When Alan Milburn’s review of young people and work is published, much of the attention will understandably focus on its recommendations for helping the nearly one million young people who are currently not in education, employment or training (NEET).
But one of its most important contributions may be something that has received far less attention: the growing recognition that we need to intervene much earlier.
Too often, the debate about youth disengagement starts when a young person has already fallen out of education, employment or training. Yet becoming NEET rarely happens overnight. The warning signs are often visible years before that point, whether through attendance patterns, economic disadvantage, additional support needs, or confidence levels.
By the time a young person has left education or become economically inactive, those barriers are often harder and more expensive to address. We are effectively waiting until the challenge is at its most complex before intervening.
So the real question is: Why are we waiting so long to respond?
If we’re serious about reducing the number of young people who become NEET, we need to treat prevention as just as much a part of the solution as intervention.
That’s exactly what we’re testing through Shaping Our Future, a four-year pilot funded by the Liz and Terry Bramall Foundation. Working with young people from Year 8 who have been identified as being at greater risk of becoming NEET, the programme combines mentoring, workplace visits and sustained employer engagement to build confidence, raise aspirations and strengthen engagement with education.
This pilot is testing whether a relatively low-cost, employer-backed approach to early intervention can provide a scalable model for preventing disengagement before it becomes entrenched.
And the results from Year 1 are encouraging. Nearly one in three participants who were classed as persistently absent improved their attendance to above 90%, while over 58% of the cohort consistently improved their attendance overall.
What we’ve learned so far is that effective prevention isn’t always about intensive intervention. Often, it’s about intervening early enough to make a meaningful difference.
A conversation with an employer. A workplace visit. Exposure to a career path a young person didn’t know existed. These moments can help bridge the gap between education and employment, making learning feel more relevant and helping young people understand where it can take them.
This matters not just for education policy, but for economic policy too.
The government’s new Social Value Model rightly places greater emphasis on jobs, skills and opportunity. But if we want those ambitions to succeed, we need to recognise that social value doesn’t begin when a young person applies for an apprenticeship or starts a job. It begins much earlier.
Public procurement is increasingly asking employers to create pathways into work. Yet many of the young people who stand to benefit most from those opportunities risk never reaching them unless we invest earlier in confidence, aspiration and engagement with education.
The Milburn Review presents an opportunity to change not just how we support young people who have disengaged, but when we choose to support them.
Because by the time a young person becomes NEET, the challenge has already been years in the making.
