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More than a million young people in the UK are not in education, employment or training.
That should stop us in our tracks.
Not because it makes a neat headline. It doesn’t. There is nothing neat about it. Behind that number are young people with different stories, different backgrounds, different barriers and, in many cases, a lot more potential than the system has managed to find.
But as a country, we tend to respond to figures like this in a familiar way. There will be reports. New schemes. Taskforces. Roundtables. Carefully worded statements about pathways, interventions and employability.
Some of that will matter. Some of it may help.
But it is worth pausing on something Nigel Miller, Managing Director of Active Learning Group, said recently: “I don’t believe more than a million young people have all suddenly gone wrong.”
That is the point.
Young people don’t usually drift away from education, employment or training overnight. It builds over time with a bit of confidence lost here. A bit of disengagement there. A young person who decides school is not for them. Another who gets the grades but still has no idea what sort of life they are trying to build. Someone else who has ability, but has never been put in the right environment for it to show.
By the time we call them NEET, the problem has often been forming for years.
So the question can’t just be: how do we get young people back into work, education or training? It also has to be: why did so many not find a route that fitted them in the first place?
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Nigel Miller, CEO for Active Learning Group |
“There’s a place in life for all kids. But we’ve got to give them enough routes to find it.”
For a long time, young people have been given a fairly narrow picture of success. Work hard at school. Pass the exams. Go to university. Get a good job. For plenty of young people, that route works. It matters. It should be protected. But it’s not the route for everyone, and we aren’t honest enough about that.
Some young people do not show you what they are capable of in a classroom. They may be quiet, restless, anxious, switched off, disruptive or simply not interested in learning in that way. They may decide early on that they are “not academic” and mistake that for not being capable.
But a classroom is only one environment.
Put the same young person somewhere practical. Give them a problem to solve. Put them in a team. Take them outdoors. Ask them to lead, listen, build, organise, try something unfamiliar, get it wrong and have another go.
Sometimes you see a completely different person.
Nigel puts it plainly:
“There’s a place in life for all kids. But we’ve got to give them enough routes to find it.”
The answer isn’t to lower expectations. It is to widen them. University should be one route. Apprenticeships should be one. Technical training, practical learning, sport, outdoor education, work experience, volunteering and learning beyond the classroom should all be proper routes too.
Not consolation prizes. Not the thing you do if the “better” route hasn’t worked but proper routes. Because different young people come alive in different places.
That’s the real warning in the NEET figures. Not that young people have stopped caring. Not that schools have stopped trying. But that we have built a system where too many young people are asked to prove themselves through one route, in one environment, against one narrow idea of success.
If we want fewer young people drifting out of education, employment or training, we need to give them more chances to find out where they are useful, capable and confident before they reach that point.
As Nigel says, “There’s a place in life for all kids.”
The job now is to give them enough routes to find it.
