Article · 24 August 2026
Asked their main priority in work, the largest group of young people who are NEET did not say pay. They said interesting or fulfilling work. We have been solving the wrong problem.
A million is a headline number, and headline numbers make news.
Between January and March this year, 1,012,000 young people aged 16 to 24 in the UK were not in education, employment or training. That is 13.5 per cent of the age group, up 55,000 on the previous quarter and 89,000 on the year before. It was the first time the count had passed a million since 2013, and it was duly reported as a stark new crisis.
I understand the appeal of a round number. It provides a threshold, and thresholds are how we notice things. But it is probably the least useful figure in the release.
Here is why. The rate has been higher than this before, and not long ago. The House of Commons Library puts the recent peak at 16.9 per cent, reached in July to September 2011 in the aftershocks of the financial crisis. That was worse, on the headline measure, than anything we are looking at now. And it fell. The economy recovered, participation in post-16 education expanded, and by 2014 the rate had returned to where it sat before the crash. The problem behaved the way we expect problems to behave. It responded to growth.
This one has not. The rate has been climbing since 2021, through a period in which overall employment has been historically high. Whatever is producing these young people, it is not the business cycle.
In January to March 2026, 39 per cent of young people who were NEET were unemployed. The other 61 per cent were economically inactive, which in the statistical sense means not working and not looking for work.
Those two words describe very different lives. Unemployed means available, searching, refreshing the inbox, waiting for a door to open. It is a gap in a working life. Inactive means the searching has stopped. The 2011 cohort was, in the main, queueing. This one has largely left the queue.
And then there is the figure that should have led the coverage. The Rt Hon Alan Milburn's interim review into young people and work, published in May, found that 61.6 per cent of young people who are NEET have never had a job at all. Twenty years ago that proportion was 42 per cent. Of today's 24-year-olds who are NEET, 45 per cent have never had one.
Unemployment is a gap in a working life. This is the absence of one ever having started.
The review is also blunt about how quickly this hardens. Of young people who have been NEET for less than a year, 65 per cent are back in education, employment or training the following year. Of those who have been NEET for more than a year, only 25 per cent are. Same young people, same barriers, same labour market. The variable is time.
There is a version of this argument that says the work simply is not there any more, so nothing else matters. It is worth testing, because it is not quite true.
In May to July this year there were 707,000 unfilled vacancies in the UK economy. That is not a labour market with nothing in it.
The honest picture cuts both ways and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Vacancies are 10.3 per cent below where they sat before the pandemic, and outside the pandemic period the last time the figure was this low was 2014. There are 2.5 unemployed people for every vacancy, up from 2.3 a year ago. Nobody should claim the door is wide open.
But 707,000 is still 707,000, and in some places the demand is not merely present, it is chronic. Adult social care in England carried around 96,000 vacancies on any given day in 2025 to 2026, a vacancy rate of 6.2 per cent. That is roughly three times the rate in the wider economy, and it is the lowest the sector has recorded in a decade. Skills for Care estimates it will need an additional 410,000 posts by 2040.
So we have close to a million young people not working, and a hundred thousand care posts nobody is filling, in the same country and frequently in the same postcode.
The obvious conclusion is that these two facts should be introduced to each other. I do not think that is quite right, and it is worth being precise about why.
The work going unfilled is mostly hard, often poorly paid and frequently on unsocial hours. Care work in particular asks a nineteen-year-old to handle intimate personal care, bereavement, and the pressure of being the only person in somebody's home, usually for close to the minimum wage.
If you would not want your own child to spend their twenties doing it, it is not reasonable to be indignant that somebody else's child does not want to either.
And here is the finding that ought to change the conversation. Asked to name their main priority in work, the largest group of NEET young people in Milburn's survey did not say pay. Forty-one per cent said interesting or fulfilling work, and that was the top answer.
That is not a generation holding out for something easy. It is a generation that wants what everybody wants, which is for the thing they do all day to mean something.
It would be easy to write these young people as despairing, and I have seen it done. The evidence does not support it. Most of them expect to work eventually. In Milburn's survey only 11 per cent feared they would not.
What they cannot tell you is what they are working towards.
Sixty-seven per cent said the school curriculum had failed to prepare them for work. Careers guidance was described to the review again and again as generic. One young woman in Belfast left school without the GCSEs she needed, ruled out her local college because too many people there knew her, and told the review she was never told what to do next, so she stayed in the house and concluded that this was just the end. She was sixteen.
That is not a motivation problem. It is a navigation problem, and we keep treating it as the first.
Someone will object that a great many of these young people are ill, and that no amount of career conversation changes that. The scale is real: in 2025, 44 per cent of young people who were NEET reported a work-limiting health condition, up from 26 per cent in 2015. But Milburn's survey also found 84 per cent said they want to find a job, education or training, which is not the profile of a cohort that has opted out. Direction is not a substitute for treatment. For a young person with anxiety it is often the thing that makes treatment worth completing.
The navigation failure shows up hardest in one number. In England, around 314,000 people aged 18 to 24 are neither in work nor in education and are not claiming benefits either. They are on nobody's caseload. No institution is responsible for finding them. A system that cannot see hundreds of thousands of the people it exists to serve is not underfunded. It is misdesigned.
