It Doesn't Start At Sixteen
“One million lives”.
Alan Milburn's interim review into young people and work landed with a number that should stop all of us. For the first time in over a decade, more than a million 16-to-24-year-olds in this country are not in education, employment or training. One in eight. On current trends, Milburn warns, it could be one in six within five years.
In a typical graduating class at a 7FE secondary school, one-in-six would be 25 young people every year.
In a typical graduating class at a 7FE secondary school, one-in-six would be 25 young people every year.
What makes that so hard to accept is that it has not happened because our schools have stood still.
Quite the opposite, in fact. By many, many measures, schools in England have improved significantly over the past fifteen years and, in places, led the world.
Our nine and ten-year-olds are now among the best readers in the developed world, ranked fourth internationally and, as ministers were fond of saying, the “best in the West” (DfE, 2023a). Our teenagers have climbed the global tables in maths, holding their position as scores slipped almost everywhere else after the pandemic (DfE, 2023b). Most telling of all, the literacy and numeracy of our 16-to-24-year-olds, the very group Milburn is writing about, improved more over the last decade than in any other country studied (DfE, 2024).
And yet, across those very same years, the number of young people slipping out of education and work has risen, not fallen.
So this is not, in the end, a story we can file under “the labour market”, or “welfare”, or someone else's brief. Milburn's honesty is to show that it belongs to the whole architecture around a child, and that includes those of us who lead schools and trusts.
Milburn is blunt about what this generation is not. They are not soft. In his own survey, 84% of young people who are NEET said they want to work, learn or train. What has failed them, he argues, is not their character but the architecture around them: a set of institutions built for a different era that now operate in parallel rather than together. Risk is spotted early. It is recorded, measured, sometimes flagged. And then, too often, no one acts, because no one is accountable for what happens next. The architecture itself, he concludes, is the problem.
For school and trust leaders, one finding shouts out.
Becoming NEET does not begin at sixteen. Children who are not school-ready at four and five are nearly three times as likely to be NEET at sixteen and seventeen. The roots of disengagement are formed well before the end of the school years. The signals are visible long before a young person drops out of view: absence, low attainment, SEND, family adversity.
That should change how we think about our role, and our work.
If the problem starts early and compounds across a childhood, then no single institution, however good, can solve it alone. Great schools are necessary but they are not sufficient. The answer is not another programme bolted on at sixteen, when the odds have already narrowed. It is coherence across the whole journey, from a child's earliest years to their first real foothold in adult life. It is strong relationships with families that enable our shared ambition for their children to be realised. It is neighbourhoods where our collective capacity to support our young people is cultivated and invested in.
That is what a growing number of schools and trusts are quietly building through The Reach Foundation's Cradle-to-Career Partnership. Not new initiatives to bolt on, but a practical discipline: making the support around children in a place more coherent, more consistent and more connected.
Coherent so it makes sense across the phases of a childhood.
Consistent so it does not vanish at the moments children are most vulnerable.
Connected so the adults and institutions around them act together, rather than in isolation.
There are now close to 100 partners doing this work, in communities across the country. Wherever you lead, the chances are someone near you has already started (click on the image below to access the interactive map).
None of this is a claim to have solved what Milburn, and many others, have spent months diagnosing. We are still building the evidence, and this is patient work that changes the odds for children rather than beating them. But it is a serious answer to a serious question, and it is already underway.
Milburn ended his launch by calling for a movement, one that rallies communities across the country.
For those of us who lead schools and trusts, that movement is not something to wait for but a call for us to rally around and lead.
If the review put words to something you already believe, get in touch. Come and find us at the Confederation of School Trusts CEO Summit on Monday, or read more about the work here.
We would love to hear how this challenge is affecting your schools and their neighbourhoods.
by James Townsend
Executive Director
The Reach Foundation
