Is the Social Contract with Young People Broken and Can We Fix It?

Something struck me recently at the Breaking Barriers / NEET Collective, held in central London on 2nd June 2026 – a FE News and Edge Foundation sponsored roundtable bringing together experts from across local and central government, careers, employment, mental health, and further education sectors. We were working through the familiar territory of rising NEET numbers, fragmented provision, and short-term funding when one of the groups I was facilitating asked a question that cut through everything else on the table: Is the social contract with young people broken?

It is a question worth sitting with. Because the honest answer, based on what practitioners, employers, and young people themselves are telling us, is: in many places, yes it is.

What we already know, and why it is not enough

We have substantial evidence about how young people acquire skills and confidence. We know that lived experience matters more than systems design. We know that the death of the Saturday job has quietly removed one of the most effective on-ramps to work that ever existed – low-stakes, real-world exposure to the world of employment, to turning up, to dealing with the public, to earning. We know that schools, under intense pressure to deliver academic outcomes, are not always sufficiently resourced to provide quality careers education, information, advice and guidance (CEIAG) on top of their teaching responsibilities and that the pressure to orientate young people towards mainly academic routes is not always in their best interests.

And yet, too often, the response is to reach for a new programme, a new initiative, a new acronym. What the NEET Collective audience told us clearly and consistently is that we need to start early, build vocabulary around the world of work from primary school onwards, and sustain that on a genuinely lifelong basis. Not as a bolt-on. As a foundation.

The silo problem

Across the room, there was clear agreement on one structural barrier above all others: silos. Schools, further and higher education, careers services, mental health and wellbeing support – each operating with its own funding stream, its own accountability framework, its own language. Young people, particularly those furthest from employment, do not experience their lives in silos. They need a connector – a wrap-around model that holds them through transition – not one that hands them from service to service and hopes the joins hold.

What that connector looks like in practice matters. Multi-agency civic forums – bringing together local authorities, colleges, employers, careers professionals, mental health services, and youth charities – offer a proven model for joined-up pastoral support that places the young person, not the institution, at the centre. These are not new ideas. What is new is the scale of the problem they need to address.

FE colleges are well placed to anchor that connector role. They sit at the intersection of education, employment, and community in a way that few other institutions do. But flexible entry into FE must be driven by responsiveness to young people’s needs – not by funding eligibility criteria that were designed for a different era. The question of who funds the connective tissue and for how long remains frustratingly unresolved.

Mental health cannot be an afterthought

One theme came back repeatedly, and it was not subtle: mental health cannot be ignored in any serious discussion of NEET. CV rejection. No or few support structures in place. Feeling like you do not belong. These are not peripheral issues for a subset of young people – they have become mainstream experiences that are quietly dismantling confidence and motivation at scale.

Cross-party commitment to addressing this properly – not through bolt-on awareness campaigns, but through genuine integration of mental health support within careers and employment pathways – is overdue. We need more dedicated champions: people working across mental health, careers, and youth work who can bridge these worlds and bring credibility and trust to both. Peer role models with lived experience of navigating the system are equally vital – young people who have been where others are now, and who can show that a way through exists. Parental influence and the importance of belonging emerged as equally significant. Young people need to feel they are part of something, that there are people who have seen someone like them succeed, that the system is done with them rather than to them.

Charities and third sector organisations have long understood this. Their ability to reach the most vulnerable young people – and to build the kind of trust that statutory services often cannot – is an asset that government consistently undervalues. Harnessing their expertise and investing in scalable models of support, including their role as connectors between young people and employers, should be a policy priority, not an afterthought.

From solutions to action

The energy in the room was not despondent. There is no shortage of good or interesting practice. What is in shorter supply is the architecture to spread it. The audience called for investment in the delivery of CEIAG in local places and online spaces, standardised approaches to skills recognition, and flexible entry points into FE that do not penalise those who have taken non-linear routes.

On employers, the ask was clear: commitment that goes beyond token gestures. That means offering authentic experiences of and exposure to the world of work. It means job trials – allowing employers to assess a young person’s suitability for a starter role based on what they can actually do, rather than what qualifications they hold. And it means government making the economics of this easier: tax credits for employers who offer quality work experience placements to young people would shift the incentive structure in a meaningful way, particularly for smaller businesses who want to engage but cannot always absorb the cost.

There is also a strong case for removing outdated qualification requirements for roles where they serve no real purpose – a point that speaks directly to the mismatch between what employers say they want and what the labour market actually rewards.

Government has a larger role to play than mapping co-funded support and reducing duplication, important as both are. What is needed is strategic leadership at the highest level: a cross-departmental taskforce on youth employment, reporting directly to No. 10 and Cabinet, with a clear mandate to align the work of DWP, DfE, DHSC, MoJ, DfT and MHCLG around a shared set of outcomes for young people. Piecemeal responses to a structural problem will not suffice. The political will to sustain this beyond the electoral cycle is a missing ingredient.

Technology also has a role. Used well, AI-powered CEIAG tools can extend access to high-quality, personalised careers support to young people who would otherwise receive none – particularly in areas with workforce shortages or limited local provision. But AI should amplify human expertise, not replace it. The most effective models combine the reach and consistency of technology with the empathy, judgement, and relationships that only a skilled human practitioner can provide.

A final thought

The social contract is not irreparably broken. But repairing it requires honesty about what has eroded it – short-termism in FE college funding, a narrowing of what counts as success in education, the quiet disappearance of informal routes into work. It also requires us to recover what has not eroded but been forgotten: the evidence-based initiatives, many of them rooted in third sector organisations, with a proven track record of success that have simply been squeezed out in successive funding rounds. They are still there. We need to find them, fund them, and scale them.

That means personalisation. It means authentic experience. It means co-creation: provision designed with young people, not delivered at them. And it means recognising that instilling a sense of purpose and securing a livelihood are not soft outcomes. They are the foundation on which everything else depends.

By Dr Deirdre Hughes OBE, Associate Professor, Institute for Employment Research (IER), University of Warwick, Director of dmh associates & CareerChat UK Ltd.

This article reflects the author’s own synthesis of themes emerging from breakout session discussions at the NEET Collective, May 2026, focusing on mental health, careers and skills. It is intended as a brief summary rather than a comprehensive account of the day’s proceedings.