Young People Are Not Lazy. I’ve Heard Their Voices, and the System Is Letting Them Down.

Today, Alan Milburn published his long-awaited interim review into why nearly one million young people in England are not in education, employment or training. His central finding is one that anyone who has spent time listening to young people already knows to be true: this is not a failure of young people. It is a failure of the system around them.

I want to add something to that from first-hand experience.

In 2024, dmh associates was commissioned by Durham County Council and the County Durham Economic Partnership Board to co-design an All-Age Careers Framework for the county. Over several months, my team and I engaged with more than 2,100 residents and businesses across County Durham, including many young people who were struggling to find their place in a labour market that, frankly, had stopped meeting them halfway.

What they told us stays with me

“There’s no bus that gets me there on time.”

Transport is one of the most under-discussed barriers in national policy conversations about youth unemployment. In rural and semi-rural areas like much of County Durham, it is not a minor inconvenience – it is a genuine wall between a young person and opportunity. An apprenticeship, a college course, a job interview: all of these require getting there. When public transport is sparse, unreliable or simply doesn’t run early enough in the morning, ambition alone cannot bridge the gap.

“Nobody really helped me figure out what I was good at.”

School-based careers support is increasingly threadbare – patchy and a postcode lottery on who gets career guidance. Teachers and school leaders are working harder than ever, but they are being asked to do more with less – and careers guidance is rarely ring-fenced in school budgets. The statutory duty exists on paper; the resource to fulfil it meaningfully often does not. Young people are leaving education without the self-knowledge, labour market awareness or career management skills that would help them navigate what comes next.

“The job centre couldn’t really help – they were too busy.”

Work coaches in DWP Jobcentres are not the problem. They are dedicated professionals working under enormous pressure, with caseloads that make sustained, personalised support almost impossible. A 15-minute appointment cannot substitute for the kind of ongoing, trusted relationship that actually shifts outcomes. The welfare system, as Milburn rightly notes, was not designed for the world young people face today.

Durham County Council and its partners are working hard to address these challenges – and their commitment to co-designing an all-age careers framework is exactly the kind of local leadership that should be recognised and resourced. But the barriers young people describe are national in origin, not local in fault.

These are not isolated anecdotes. They are systemic patterns that persist despite the best efforts of local authorities and partners – and they are the reason why locally-led initiatives like the County Durham All-Age Careers Framework matter so much. Rural isolation, post-industrial labour market transition, digital exclusion, transport poverty, patchy SEND support: these are the lived realities behind the headline NEET figures.

Hopeless Catch 22

Milburn’s review describes a “hopeless catch-22” in which employers ask for experience that young people have no opportunity to gain. I’d go further: the catch-22 begins earlier than that. It begins in a school system that cannot afford a qualified careers adviser. It continues through separate careers and enterprise strategic advice for schools (often left for teachers to deliver on) and a welfare system designed to process people rather than develop them. And it is compounded in communities where the geography itself limits what is reachable.

This is also where well-designed AI-powered careers tools have a genuine role to play – not as a replacement for human support, but as a complement to it. Used well, AI can provide young people with accessible, non-judgemental careers information and advice at the moments when a careers professional is not available: late at night, in a rural village with no local provision, or at the point of crisis when confidence is low. The right technology can help build self-knowledge, surface relevant opportunities and scaffold the kind of exploratory thinking that supports resilience. But it must be developed with young people’s needs at its centre, deployed alongside – not instead of – the human relationships that make the deepest difference.

The solutions, when Milburn’s final report arrives, must reckon with all of this – not just the mechanics of welfare-to-work transition, but the whole upstream ecosystem of careers support that shapes whether young people arrive at adulthood with any sense of direction at all.

That means ring-fenced funding for impartial careers guidance in schools and colleges. It means investment in community-based careers support that reaches young people where they are, not where policy assumes them to be. It means working with local transport authorities to treat access to opportunity as infrastructure. And it means backing the communities – and the professionals within them – who know their young people best.

The voices I heard in County Durham were not the voices of people who don’t want to work. They were the voices of people who have been let down, overlooked, and who are still, despite everything, trying.

That deserves far better than a system stuck in the past.

By Associate Professor Deirdre Hughes OBE

Co-Founding Director, CareerChatUK, Legacy Fellow, UK Career Development Institute, Former Chair of the National Careers Council, England