The Milburn Review must learn lessons from the past or risk repeating it

The UK has had no shortage of interventions to deal with youth unemployment. From the New Deal for Young People in the late 1990s, through to more recent interventions such as Kickstart, successive governments have sought to tackle the persistent challenge of young people falling out of education, training and work. Yet with almost one million young people now not in education, employment or training (NEET), it is clear that the problem has not been solved.

In fact, we are at a unique point in the history of youth unemployment – unlike other periods like the financial crisis where youth unemployment was primarily driven by a shortage of opportunities, 3 in 5 NEETs are classed as “economically inactive” meaning that they are not actively looking for work.

This is why the Milburn Review matters – a rare opportunity to step back from piecemeal reform and rethink how the system supports people into good work. The review will cut across government silos, investigating how education, employment, and health policy can work together to fix this problem. And it seems to be a truly personal passion for Alan Milburn, the former Health Secretary chairing the review, who has said that it will be “groundbreaking” and “willing to tell uncomfortable truths”, calling for us to measure this issue “not just in dry statistics, but in lost lives”.

Passion and big-thinking are exactly what we need, but in the rush to fix this issue, it’s important to step back and consider lessons from our previous attempts to avoid repeating policy failures.

What we’ve learned from past attempts

Edge Foundation’s 2022 commissioned report, A difficult nut to crack?, examined fifty years of attempts to tackle youth unemployment. Its findings are sobering. Again and again, well-intentioned initiatives were undermined by short-term funding, fragmented delivery and a failure to recognise the diversity of young people’s needs. Programmes were often designed at pace in response to political pressure, rather than grounded in a robust understanding of local labour markets or young people’s lived experiences.

Take the Youth Training Scheme (YTS) for example, which operated between 1983 and 1990 and enrolled almost two million young people on work experience placements, combining on-the-job and off-the-job training. It was undoubtedly ambitious in both its budget (a whopping £1 billion annually) and its aims: to equip young people with transferable skills, improve productivity and support economic recovery. In practice, however, the scheme prioritised scale over quality and progression. Participants were classified as “trainees” rather than employees, allowing employers to access large numbers of young people at low cost and with limited obligations around pay, training quality or long-term outcomes. For many participants, YTS functioned less as a route into skilled work and more as a way of temporarily removing young people from unemployment statistics.

The lesson for the Milburn Review (and the incoming Jobs Guarantee) is clear: expanding participation without guaranteeing quality and progression risks “warehousing” young people rather than supporting sustainable transitions into work. Policies that focus on volume – whether placements, guarantees, or starts – must be underpinned by strong safeguards on training content, employment rights, and routes to progression. We will be exploring the YTS in more detail in a future Learning from the Past paper in March.

We did get it right sometimes – the New Deal for Young People (1998-2009) offered young people on jobseekers allowance for more than 6 months a tailored package of job searching support, subsidised employment, work experience and skills training. By its end, it had supported an estimated 60,000 more young people onto jobs and increased national income by more than £200 million per year, showcasing how much can be achieved by looking at young people as individuals and tailoring support accordingly.

From lessons to lasting change

These lessons are directly relevant today. As Edge’s submission to the Milburn Review sets out, youth disengagement is driven by a complex mix of structural, institutional and personal barriers. Poverty and financial pressure shape young people’s choices long before they reach the labour market; cuts to local authority services have eroded the capacity to identify and re-engage those at risk of dropping out; while rigid education pathways and uneven careers guidance continue to alienate young people who do not thrive in a narrow academic system.

The Milburn Review must resist the temptation to recommend another standalone scheme. Instead, it should focus on how existing reforms – such as the Youth Guarantee, foundation apprenticeships and the Growth and Skills Levy – can be aligned into a coherent system.

Crucially, the review should see itself not as a fresh start, but as part of a longer policy conversation. The real test of its impact will be whether its recommendations are integrated with those of other major reviews and policy reforms, rather than competing with them. Without this historical awareness, there is a real risk that we simply repackage familiar ideas under new branding. The UK already knows much about what works. The challenge is not a lack of insight, but a lack of follow-through.

If the Milburn Review genuinely learns from past interventions and previous reviews, it could build a more stable, inclusive and effective system that supports young people into work. If it doesn’t, we’ll be right back where we started, asking ourselves why youth unemployment remains such a “difficult nut to crack”.

By Sorah Gluck, Senior Policy and Public Affairs Manager, Edge Foundation