How can we prevent young people from falling out of our education system?

As the UK economy slowly emerges from the pandemic, the government has already begun withdrawing many of the schemes that it introduced to support young people over the last two years. 

This includes the demise of the Kickstart programme, which subsidised jobs for young people who were unemployed, as well as the incentive payments for employers who recruited apprentices during the pandemic. 

But the truth is that for some young people, their difficulties are far from over. Even a return to life before the pandemic will not be enough to improve their chances of making a successful transition from education into employment. 

On May 17th, EDSK launched a major new report that begins with a simple yet troubling fact: on current trends it will take over 150 years before there are no longer any young people who end up ‘not in education, employment or training’, otherwise known as NEET. 

So why is it that despite endless initiatives and policies from successive governments, the proportion of young people in England who become NEET after leaving school or college has barely changed over the last two decades?  

And what could we do differently in future to reduce the number of young people who fall through the cracks in our education system?  

To help us unpack this seemingly intractable policy problem, we are joined today by my EDSK colleague Eleanor Regan, who co-authored our new report, and Becci Newton, who is the Director of Public Policy and Research at the Institute for Employment Studies 

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