Neuro-inclusion Article Three: One Million Young People and the Case for Building Differently

In the first three months of 2026, the number of young people in the UK who were not in education, employment or training (NEETs) passed one million. The Office for National Statistics puts it at 1,012,000 people aged 16 to 24, which is 13.5% of the age group, up 89,000 on a year earlier. It’s the first time the figure has been above a million since 2013.

One statistical note, the ONS labels these estimates as official statistics in development, so quarter-to-quarter movements deserve caution. The direction of travel over the past five years however, does not. The proportion of young people who are NEET has been rising since 2021 and now sits at its highest level since 2014.

A million is the kind of number that stops meaning anything, so make it one person: a nineteen-year-old who left school with a handful of qualifications and a settled belief that education wasn’t built for them. No course, no job, no training place. Now multiply by a million, and ask how many of them think and process the world differently.

Not a phase. A trap.

In November 2025, the government launched an independent review into the rise in youth inactivity, led by Alan Milburn, with the final report due this summer. The interim report, published in May 2026, contains a finding that should end any temptation to treat NEET status as a phase young people simply pass through: of those who fell into health-related economic inactivity between 2017 and 2019, almost eight in ten were still NEET more than two years later.

The same report shows how much the character of the NEET population has changed. Over the past decade, the proportion of young people who say they’re NEET because of a work-limiting health condition has risen by 70%, with the neurodevelopmental thread now visible in the official data as well. In 2025, 12.3% of all NEET young people in England recorded learning difficulties or an autism spectrum condition as their primary health condition, up from 7.7% in 2021.

Around 100,000 NEET young people now report autism as their primary work-limiting condition, according to a March 2026 analysis published by the Health Foundation. Among NEET young people who report any such condition, roughly two in three name a mental health condition or autism as the main one. And those figures capture only the young people whose conditions surface in survey data at all. Late diagnosis, no diagnosis, and simply not knowing you’re neurodivergent are all common. I was 35 before I even thought I might be neurodivergent and got mine, so it’s reasonable to read these numbers as a floor, rather than a ceiling.

The pipeline starts at school

None of this begins at sixteen though. In the 2024/25 academic year there were 913,000 suspensions in England’s state-funded schools, even in a year when the overall total fell, the burden did not fall evenly. And on permanent exclusions, the gap is starker: Department for Education figures show pupils on SEN support were permanently excluded at six times the rate of pupils with no identified special educational needs, and pupils with an education, health and care plan at more than four times the rate.

Special educational needs is a broader category than neurodiversity, and the two don’t map neatly onto each other however, but the direction is hard to argue with: children whose needs have been identified are removed from mainstream classrooms at several times the rate of their peers. If school teaches a child that the system responds to their difference by pushing them out, the NEET figures at nineteen stop looking mysterious.

At the far end of the pipeline, the adult employment data should complete the picture. The Department for Work and Pensions figures, drawn from the Annual Population Survey, only cover autism however. Other forms of neurodivergence, and neurodiversity as a whole, aren’t collected. The figures that they do have on autism, however, show that in 2023/24 just over 30% of autistic people were in employment. That compares with about 55% of all disabled people, and 82% of people without a disability. It’s among the lowest employment rates of any disabled group recorded. This is why I question folding neurodiversity into the disability umbrella. Inside a category that large, the specific data on neurodiversity gets thin, something needs to change.

To be fair to the policy machinery, it is moving. The Get Britain Working white paper of November 2024 introduced the Youth Guarantee, with further components announced in March 2026 under what the government calls a New Deal for young people. Milburn’s final report lands this summer. A separate independent panel led by Professor Amanda Kirby, appointed in January 2025, has been examining how to improve employment prospects and workplace inclusion for neurodivergent people specifically.

All of that matters, but none of it reaches the place where a young person’s trajectory is actually set: the classroom, where their difference is met with a suspension or with support; the interview where their communication style is read as a red flag or simply as a difference; the workplace where the sensory environment is unbearable or workable. Those decisions happen inside individual settings, one at a time. Policy can fund and exhort, but it can’t build.

Where the NSS fits

The Neurodiversity-Supportive Standard asks a setting, whether education or workplace, to show that it’s built for neurodivergent people, not merely tolerant of them. Not a poster on the wall, but practice you can see: leadership that means it, systems designed for different minds, recruitment and assessment that are fair, support that arrives with dignity, and improvement that continues. A setting demonstrates this against seven principles, and an external assessor places it at one of four levels.

A standard won’t fix the NEET numbers on its own of course. Poverty, housing, mental health services and a soft labour market all sit inside that million too. But a striking and growing share of those million young people are neurodiverse, and for them the evidence points at something we can actually change: the design of the settings they pass through. Every education provider and employer that becomes deliberately, demonstrably neuro-inclusive shortens the odds for the young people who walk through its doors.

Every one of those 1,012,000 young people sat in a classroom once. Most still could be there, or in training, or in work, if the settings around them were built with their minds in mind. We’ve been calling this a youth problem. The data says it’s a design problem. Design problems have designers, and that means they have solutions.

From the next article, I’m going to take the NSS one principle at a time: seven articles for seven principles, each one looking at what the principle means, why it earned its place in the standard, and what changes when a setting takes it seriously. We start where everything starts, or doesn’t: leadership, and I’ll begin with a laugh I still haven’t forgotten.

By Stuart Martin, the Founder of George Angus Consulting and of the Neurodiversity-Supportive Standard

Previous Neuro-inclusion Articles

Neuro-inclusion Article One: The Research Project That Led to My ADHD Diagnosis

Neuro-inclusion Article Two: What the NSS Is and Why It Exists