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One in six young people will not be in education, employment or training within five years, report finds

ended 28. May 2026

One in six young people will not be in education, employment or training within five years unless "urgent" action is taken, a major review set to be released at 11am will warn.

The education, health and welfare systems are "no longer fit for purpose" in preparing young people for adult life, said its author former minister Alan Milburn.

"We are at risk of a lost generation," he warned, with the number of 16 to 24-year-olds out of work, education or training set to rise to 1.25 million by 2031.

The "first rung of the career ladder has thinned" and that for "too many young people it is now simply out of reach", Milburn is set to say in a speech later.

"That places them in a hopeless catch-22 where employers ask for work experience but the opportunities for young people to gain it have narrowed or gone," he will say.

There are growing concerns over the number of young people not working. Latest figures show the unemployment rate for 16 to 24-year-olds is 16.2%, the highest since 2014, and more than three times the broader unemployment rate of 5%.

  • How bad is this warning?
  • What are your thoughts on it?
  • How can this be solved?

Responses asap.

6 responses from the Newspage community

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Kate UnderwoodVerified
Founder & Chief People Strategist at Kate Underwood HR and Training
Behind every statistic in this report is a teenager checking their phone for a job reply that isn't coming. A "lost generation" isn't just a soundbite; it's someone's child, sitting at the kitchen table, slowly losing belief in themselves.
I get it from both sides. Small business owners would love to take a chance on young talent, but between NI hikes, rising wages and shrinking margins, they're barely keeping the lights on. You can't hand-hold a 17-year-old through their first job when you're doing payroll at midnight.
And we keep asking young people to gain experience that nobody will give them. It's the cruellest catch-22 going.
This is where charities like Safe New Futures step in, doing the unglamorous, patient work of helping young people find their feet when school, the system, and sometimes home have all let them down. They shouldn't be filling a gap this big alone, but thank god they're filling it at all.
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Stephen PerkinsVerified
Managing Director at Yellow Brick Mortgages
Government policy has clearly stacked the deck against young people. With employer national insurance and increased minimum wage, employers are hiring less as demonstrated by falling vacancy numbers. Where companies do look to hire - young inexperienced staff are no longer the cost saving chance worth taking when older experienced workers can be had for similar cost. It’s less a lost generation and more a betrayed one.
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Rob MansfieldVerified
Independent Financial Advisor at Rootes Wealth Management
It's always been difficult to get started as companies look for experience to reduce the risk of hiring someone unsuitable but with increased payroll taxes and the allure of AI being able to automate some entry level jobs, it's only set to get harder. The government should look at ways of reducing the cost of employing people and and giving them a chance to shine. Taxing employment then using some of that money to fund job schemes feels like a circular waste.
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Katrina YoungVerified
Futurist | Chief Technology Officer CTO/CDO Ethical AI & Digital Transformation Strategist at KYC Digital
The warning is serious, but the deeper issue is structural. The entry-level work young people once used to gain experience is increasingly being automated or absorbed by AI tooling. The catch-22 Milburn describes is no longer temporary. Inside organisations, firms deploy AI to handle the routine tasks that used to be a junior’s first job. Short-term efficiency may improve, but the training ground disappears with it. You cannot build a senior workforce if you quietly remove the rung people climbed to get there. The real risk is not youth unemployment alone. It is a future capability gap, where experienced workers retire with too few trained successors behind them. The fix is not more work-experience schemes after the fact. It is rebuilding entry-level roles around human-plus-AI work, where juniors learn through supervision, validation and operational oversight rather than competing directly with automation.
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Debbie PorterVerified
Managing Director at Destination Digital Marketing
As the mother of a high-IQ, SEN child who is a NEET, I would say that an overhaul is desperately needed. He has been snookered into this position by the Education system.

My son has dyscalculia, which means he has a fundamental inability to understand numbers, yet grade 4 in GCSE maths remains a mandatory bar for his ‘first steps’ progression in life. It is a bar over which he will never be able to climb.

The mandatory requirement to stay in education post-16 has been torturous. Further education requires a mandatory GCSE maths pass, meaning most courses wouldn’t accept him, closing down his options. Apprenticeships require mandatory maths to gain the qualification, and many jobs advertise with mandatory maths GCSE passes too.

If he had a physical disability, he wouldn’t be required to perform a task that his disability made impossible. We would say that was cruel. And as a barrier to entry, we might also say that it’s a contravention of the Equality Act 2010.
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Colette MasonVerified
AI Ethics Consultant at Clever Clogs AI
Yet again we have another report from the government and no change.

The recruitment process isn't just broken, it's broken and punitive. Cover letters go into AI screening tools that score keywords, not people. AI interviewers have replaced humans. There's no callback, just an assumption you've been tossed in the sin bin. What an unfair soul crushing mincing machine they have to battle against.

Every entry level hire costs more before they've done a day's work. The tax maths snuffs out their traditional roles. It is no surprise that this month US graduates booed wealthy CEOs extolling AI and telling them to "embrace the disruption."

Governments globally will need to tax the companies deploying AI that eliminates entry level roles. Use the revenue to subsidise junior hires in small businesses, the ones who'd train someone if they could afford to.
This is now a problem the tech industry created and its CEOs drive relentlessly. The job-slaying rhetoric must stop and compassion begin.