Prevention not Rescue, Rethinking Youth Unemployment

The number of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) has topped one million for the first time since 2013. Alan Milburn’s independent review, commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions, put the annual cost of this at £125 billion – more than England spends on education each year.

This is a national emergency. It has been building for years, and it won’t be solved by any single scheme, however well designed.

The government’s Jobs Guarantee, now expanding to 18-24-year-olds, is a genuine and welcome response. It offers a fully subsidised six-month job, with 100% of employment costs covered by government, to young people who’ve spent 18 months or more on Universal Credit and out of work. For those it reaches, it’s a real, practical lifeline, and it deserves to succeed.

But analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that, because eligibility depends on 18 months of prior long-term unemployment, the scheme is likely to reach only a small share of the young people currently NEET. It is built to catch people after they’ve already fallen through every earlier opportunity to find their way into work, rather than to stop them falling through in the first place.

That distinction matters. A scheme built for the young people furthest from work cannot, on its own, be the answer to why so many got there.

The real gap opens years earlier, long before anyone becomes eligible for a Jobs Guarantee placement. Around half of state school students leave school without ever having done a single day of work experience. Independent school students are twice as likely to have done three or more placements during their time in education.

Work experience is not the only early opportunity disappearing. Apprenticeship starts for young people have fallen by over 30% in a decade, and the decline of Saturday and holiday jobs means many young people are reaching adulthood having never held down any kind of paid work at all. Each of these was, for previous generations, an ordinary early rung on the ladder into employment. Fewer and fewer young people ever get to climb it.

This is not, at heart, a talent gap. It is an access gap, and it starts years earlier, in the classroom.

The Get Britain Working white paper promised two weeks’ guaranteed work experience for every young person. That promise hasn’t yet been delivered at scale. Rollout has been patchy, dependent on individual schools’ capacity and individual employers’ goodwill, rather than built as reliable, funded infrastructure.

This is the layer that’s missing. Quality work experience at 14-18 – structured, supported and genuinely accessible regardless of background – is the prevention the system hasn’t yet delivered. Without it, we will keep needing bigger and more expensive interventions at the other end, because we haven’t stopped young people falling through in the first place.

This is a business case as much as a social mobility one. Young people who do work experience can see a salary boost of 5-10% in adulthood, and employers who offer it are 77% more likely to report direct business benefits than those who don’t. Get this right, and everyone gains, not just the young person walking through the door.

We estimate the UK needs in the region of 200,000 more employers to open their doors if every young person is to have a fair shot at real workplace experience. Most employers I speak to want to help. What they lack isn’t will, it’s time, resource and a clear reason to prioritise it over everything else competing for their attention.

There’s a longer game here too. Every employer who tells us they can’t find the skills they need is looking for a workforce that doesn’t yet exist. Work experience is how you help build it, by shaping a young person’s understanding of your industry years before they’re job-hunting at all.

Government has just shown it understands the incentive problem. New procurement rules published this August will require major government contractors to demonstrate their contribution to jobs and skills, including work experience, from January 2027. It’s a genuinely welcome step, and one we called for a year ago.

But it only reaches the biggest suppliers, on the biggest contracts. If we want the 200,000 more employers this country needs, that same thinking has to reach much further down the supply chain, to the SMEs who most want to help, and who most need support to do it well.

Three things would take that further: a clear national standard for what high-quality work experience looks like; financial incentives to help employers cover the legitimate costs involved in providing high-quality workplace experiences, particularly for SMEs; and a simple and accessible way to connect young people with opportunities, wherever they happen to live. Futures For All’s Work Experience Finder already connects employers and young people across the UK, and there’s no reason a tool like it shouldn’t sit at the heart of how government delivers on its own promise.

Get this right, and the Jobs Guarantee can do what it was designed to do: catch the young people who slipped through everything else. It just won’t need to catch quite so many.

By Nick Brook, CEO of Futures For All