There are now over a million young people in the UK aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training. One million. In January to March 2026, the Office for National Statistics put the figure at 1,012,000 – the highest level in twelve years, and still rising.
Alan Milburn’s independent review, commissioned in November 2025, published its interim findings in Spring 2026. The report speaks of a “generational fault line”, a “lost generation”, a “whole-system failure” across education, health, welfare and the labour market. Without reform, the review warned, the NEET figure could reach 1.25 million.
It is a serious diagnosis. But reading the Milburn review, one thing stands out: the government’s proposed solutions (apprenticeships, Youth Hubs, a Youth Guarantee for long-term claimants, subsidised placements in construction, care and hospitality) are largely structural. They address the system. They are less clear on what happens when a young person finally gets to the door of an employer and finds that the door is still too heavy to push through.
That gap, the distance between accessing an opportunity and being able to take it, is a communication problem.
What the numbers actually tell us
The Milburn review identifies several overlapping causes for the rise in NEET numbers: declining mental health among young people, the long tail of the pandemic on school attendance and work readiness, a shrinking pool of entry-level jobs, and a benefits system that has not kept pace with the complexity of young people’s circumstances.
The Resolution Foundation research adds important context to who these young people actually are. Despite a popular narrative about AI displacing graduates from the workforce, it is in fact those with the fewest qualifications who face the greatest risk of becoming NEET.
Young people aged 22 to 24 whose highest qualification is GCSE level or below are three times more likely to be NEET than graduates – 30% compared with 9%. Fewer than one in three NEETs hold a degree, compared with over four in ten young people overall.
The NEET problem is concentrated among those who left education with the least, and who arrived at the labour market with the least preparation for professional life.
When NEET young people themselves are asked what would most help them move into work, the single most popular answer, cited by 32 per cent, is developing confidence.
Not money. Not qualifications. Confidence.
A separate survey found that half of young people who are NEET do not feel in control of their future, compared with 39% of their peers who are in education or employment.
Most of them have no shortage of ambition or capability. What they lack is the ability to translate that capability into something an employer can see and a workplace can use.
The confidence gap hiding inside the NEET figures
Confidence in a professional context is not a personality trait. It is a communication skill:
01 The ability to speak clearly in an interview
02 To ask a sensible question in a new environment
03 To push back on something you do not understand, rather than nodding along and hoping nobody notices
04 To make a case for yourself.
These are learnable behaviours, and also the ones most unevenly distributed. Young people who grew up in environments where professional communication was modelled – dinner table conversations, school debating societies, activities that required them to speak in front of others – arrive at the workplace with a significant head start over those who did not.
CNBC reported in January 2026 that a growing cohort of employers now describe Gen Z graduates as not “work-ready”, and that the pandemic had accelerated a deficit in what one senior HR leader called “human skills” – the ability to collaborate, advocate, listen, respond.
PwC introduced resilience training, delivered by us at Debate Mate, for its new graduate intake in 2025, specifically to address this.
If this is true of graduates, it is considerably more acute for young people who never made it to university, or who left school with attendance gaps and no clear on-ramp into professional life.
Why employers are more central to this than they might think
The Milburn review is largely addressed to government and the education system, and rightly so. But it understates the role that employers play in whether the NEET pipeline expands or contracts. Employers shape the supply of entry-level opportunities.
They define what work-readiness means in practice. They decide whether a candidate who communicates slightly differently, who is quiet in an interview or stumbles on a question about their strengths, is dismissed or developed.
The organisations doing most in this space are not waiting for a government intervention to tell them what to do. They are investing in early-years partnerships with schools, building pre-employment programmes that develop communication and confidence before a young person ever arrives at interview, and rethinking what the first twelve months of employment look like for someone who has never worked in a professional environment before.
This is pipeline work, not charity. The organisations that build diverse early-careers cohorts and invest in the communication habits that allow those cohorts to perform tend to find that retention improves and that the range of perspectives inside the organisation broadens.
There is also a structural gap in the government’s approach that makes the employer case sharper. Resolution Foundation research shows that nearly half (44%) of all young NEETs do not receive any out-of-work benefits.
Government programmes that depend on benefit contact will not reach them. Pre-employment partnerships, local school relationships, and early-career investment are not simply supplementary to government action. For a large proportion of NEET young people, they are the only route in.
What communication training can do that job postings cannot
Posting an entry-level role and hoping that the right candidate applies is a filter, not a strategy. It favours young people who already have the confidence to apply, navigate the recruitment process, and perform in an interview environment designed by and for people who have been doing this for years.
The shift happens when organisations invest deliberately in the skills that allow a young person to get to the room and do themselves justice once they are there. That means practicing how to make an argument under mild pressure, how to disagree with a line manager without derailing the relationship, how to ask for what you need rather than quietly failing to get it, and how to recover from a mistake in a meeting without deciding the workplace is not for you.
These are behaviours that improve with practice. Without practice, they tend to stay undeveloped, not because young people are incapable of them, but because nobody has given them a structured environment in which to try.
The practical case for investing earlier
The government’s measures will take time to filter through.
The Youth Guarantee, as currently structured, targets young people who have been out of work for eighteen months and claiming benefits, and covers only those aged 18 to 21. It will not reach the 44% of NEETs who are not on benefits, and it does not extend to the 22 to 24-year-old age group at all.
By the time it activates for those it does cover, the habits of disengagement are often already set.
The organisations most likely to make a difference, and to benefit from doing so, are those that invest before the eighteen-month mark: early-careers programmes with a genuine communication and confidence component, partnerships with schools in their local area, and pre-employment work that begins before a young person has submitted a single application.
At Debate Mate, we work with schools and corporate organisations on exactly this: building the communication skills that allow young people to enter professional environments with the confidence to contribute, challenge, ask, and grow. The NEET figures are a policy problem, but the practical side sits alongside it, and the organisations best placed to address it are not waiting for Summer 2026 to read the Milburn final report. They are investing in Debate Mate programmes.
Debate Mate Training works with corporate organisations on communication and leadership development, including early-careers and pre-employment programmes. To explore what a partnership could look like, visit debatemate.com or get in touch.
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