A New Youth Jobs Crisis Demands System Change

Alan Milburn’s interim findings from his Independent Review, Young People and Work, published yesterday, warn of a growing generational fault line, with more than one million young people not in education, employment or training. That amounts to 13.5% of all young people in the UK: the highest level since the aftermath of the financial crisis, when the rate peaked at 17%.

Britain has been here before. In the early 1980s, youth unemployment regularly exceeded 30%, driven by deindustrialisation and deep economic restructuring. But this crisis has a different profile and different causes. That matters, because it means the policy solutions cannot simply be recycled from an earlier era. Programmes such as the Youth Guarantee, Pathways to Work and the Right to Try may have a role, but they are unlikely on their own to deliver the scale of change required.

Milburn’s diagnosis is that the current rise in youth detachment reflects a wider systems failure across education, health, welfare and employment support. The report points to deep structural inequalities tied to place, a sharp rise in mental ill-health, the lingering effects of Covid-19, a mismatch in funding for employment support, and an education and skills system that still does too little to prioritise transitions into work.

Yet one of the most striking arguments in the report is that this is not only a supply-side problem. It is also a demand-side failure. The first rungs of the career ladder have weakened or disappeared altogether. Entry-level jobs have become less plentiful, recruitment more remote and impersonal, and apprenticeships for young people have fallen sharply. Educational attainment may have improved overall, but that has not automatically made young people more employable in the eyes of employers. One distinctive feature of the current moment is the growing number of graduates competing for non-graduate jobs in sectors such as hospitality and retail.

In that sense, education is no longer able to absorb the shock of an underperforming labour market in the way it once did. That points to a broader economic challenge. If the UK is serious about improving productivity, it cannot rely on an education system that simply warehouses young people for longer while the labour market fails to provide enough routes in. It needs stronger vocational and workplace pathways that connect learning to progression and participation in a more effective way.

The interim report is explicitly framed as a diagnostic. It says clearly that it “does not yet set out solutions”. Those will come later in the year, when the final report is due to outline what “a coherent participation system for early adulthood should look like”. But even at this stage, the direction of travel is clear. The argument is that the current architecture is itself part of the problem, and that reform will need to focus on integration rather than another layer of disconnected programmes.

That has important implications for the education and skills system. The report is, in effect, calling for a shift away from a model organised around discrete stages and institution types, and towards one organised around participation and progression over time. It criticises a landscape in which the academic route remains familiar and relatively stable, while the non-academic route is repeatedly reformed, too often underfunded, and frequently harder to navigate. The result is a system that is easiest to use for those already likely to succeed, and hardest to use for those who most need support.

For colleges, the implications are significant. The report sees further education as central to delivering vocational learning, work preparation and second-chance progression, yet argues that the sector has been weakened by real-terms cuts, policy churn and a narrowing of opportunities for young people on vocational routes. It is explicit that further education and apprenticeships have contracted for precisely those young people most at risk of becoming NEET, even though these are often the most accessible and most relevant pathways for them.

For universities, the report is more nuanced. It does not dismiss higher education. On the contrary, it recognises its value. But it questions whether university has become too often positioned as the default route, at the expense of stronger alternatives. It notes that some regions do not generate enough graduate-level opportunities to absorb those leaving higher education, and that a notable minority of the NEET population already holds a degree or other higher-level qualification.

This is where the idea of a lifelong learning mindset becomes especially important. Although the report focuses on young people, its structural lessons reach much further. If the system treats learning as culminating in a single decision at 18, it will continue to fail both those who do not make a clean transition into work and those who need to progress later in life. A more modern approach would treat the move into work as the beginning of a learning journey, not the end of one.

The wider implication, then, is not simply that youth policy needs repair. It is that England needs a more plural, connected tertiary system. Colleges should be strengthened as core institutions of progression and re-engagement. Universities should sit within that system as part of a broader ecology of opportunity, rooted in place and linked more clearly to labour market realities. And structural reform should be built around progression through life rather than around a single high-stakes moment of youth transition.

By Mark Morrin, Principal Research Consultant at the Lifelong Education Institute