We Have a Prevention Crisis.
957,000. That’s how many 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK were not in education, employment or training at the end of last year. Line them up and you’d have a population bigger than Leeds, bigger than Glasgow, bigger than Cardiff. And it’s still rising.
It’s not for lack of money. The last twelve months alone have brought an £820m Budget commitment for 18-21 year olds, the Youth Guarantee, the Get Britain Working White Paper. Worthy interventions, all of them. Almost all of it arrives after a young person is already NEET, not before.
The problem isn’t funding. It’s departments that don’t talk to each other, protect their own KPIs, and pass the consequences down the line for someone else to absorb. DWP assumes DfE has prepared young people for work. The NHS assumes that the society we’ve built produces children who won’t succumb to preventable illness. Neither assumption holds. What follows is a bill that keeps growing because we keep paying for crisis points that earlier investment would have prevented.
The current NEET statistics are the clearest possible illustration of what that costs.
This month, the government’s own review into youth economic inactivity, chaired by Alan Milburn, put a number on it. Less than half of the £8.1bn spent annually on benefits for under-25s carries any participation support or requirement at all. Only one in five NEET young people get meaningful employment support from the welfare system. The review’s conclusion is as follows.
The system pays for what a young person can’t do, rather than investing in what they could become.
That’s not a failure of funding. It’s a failure of timing. Prevention has been cut at almost every level over the past decade from early years to youth services; public health to further education. What’s grown instead is crisis spending. In other words, support that only shows up once a young person is already months or years into disengagement. We pay more to manage the consequences of a young person falling through the system than it would have cost to stop them falling in the first place.
The cliff edge nobody looks at
There’s no legal cliff edge at 16. Since 2013, the law has required every 16- and 17-year-old in England to stay in education, training, or employment with training, right up to their 18th birthday. The Raising of Participation Age legislation was meant to close exactly the gap this piece is about.
It didn’t close it, not in practice. Around 57,000 16- and 17-year-olds in England are NEET despite the law saying they shouldn’t be. How well that’s tracked depends entirely on where you live. For example, the share of 16- and 17-year-olds who are NEET or simply unaccounted for ranges from 1% in Barnet to over 20% in Dudley. A legal duty nobody is funded to enforce isn’t a safety net. It’s a promise nobody has to keep.
The real cliff edge, and the one the government’s own review names directly, comes one or two years later. At 18, statutory participation duties end completely and the NEET rate trebles from around 4% to 13%.
Care leavers feel this hardest. They’re already more than five times as likely to be NEET at 17, while still technically covered by the participation law. Their NEET rate then jumps from 22% to 31% in the single year between 17 and 18. This is the exact point a key worker, a personal adviser, or a trusted mentor typically disappears for good, and the law itself stops requiring anyone to keep them in anything.
By the age of 20, more than 40% of care leavers are NEET, against roughly 15% of their peers.
The education funding system layers a second problem on top, a financial one rather than a moral one. FE colleges are paid for enrolled students who are still on-roll at the October census point. Furthermore, secondary schools are measured on exam results, not on what happens to their pupils after results day. Neither institution is funded to provide support where it really matters, which is to build a bridge between the two.
A lazy generation? Or a lazy generalisation?
This isn’t a story about apathy. The same review found that 84% of NEET young people say they want a job, training or education. Among those who’ve slipped out of the system entirely and not even claiming benefits, the most common reason given for their status was that they were actively looking for the right course or role, not that they’d given up.
The lazy-generation narrative doesn’t survive contact with this evidence. Maybe early commentators arrived at this easy generalisation a little too soon and before they took the time needed to really understand the nuance of the issue.
Why does the money always arrive when it’s too late?
DWP controls the biggest budget here with the benefits system and employment support. But DWP’s natural point of contact with a young person is the moment they’re already NEET. i.e. already on Universal Credit, already economically inactive, already some way into a spiral that becomes harder to reverse the longer it runs.
Here’s why timing matters. Of those young people who are NEET for less than a year, roughly two-thirds return to participation within twelve months. Of those who are NEET for more than a year, only a quarter do.
67% success rate v 25% success rate.
In summary, the system steps in right at the point where it does the least good and costs the most. Nobody is responsible for the months before that during the window of time when a school leaver quietly becomes a college no-show, or a care leaver loses their last stable adult relationship in the same month they lose their bedroom.
A stopgap. Not a solution.
At Evolve, we got tired of watching young people fall into that gap and built a solid bridge to help them to navigate it.
LEAP Transition pairs a Health Mentor with vulnerable Year 11s from December through to the following November, so the relationship doesn’t end the day the school term does. It runs entirely inside the timeframe that the law says should be covered, just with key stakeholders stepping outside their KPIs and doing what is needed.
This isn’t a fix for the bigger reforms the Milburn review is building toward. No single programme is. It’s a stopgap, built by a small social enterprise, for a gap that should never have needed one in the first place.
Prevention or Paralysis
A government serious about prevention, and looking for a renewed political identity, would start by connecting departments that currently pass problems between one another. It shouldn’t take a small social enterprise, without a penny of funding support, to plug gaps in provision that shape whether a generation participates or doesn’t.
The financial case for acting earlier is a simple one. It costs less to prevent than to repair. We really should get serious about this before we eventually run out of crisis funding. If this argument alone isn’t enough to move policy, mobilising the potential within each of the 957,000 young people sitting outside the system probably should be.
Connection > Prevention > Participation