ONS data shows that around one in eight young people aged 16-24 in the UK (about 957,000 individuals) are not in education, employment or training.
The government’s recent announcement of a £1 billion youth employment package highlights just how urgent this challenge is and aims to create more opportunities for young people to enter work, training, or apprenticeships.
Last month, Skills England convened a series of Youth Employability Summits to look at particular issues around skills and work readiness in young people from three different perspectives:
young people themselves place-based leaders from Mayoral Combined Authorities and education providers employers from across sectors including IBM, PwC, Severn Trent and Enterprise Rent-a-Car.The sessions were delivered in partnership with Youth Futures Foundation.
Here's what we heard:
The problem isn't a lack of skills, it's that skills go unrecognisedOne of the most striking findings was that the skills that young people are developing are largely invisible to the people hiring them.
Young people develop communication, resilience, teamwork and problem-solving through informal routes like sport, caring for family members, volunteering and lived experience. Recruitment processes which are built around formal qualifications and paid experience don't always see these competencies.
Young people struggle to translate their experience into the language employers use, and job descriptions are often not clear about which skills are actually needed, making it harder to assess whether you'd even be a good fit before applying.
The wide variety of different frameworks for describing employability skills makes this more confusing. Employers and young people are not speaking the same language, because no shared language exists.
Bridging the gap between education and the workplaceThe development of practical, transferable skills like networking, financial literacy, workplace rights and interview preparation, were often left to individuals to figure out alone. Most participants felt that careers support needed to be structured and sustained over time, instead of a one-off isolated event. It should cover not only job-searching but financial literacy, how to describe informally gained skills, and workplace rights.
Employers identified specific structural mismatches: schools try to provide clear, "scaffolded instructions" - workplaces expect people to navigate ambiguity. Feedback in education tends to be structured and frequent - at work it can be informal and irregular.
The ability to exercise critical judgement about AI outputs was also raised as an increasingly important skill that young people need but are rarely taught. As AI becomes embedded in more workplaces, the risk is that this gap grows.
Work experience works, but only when it's realWork experience and industry placements were identified across all three sessions as the single most effective route to developing and demonstrating employability skills. However employers said that placements needed to be meaningful.
What makes the difference is real responsibility and genuine tasks. One employer described a pilot in which young people completed three-quarters of standard induction training before starting their placement. Within three weeks, they were doing the job, not shadowing, and managers described them as amongst the strongest talent they had seen in years.
The not in education, employment or training (NEET) population is not one groupA clear message from all three sessions was that the NEET population is diverse. It spans graduates, early school leavers, young carers, people with disabilities, and those facing housing or health challenges.
Young people furthest from the labour market need support that is integrated with stability and delivered at a pace that reflects their circumstances. Many want accessible, sustainable work rather than a defined career path, and the current system is not well designed to support them.
The system is too fragmentedPerhaps the most consistent message was that the skills and employment system is too complex, too fragmented and too short-term in its thinking. Young people fall through the gaps at transition points, particularly between school and college, and between college and work.
Participants welcomed the direction set out in the Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper and the Youth Guarantee. They were also clear that early intervention was critical and so schools need to be part of the conversation.
How Skills England can supportWith a focus on skills and work readiness, Skills England can prioritise two areas.
First, working with employers, young people and providers, we want to understand what makes work experience genuinely effective at building and recognising the skills young people need, by examining:
what works how barriers have been overcome what it takes to make meaningful, skills-rich experience work at scale, including for smaller employersSecondly, we will also look at ways to build a common skills language to recognise the skills young people gain outside of formal employment. This includes our ongoing work on skills passports, where we will consider how these can work better for young people and ensure the skills they develop can be captured, communicated and understood by employers.
Underpinning both of these is Skills England's role in building a clearer picture of the labour market. By analysing data on occupations, pathways and where skills gaps exist and are likely to grow, we can help ensure that the skills being developed and the work experience being offered are aligned to where real employment opportunities are, now and in the future.
The challenge is significant, but so is the opportunity. Better skills recognition, better work experience and a less fragmented system could make a real difference to hundreds of thousands of young people. That is what we are working towards.
Tessa Griffiths and Sarah Maclean
Co-CEOs, Skills England
seen at 10:30, 2 April in Skills England.