Kids aren’t leaving school ready for work – and we’ve all been conned into thinking that’s normal.
A million young Brits aren’t working, studying or training. How did we let this happen and what does it mean for your child?
Something has gone badly wrong in how prepared Britain’s young people are for the world of work. Not their ambition or their talent. Not their willingness, their readiness.
And it’s that gap between school and work where too many are getting stuck.
Nearly a million young people are not in education, employment or training – the so-called NEETs. That’s one in eight 16 to 24-year-olds. More than half have never worked a single day.
That’s not a small policy problem. This is your neighbour’s child, your kid’s friend. This is a national crisis.
Six in ten aren’t even counted as unemployed – they are classed as economically inactive. They are not working, not studying and crucially, not even looking.
NEET numbers have been rising for years, fuelled by ill health and disability. Around half now report a health condition – most often mental health or autism – and in just six years claims for health and disability benefits from young people have nearly doubled.
Almost a million young people are not in education, employment or training, a group known as NEETs
That should set the alarm bells ringing in every household in the country. A life on benefits cannot be the future we aspire to for this or future generations.
But too many young people end up on a downward escalator, one that starts with poor schooling, slides into poor mental health and ends parked on benefits before adult life has even begun. No parent dreams of that for their child.
We have to turn this around, and the interim report from the review that I am leading for the Government, which will be published next week, aims to do just that.
Part of the answer lies in something that is quietly disappearing: the first job.
Most parents reading this will remember theirs. Mine was delivering newspapers in the west end of Newcastle.
I learned more from that than any lesson in school – the importance of turning up and getting on with it, even when I didn’t feel like it.
Those early experiences used to be a rite of passage. Saturday jobs. Summer work. First proper pay packets in brown envelopes. The first taste of independence and pride. But today, entry-level roles are disappearing. Retail jobs – the biggest employer of Britain’s young people – have been falling for a decade.
Walk into a supermarket and you are more likely to scan your own shopping than speak to a cashier. Ordering a meal means scanning a QR code or using an app, rather than speaking to a waiter.
Offices that hired school leavers are using AI to do basic admin, customer service and even recruitment screening.
The very jobs that used to give young people their first step on the career ladder are disappearing. Which makes this crisis not just urgent but accelerating.
More young adults now arrive at 18 having never worked – with no references and no idea how a workplace runs.
And schools are not helping. Only one in five teachers think the system, based largely on exams and academic rigour, prepares students for what comes next.
Former health secretary Alan Milburn is conducting a review into the rising number of NEETs
For many schools, organising work experience is too often an afterthought. Six in ten young people did no work experience last year. Employers and schools seem to operate in parallel universes.
How can we expect our young people to do a job when they have never been given an opportunity to see how work actually works? How to speak to someone face to face, pick up the phone, deal with knock backs and keep going.
These are the basics of getting and keeping a job. And too many young people are reaching adulthood without them.
Just three per cent of employers say literacy or numeracy is the problem. They point to something more basic – communication and collaboration skills, agility and adaptability.
We are quick to judge ‘Gen Z’ – told they are glued to their phones, lost to algorithms or captured by the ‘manosphere’. It is easy to brand them all as lazy. Easy – and wrong.
I have spent the past few months speaking to them and I have heard a very different story. Like the young man in Newcastle who told me about applying for hundreds of jobs, day after day, and never even getting a reply, never mind an offer.
When that happens, kids start to doubt themselves, confidence drains away.
Despite that, nearly a third of NEETs apply for jobs they don’t even want. One in five apply every single day. This is not apathy. It is effort. This young generation did not choose to live through the pandemic, isolated from school and friends.
They did not design an outdated system in which schools and employers operate. They did not dismantle the Saturday job. But they are the ones paying the price.
And all this while the jobs that keep the country running are crying out for skilled people – engineers, electricians, care workers.
For years, businesses could recruit ready-trained staff from abroad rather than invest at home. That easy fix is fading as immigration levels tumble, and we are now left exposed with huge skills gaps.
But Britain’s bosses cannot stand back – if you want work-ready young people you must help create them. Support and invest in them.
Classroom confidence only becomes workplace confidence when young people are given somewhere to practise it. Work experience. Supported internships. Apprenticeships. The chance to get on the first rung of the jobs ladder. The good news from the countless conversations I’ve had with employers is they recognise this and want to do something about it.
The job of the state – of government and public services – is to make it as easy as possible for them to hire, support and train more young people. Right now, that system isn’t working.
The school records the absence. The NHS signs people off work, rather than offering help to get them into work. The jobcentre processes the claim.
We have built a maze of services around these young people – and somehow turned each one into somebody else’s responsibility. And in the gaps between them, a young person disappears.
Mr Milburn (right) with work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden (centre) during a visit to a boxing gym in December to launch the Milburn Review
So, the risk is a lost generation stuck on the scrapheap when they need more opportunities to learn or earn.
We have been here before.
When I think back to that paper round and growing up in Newcastle in the Seventies, I remember families who did not always have much, but they had purpose. They had work.
I watched that world collapse. The pits closed. The shipyards fell silent. Whole communities were written off. The government did not invest in them, retrain them or build them a future.
It quietly moved them onto incapacity benefits, closed the door and told itself the problem had been solved. It had not. The consequences lasted for decades.
We cannot afford to make the same mistake again.
The Government has already announced new measures, including new incentives for firms to hire young people, changes to apprenticeships and the school curriculum and investment in youth services.
These are welcome. But on their own they will not be enough.
Solving the NEET crisis means resetting the system that is supposed to transport young people from education into the world of work.
My review will not shy away from confronting uncomfortable truths about welfare, public services, employment practices or education. Schools must do more to connect young people with the real world of work. Careers advice must start earlier.
Work experience must mean something again. Employers must step up. And the health and welfare system must support work, not discourage it.
If we fail to act now, the cost will be enormous.
Not just in benefits and lost taxes but more importantly, in the millions of young lives wasted before they have properly begun.
Alan Milburn is a former Health Secretary who is leading an independent review into young people and work.
