Nearly a Million Young People Neet, and What Schools Can Do About It

In May, the Alan Milburn interim report into young people and work landed with a figure that's hard to ignore: nearly one million 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK are currently not in education, employment or training (NEET).

When a number like that lands, the instinct is to reach for attainment as the explanation, and of course it's part of the picture, but we also probably already know that it's not just about grades. If you talk to the people working closest with young people at the point of transition, most of them will tell you the same thing: plenty of those young people left school with qualifications in hand, yet still struggled to take the next step.

It's not just about grades

What young people often didn't have was the ability to look at themselves clearly and say "here's what I'm good at, here's how I've shown it, and here's why it matters to you." That sounds simple, but for a 16 or 17-year-old standing in front of a college interviewer or filling in their first job application, it's actually one of the hardest things in the world.

Schools are already doing the work, but the challenge is joining it up

And this is really important to say: it would be unfair and inaccurate to suggest that schools aren't already thinking about this. Most of them are doing a huge amount of brilliant work around personal development, careers, and helping students understand their strengths. The problem is that it all tends to live in lots of different places: a pastoral conversation here, a careers session there, an extracurricular achievement that never gets written down anywhere, and by the time a student actually needs to draw on all of it, there's no thread to pull. The challenge, as ever, is consistency and visibility.

What the schools really getting this right have figured out is that consistency and visibility are everything. When students have a structured, ongoing way to reflect on what they're developing, not just what they're studying, and when that's built into school life rather than bolted on at the end of Year 11, something genuinely shifts in how they talk about themselves and how ready they feel for what comes next.

What globalbridge does, and why teachers built it

globalbridge started with a team of teachers who could see the gap between how young people were developing and what they were able to show for it. The platform gives students a digital learner profile built on the Skills Builder framework, which means they're not just accumulating experiences, they're building a clear, evidenced picture of their skills that they can name, talk about and share with confidence when it really counts.

For schools and Multi-Academy Trusts, there's something equally valuable in it too because for the first time you get a consistent, data-backed view of how students across the whole school, or the whole Trust, are actually developing as people. It's exactly the kind of insight that tends to be very hard to get hold of and very useful once you have it.

What comes next for the young people who are NEET?

With the confirmation that nearly a million young people are currently NEET, there is an additional pressure to better prepare students for what comes next. But the good news is that the schools leading on this aren't waiting for a curriculum overhaul or a new government initiative, they're just making sure the brilliant work they're already doing is visible, joined-up and genuinely useful to the young people it's meant to serve.

If it's something you're working through in your Trust, we'd love to hear how you're approaching it. We're running a webinar on this subject in July and we're actively shaping the conversation around what schools and Trust leaders are actually grappling with here, so if you have thoughts, experiences or questions you'd like to see explored, please do get in touch at hello@myglobalbridge.com. We'd love to include your perspective.