The NEET Diagnosis is Shocking, it’s Time for Action not Rhetoric

Britain’s NEET crisis is no longer a warning sign; it is a structural failure. The latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures (Jan-March 2026) estimate that 1,012,000 young people aged 16 to 24 in the UK were Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET), equal to 13.5% of the age group, up 89,000 year-on-year (2025 vs 2026) and 55,000 on the quarter (ONS, 2026). The Milburn interim report Young People and Work warns that, without reform, the figure could rise to 1.25 million within five years, meaning 1 in 6 young people could be NEET by 2031. The issue is not simply that too many young people are out of work or education; it is that the institutions meant to move them into participation are no longer joined up.

Statistical Trends

According to the ONS, of the 1,012,000 NEET total, 553,000 were men and 459,000 were women, with rates of 14.4% for young men and 12.5% for young women. The total includes 400,000 unemployed young people and 613,000 economically inactive young people, showing that this is not just a labour market shortage but a deeper detachment from work and learning. Among 18 to 24-year-olds, 928,000 were NEET, with a rate of 15.8%, highlighting the post-18 transition as a major system failure.

Milburn estimates this will have a combined annual cost of £125 billion (more than the government spends on education), alongside potential lifetime earnings losses of up to £300,000 for those who remain detached for long periods. The report’s central message is that Britain is no longer dealing with temporary youth unemployment, but with a long-term participation crisis.

Why this is happening

Gamote and Hyman’s Inside the Mind of a Young NEET, published as part of Milburn’s evidence call, shows that NEET is not a single condition. Their “traffic light” model distinguishes young people who need stabilisation, those who need unblocking, and those who are ready for work but excluded by employer systems, transport barriers, or recruitment failures (Gamote & Hyman, 2026). That distinction matters because no single policy response will work for every group.

The report also captures the psychology of disengagement. Young people describe repeated rejection, loss of confidence, and a sense of being abandoned by systems that should support them. Motivation is not fixed; it is shaped by experience. When young people repeatedly encounter silence, inaccessible processes, or no route forward, they do not simply become unemployed – they become disconnected.

Milburn’s report suggests the problem is now a national emergency, with NEET status increasingly tied to health, disability, anxiety, and economic inactivity. Over the years, the established links between education, health, welfare, and employment support have broken down, blocking participation routes to work and causing young people to fall between institutional gaps.

Colleges as anchor institutions

Colleges must sit at the centre of any serious NEET strategy. Milburn describes further education as “the primary recovery layer for those who leave school without strong academic results” (p182) and acknowledges its decline over the last two decades: a 14% drop in learner numbers between 2016/17 and 2023/24, falling class-based qualifications, and funding lower than in the early 2010s. He also notes the sector’s struggle with low GCSE English and Maths resit success and the persistent imbalance between FE and higher education funding (£7860 vs £9,906 per student).

Colleges and training providers already have expertise in curriculum design, pastoral support, vocational identity, employer brokerage, and flexible re-entry pathways. They can move young people from instability to readiness through structured support and close tracking. However, their public value is too often hidden by business models that reward profitable work and de-prioritise expensive, intensive support for the most vulnerable learners.

Milburn’s is highly critical on this point. He states: “Lecturers act as mentors, employment coaches and referral agents to health and social services. These functions are not funded, not measured and not recognised in accountability frameworks” (p187). He argues that regulatory and normative pressures around attainment, inspection and financial growth have led to individual learners being overlooked and rendered ‘invisible’. This is hardly surprising, in an environment where funding is tight, competition is high, and efficiency is king. Many schools and colleges, in the current cost-of-living crisis, are busy securing their survival and are fixated on league table improvement, increasing class sizes, funding maximisation, corporate reporting and staff utilisation. If Milburn – and indeed society – wants change, these conditions need overhauling.

The folly of outcomes-based methodologies

While Milburn’s report is a serious wake-up call for policymakers and sector stakeholders, his solution seems stoically Blairite by design. He argues that “until schools are held accountable for what happens to their pupils after they leave [and] until colleges are funded for outcomes not headcounts…the tail of failure will persist” (p201). However, a system built around measurable outputs does not simply “raise standards”; it reshapes behaviour, rewarding institutions for what is easiest to count and pushing to the margins those learners whose progress is slower, messier, or less likely to fit neat performance metrics. This is not a revolution in system redesign; it is the same ideology that fuels league tables and performative practices. An outcomes-based model compounds the very system Milburn is critical of because it rewards cherry-picking, a narrowing of support, depersonalisation, and data presenteeism. It pushes institutional compliance and delegitimises the hard endeavour needed to support complex individual cases.

In effect, outcomes-based funding risks penalising the very institutions that are working hardest to support NEET young people, especially in postcode-lottery areas where the labour market is thin, employer engagement is weak, and poverty is affecting the choices young people can make. In those places, colleges and schools are often trying to hold learners who face the steepest barriers to participation, yet they are judged by the same headline outcomes as institutions operating in stronger local economies. That creates a perverse incentive: the places with the greatest need are also the least likely to be rewarded, because the hardest work is often the least immediately visible in funding formulas. 

Lots of rhetoric, not enough detail

There have been predictable calls by stakeholders for dialogue, summits and roundtable discussions, and this is to be welcomed. But it is far from sufficient as a response. Those familiar with Phillip Augur’s (2019) report on post-18 funding, Sainsbury’s Technical Education Report (2016), and the Richards Review (2013) of apprenticeships, amongst a catalogue of White Papers, research articles and independent studies in the last 20 years, will know that plenty of dialogue has already taken place. Yet in 2026, we are still talking of teacher retention problems, vacancy shortages, workload pressures, uncompetitive pay, low vocational status and a non-existent national workforce strategy. Milburn’s report suggests ‘enough is enough’: the consequences of this inaction is compounding an already dire problem.

