The NEET Crisis: how do we start to resolve it?

More than one million young people in the UK are now not in education, employment or training (NEET). This is not simply a troubling statistic; it is a national crisis. Behind that figure are young people increasingly disconnected from opportunity, economic security and social participation. When 13 percent of 16-24-year-olds are disengaged from mainstream pathways, we must stop asking why individual young people are failing and start asking why our systems are failing them. 

Alan Milburn’s interim report, Young People and Work (May 2026), confronts this urgent issue. Commissioned by the UK government, Milburn examines the factors driving this growing crisis, with recommendations due later this year. His early findings are clear: there is no single cause of youth disengagement and therefore no simple solution. 

Research at the Carnegie School of Education reaches the same conclusion as Milburn’s 400-page report; NEET is not the result of isolated poor choices or individual deficits. It emerges from the cumulative effects of structural disadvantage - poverty, disability, ethnicity, gender inequality, family instability and community disinvestment. 

These factors do not operate in isolation. They interact, reinforce one another and often intensify across childhood. Any serious response to the NEET crisis must therefore move beyond siloed thinking and simplistic interventions. 

An example of the often simplistic responses to crises was the media frenzy in 2025 focused on children absent from school. The government’s answer was to remind parents and schools of their duties. However, it is apparent, like NEET, that addressing school absenteeism is far more complex than that.  Our work illustrated significant numbers of children from the one million not attending school each day are from the poorest families.   

Hence our research like that of Milburn, the Centre for Young Lives, Mission 44, discards traditional simplistic silo thinking that is usually confined to professional and organisational boundaries. Our starting point is to gain deep holistic understandings as to the multiple and complex influences that act upon significant numbers of families. These factors include poverty, gender, ethnicity, disability, family and community.  When considering the question, how do we respond to NEET? Our starting point is birth.  

Perhaps the most uncomfortable finding comes from longitudinal research in Bradford: assessments conducted when children enter primary school at age four can predict with striking accuracy which young people are likely to become NEET at age sixteen. This raises a profound question. If outcomes are already highly predictable at age four, what is the education system doing during the eleven years that follow? For too many children, schooling appears not to interrupt disadvantage but to reproduce it. 

School success in England is largely measured through attainment data, inspection outcomes and league-table performance. Predictably, schools become heavily focused on academic achievement. 

Yet our research with school leaders, practitioners and young people suggests that this narrow definition of success is leaving many behind. Participants repeatedly described the current system as “one size fits all,” warning that schools can either empower or alienate young people. 

A curriculum centred primarily on academic performance risks marginalising those whose strengths are practical, technical, relational or vocational. When young people fail to see themselves reflected in what school values, disengagement often follows; first through absenteeism, then through withdrawal altogether. 

The long-standing policy emphasis on university progression has unintentionally reinforced this problem. When Tony Blair proposed that 50 per cent of young people should enter higher education, the aim was to build a high-skills economy. But the policy also sent a cultural message: academic routes are superior. 

The consequence has been the gradual devaluing of technical and vocational pathways, including sectors such as construction, engineering, and skilled trades, precisely the sectors where labour shortages now exist. 

Young people who do not aspire to university are too often made to feel like educational outsiders. For many, disengagement becomes less a personal choice and more a rational response to a system that offers them limited recognition or meaningful progression. 

If we are serious about reducing the number of young people who are NEET, intervention cannot begin at age sixteen, it must begin in early childhood and continue across the whole educational journey. 

This requires more than policy tweaks. It demands a fundamental shift in how we understand success. Schools must be empowered to nurture not only academic excellence but also technical skill, belonging, resilience and purpose. 

The NEET crisis is not simply about employment. It is about whether our institutions enable all young people to imagine a future in which they matter. Until we build systems that recognise the full diversity of young people’s strengths, one million may not be the peak of this crisis, it may only be the beginning.