The state's answer to a young person with no direction is almost always a course. The Youth Guarantee has £820 million behind it over the three years from 2026-27 to 2028-29, and it will fund a great deal of training.
Some of that will work. But watch what happens when you put somebody on a course before they have an answer to the question the course is supposed to serve.
One further education provider in Islington told the review that almost 30 per cent of its enrolments are walk-ins on enrolment day, young people who arrive without knowing what their next step is going to be. That same group, the provider said, has a high dropout rate and tends to leave within six weeks.
Six weeks. Long enough to appear in an enrolment figure, and then in a withdrawal figure a quarter later. Long enough to be recorded as a young person who was engaged and then disengaged, when what actually happened is that nobody asked them what they wanted before placing them on a path towards something else they did not want.
A course moves a political number. On its own, it does not move a life.
There is a harder version of this argument that deserves a straight answer. Sometimes people take work because they have to. The rent is due. Desperation moves people in a way that careers advice does not, and plenty of good working lives began with somebody taking whatever was going because there was no alternative.
I am not going to be sentimental about that. It is true.
But desperation produces a job, not a direction. Somebody who takes work only because they had no choice has no reason to stay once the immediate pressure lifts, no reason to learn anything beyond the minimum, and nothing to say at the next interview except that they needed the money. It fills a vacancy for a few months. It does not build anything, and it leaves the young person exactly where they started, only tireder and slightly more certain that work is something that happens to you.
The difference between a young person who takes an unloved job as a step and one who takes the same job as a sentence is not the job. It is whether they can see what it is a step towards.
So the sequence we run is backwards.
We identify a young person who is not participating. We offer them provision. If they refuse it or leave, we record it as disengagement. At no point does anybody sit down and start from what this specific person is good at, interested in, or willing to put up with a difficult year for.
Milburn draws the distinction cleanly. A deficit model asks what is wrong with a young person. A strengths-based model asks what they are good at, what they care about, and what becomes possible when somebody takes those things seriously.
Start there and the unloved job stops being the insult it currently is. A warehouse shift to fund a course, an evening in a care home for somebody who has worked out they want to nurse, a year in a kitchen for somebody aiming at their own place: these are not the same experience as being put in the only thing left. Same hours, same pay, entirely different psychology, and a very different likelihood of still being there in six months.
None of this requires a new institution. It requires an adult with time, some knowledge of the local labour market, and a longer conversation than a fifteen-minute appointment allows.
We used to get that from three places, and all three have thinned. From families who had worked, which is why one stakeholder told the review that work experience now relies on who your parents know. From schools that arranged things rather than leaving them to parents. And from the first job itself, which was where most people met a working adult who was neither a parent nor a teacher. The Saturday job on the high street. The summer on the site because somebody's uncle put in a word. Apprenticeship starts for young people have fallen by more than 40 per cent, and recruitment has moved to portals, screening tests and algorithms, so the young person who might once have walked in and been given a chance is filtered out before anyone has looked at them.
The same erosion runs through everything else. Around 70 per cent of people aged 18 to 24 now report experiencing loneliness. One in five have one or no close friends, a proportion that has tripled in a decade. Youth clubs, libraries, pubs and community centres have closed. We took away the places where a young person could be known by somebody, and then built a labour market that will only hire people who can demonstrate they have been known by somebody.
Milburn found employers who wanted to hire young people and were nervous about it, describing a growing pastoral burden. One large employer told the review it had found it necessary to employ a full-time social worker to support its younger staff. A large organisation can absorb that. A firm of twelve cannot, so it hires the older candidate with the track record, and the young person with potential and no history loses again.
That caution is rational and it will not be talked out of anybody. But it is worth naming precisely what is being asked, because it is smaller than it sounds. The intervention that changes a life here is not a wellbeing platform or a mental health app. It is a first job with a named adult attached to it, somebody who notices in week three that a young person has gone quiet, and who knows what to do about it. Somebody, ideally, who at some point asks them what they actually want to do, because for a lot of these young people that will be the first time anybody has.
That is a behavioural capability, not a benefits package. It sits with the line manager, who is usually the least trained person in the building and the one carrying the most. Give that manager a simple structure for the first ninety days of a young person's employment and you change retention, confidence and the trajectory of a working life. Leave them to improvise it under pressure and you get an early exit that both sides read as proof they were right to be worried.
When the next quarterly figures land, the count will move. It may be higher, it may be slightly lower, and either way the movement will be reported as though it were the story.
It is not. The question worth asking of any programme aimed at these young people is much simpler, and almost nobody asks it. Not how many were enrolled. Not how many completed. How many, at the end of it, could tell you what they were aiming at, and why.
Give a young person a direction and they will tolerate an enormous amount to get there, including work they do not much enjoy. Give them a course instead, and we should not be surprised when they are gone in six weeks and we record it as their failure.
Rebuilding the Village, my first book, is about what we removed from around young people without ever deciding to, and what it would take to put it back. It is published in early 2027.
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