 to 48,133, although work-based placements such as Read’s made up only 0.62 per cent of the total.

In Stoke-on-Trent, where an astonishing 16.5 per cent of 16-17 year olds are NEETs, the cost of alternative provision for excluded pupils rose from £2.3 million in 2022-23 to £3.1 million in 2023-24.

Cameron, 17, used to “skip school a lot” and “wasn’t allowed on school premises” to take his GCSEs. He says: “I can be myself at Engineered Learning.”

Corey, 17, was “kicked out of many schools”. He wanted to do a “hands-on” engineering course at school but was given “no opportunities”.

He spent a year as a NEET “doing a lot of things I shouldn’t have been doing”.

“I actually look forward to waking up now and doing something, because Dan believes in us 100 per cent.”

A trusted adult

Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner for England, told FE Week she would like to see “far more help” for NEETs, including “support from trusted adults in schools or colleges”.

The government has pledged to provide 1,000 new careers advisers in schools, and make two weeks’ work experience mandatory.

Having a “trusted adult” providing careers mentoring was “the key to success” in preventing 14 to 17 year olds from becoming NEETs, a project by the Careers & Enterprise Company (CEC) found. The pilot, running in 10 areas over the last three years, also highlighted the importance of young people meeting people they could relate to from the world of work who shared similar backgrounds and had faced similar barriers.

Of the more than 1,000 pupils on free school meals who took part, 94 per centsuccessfully transferred to college or training upon leaving school at 16 (compared to 88 per cent of disadvantaged young people nationwide) and only around 1 per cent had quit the course six months later.

Each of the 10 projects had a different focus based on local needs.

In Liverpool, the programme’s focus was on young boys disengaged from school. It enabled them to meet local self-made entrepreneurs – “adults they could actually relate to”, explains Gill Walsh, Liverpool City Region’s hub lead.

In Leicester, the project focused on young people with SEND. They built a “really strong relationship” over two years with their careers advisor, who they would meet with twice a term, explains project lead Laura Sherlock.

“That meant that if courses were dropped, which can happen quite frequently with entry level post-16 qualifications, they have somebody helping them transition to new courses. That careers advice was central.

“Some of our young people aren’t going to access paid employment. But we wanted to help them understand how they could meaningfully employ their time. That might start voluntarily, but progress to paid employment once they’ve built up skills.”

East Sussex’s project supported 105 persistent school absentees, as the council found high school absence to be the biggest indicator of later NEET status.

Zack Johnson, 17, says his “head was a whirlwind” when he tried to go back to his school after Covid lockdowns as he was “riddled with anxiety”.

From year 10 the project provided him with three hour-long sessions a year with a coach, Anna, to set career goals. He was inspired to apply to a music production course at DV8 College in Bexhill-on-Sea, after being introduced by Anna to local jazz musician Neal Richardson, and now has his sights on becoming a singer songwriter.

CEC’s chief executive Oli de Botton sees that “connection” to role models for young people as “crucial”. 

“Everyone’s got passion for something, you’ve just got to find it.”