The high rate of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) is a challenge which needs solving quickly. Everyone understands the risk of long-term “scarring”. But if progress is to be made, we need clear thinking, unencumbered by ideology or policy fads.
The government’s measures addressing the problem are disjointed. A number of small, experimental projects were commissioned some months ago, including £45 million invested in youth guarantee trailblazers, alongside smaller initiatives with the Careers and Enterprise Company and the third sector.
More recently, the government has scaled up its response by announcing a £725 million apprenticeship budget uplift, a proportion of which enables mayoral authorities to broker placements for NEETs. A further £820 million will provide a package of youth employment measures, including intensive support from job coaches, work experience placements and subsidised jobs for those in “high-need” areas on Universal Credit for 18 months.
Yet all this does not add up to a national strategy. Coverage is geographically uneven. No single agency “owns” the challenge. There is a multiplicity of approaches, but no underlying narrative to explain rising numbers since 2021, why inactivity has become so widespread, why mental health features so prominently, or why young men are disproportionately represented.
The government has implicitly recognised this by establishing an independent review, chaired by Alan Milburn. Writing for FE Week, Lee Elliot Major welcomed the appointment, describing Milburn as the “ideal man” because of his social background. He argued that “three powerful orthodoxies” had derailed solutions: the dominance of deficit approaches rather than “equity” ones; rising mental health issues; and the problem of silos in government.
The latter third of these is a genuine problem. The term “NEET” dates back to the late 1990s, when it was introduced by the Social Exclusion Unit. The lack of joined-up interventions led to initiatives such as Connexions and the New Deal for Young People. Connexions has long since gone, and with it any single body with oversight of the whole problem. Responsibility for monitoring 16-18 NEETs sits with local authorities, while the Department for Work and Pensions is responsible for 19-24 year-olds. Arguably, neither has the capacity to address the overall challenge. This needs fixing.
Major’s other two “powerful orthodoxies”, and his analysis of them, are a distraction. The claim that deficit thinking dominates policy, and should be replaced by an “equity approach”, rests on the idea that policymakers and educators wrongly treat disengagement as a problem of the individual rather than the system. At times, this perspective can be useful. But there is nothing new about it. The term “NEET” replaced “status zero” because the earlier language was considered too negative.
Equity-based thinking is already widespread and well established. The suggestion that deficit thinking is the system’s default position is a caricature. The problem is it may have a weak track record of delivering improvement. As a framework, it often generates more heat than light.
NEETs are not a homogenous group. Experiences vary widely by family background, gender, ethnicity and geography. Understanding the recent rise means disentangling both system-level factors and individual incentives and choices. It is complex, and slogans do not help.
What is missing from the debate is high-quality research into young people’s own perceptions and experiences. This is why our commission, which has argued for a stronger focus on NEETs for some time, is commissioning new qualitative research into the lived experience of disengaged young people. Starting in Blackpool, which has an established NEET reduction partnership, we are seeking two additional areas to include.
The other distraction is Major’s account of a mental health “emergency”, which he suggests is inevitable because the traditional life model of “work hard in education, get a stable job, buy a home” has broken down. There is evidence of declining confidence in this model, but relating primarily to graduates rather than NEETs.
This argument seems wide of the mark in explaining rising NEET numbers. Inactivity is a defining feature of the current problem, and mental health strongly associated with it. But the causes more likely include the effects of social media, over-diagnosis of mental health conditions and a benefits system that too often lacks clarity of purpose and undermines individual development rather than supporting it. I share Major’s optimism about Milburn’s appointment, but disagree that his suitability rests on his upbringing or background. We should judge people by what they do, not where they come from. What stands out is his leadership of the Pathways to Work Commission in Barnsley, which successfully combined health, employment and welfare policy to address inactivity. Similar approaches are urgently needed if we are to tackle the NEETs problem effectively.