There have been a number of ideas floated recently as possible solutions to the crisis; however, so far, none that offer detail or theorise system redesign. Too soon perhaps, but I’d like to see stakeholders go beyond ‘intellectual sketching’ and offer some in-depth analysis and imagination to the issue. The NEET crisis didn’t turn up last year; its symptoms have been self-evident for some time. In response to Milburn, we have seen proposals to ‘fund colleges properly’, ‘build system coherence’, ‘enable GCSE learners to spend time in colleges’, and a demand for ‘effective data sharing’ to identify learner risks early. These are good starting points, but collectively they won’t deliver system change. What is missing is a detailed assessment of who is funding and leading this work, how these changes affect the wider eco-system of opportunity and support, and what the implications are for a fatiguing and overstretched workforce.  Colleges can certainly play a bigger role, but only if they are backed by a wider system that does not shift the burden of solving structural disadvantage onto institutions already operating under intense pressure. 

Milburn’s next report will consult with international vocational systems, and some believe the answers to this crisis will be found here. Comparative data is both useful and illuminating, but we must be cautious with our expectations. We have also been here before. Lower NEET rates internationally in Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany, for example, are not produced by colleges or apprenticeships alone, but by a whole settlement that includes housing stability, welfare design, health access, transport, and a labour market that gives real value to non-academic routes. We cannot cut and paste these systems into our own model without radical rethinking. What we can do is learn from these systems and build the conditions in which vocational routes can succeed. That means secure transitions, employer commitment, trusting teachers, tailored support systems, and properly funded pathways. 

Changing our assumptions

In a climate where further education is deregulated in the UK, FE institutions behave like businesses and organise their activities to make profits and stay financially solvent. This may do a disservice to those colleges and companies who provide services on a philanthropic or lost leader basis to different community audiences, but essentially, this is what Incorporation in 1993 promised. It means that profitable work is valued work, and unprofitable work is not.  

Therefore, there is no incentive in the UK for institutions to chase expensive, unprofitable work if this jeopardises their business efficacy. When funding is squeezed, institutions double-down on profit motives. This won’t force system change. The most extraordinary feats of public service in the FE sector are those little, unnoticed acts that staff do day in-day out – acts of kindness, generosity, advocacy, support and mentoring, often outside the formal curriculum, which do not make money, but which can instantly change a learner’s self-image and confidence. All of this performed within a narrowing funding envelope and constantly changing curricula. As practitioners and researchers have consistently shown, supporting struggling and disadvantaged learners demands hard work, time, skill, patience, determination and a relentless focus on individual care. It may not be profitable, but it is righteous, ethical, important and needed. It must be recognised, supported and – crucially- paid for, if the NEET crisis Milburn has documented is to be reversed. 

A five-star plan

Milburn is right that the current system is fragmented. A serious response must focus on participation, not just provision. These five interventions, therefore, are proposed as part of a new settlement for young people, offering a more sustainable solution to the crisis.

1. College Transition Guarantee: every young person aged 16 to 24 should be able to re-enter FE or bridge provision quickly, without waiting for the next term. This would require funded open-entry capacity, rolling admissions, modular bridge provision, and a named caseworker.
2. Local Participation Compact: colleges, employers, Jobcentre Plus, schools, health services, and local authorities should share responsibility for early risk identification, data sharing, and rapid response at transition points where young people often disappear.
3. Youth Hiring Risk Reduction Package: remove levy co-investment barriers for 16 to 24-year-olds, protect apprenticeship-related household benefits, and require public employers to provide transparent feedback and short trial opportunities.
4. FE-based Artificial Intelligence Progression Broker: AI-supported guidance could help tutors and advisers match learners to routes, translate job requirements, and identify next steps, with human oversight and clear data protection safeguards.
5. Stabilisation-First Pathway: for young people not ready for immediate job-search demands, colleges should offer a staged route of stabilise, build and step-forward, combining mentoring, wellbeing support, low-pressure progression and practical engagement before formal employment activity.

These proposals address participation, visibility, confidence and speed. They will require national planning, local interpretation, ongoing professional development and sustained investment, but the expertise already exists across the sector for policy to build on.

Conclusion

Milburn is right to argue for a more coherent “Working State” that enables participation rather than merely policing non-participation, and Gamote and Hyman are right that many young people are stranded by trauma, rejection and broken transitions (Gamote & Hyman, 2026; Milburn, 2026). The system is not short of intention; it is short of connection.

This article has argued that FE colleges and training institutions are the hinge institutions in any serious response because they can stabilise those not yet ready, unblock those almost there, and broker routes for those ready but excluded. That role only works if FE is funded and trusted as an anchor institution. What we do know, from years of experience, is that outcomes-based funding has a distortive effect on priorities, and it is often the most in need who do poorly under this regime. Instead, the advantages of introducing a college transition guarantee, a local participation compact, a youth hiring risk-reduction package, just-in-time intelligence-based decision-making and a stabilisation-first pathway for ‘red-category’ learners, are self-evident. 

The next step is not another isolated reform. We need to see organisations aligned, lobbying with one voice, around an agreed consensus for action. We don’t need more rhetoric and then left with more of the same. We need a joined-up design that aligns colleges, apprenticeships, welfare, health, employers and local support around one goal: turning drift into direction before disengagement hardens into long-term inactivity.

By Dr Paul Tully is the Chief Executive of FEthink, a specialist analytics and research agency serving the further education and skills sector.