28th August 2026
Almost One Million Young People Are NEET — What Does It Say About Britain's Future?
There is a number in today's labour market figures that deserves rather more attention than it is likely to receive.
Almost one million young people aged 16 to 24 are currently not in education, employment or training.
The Office for National Statistics estimates that 981,000 young people were NEET in April to June 2026. That is 13% of everyone aged 16 to 24. The figure is down by 30,000 on the previous quarter, but it is still 30,000 higher than a year earlier.
That is a huge number of young people at a critical stage of their lives.
And it raises a question that goes beyond today's statistics.
What happens to a generation that increasingly struggles to make the transition from education into work?
Almost one in seven young men
One of the more striking features of today's figures is the difference between young men and women.
The ONS estimates that 13.7% of young men aged 16 to 24 were NEET, compared with 12.3% of young women.
There were 530,000 young men in the NEET category, compared with 451,000 young women.
The increase over the year was also concentrated particularly among young men, with their number rising by 25,000 compared with 4,000 among young women.
That deserves attention because discussions about young people who are disconnected from education and employment can sometimes become dominated by other issues.
There is clearly a particular challenge emerging among young men.
But the statistics also show that this isn't simply a story about unemployment.
Being NEET doesn't necessarily mean unemployed
This is an important distinction.
Of the 981,000 young people classified as NEET, 393,000 were unemployed.
That means they were actively looking for work and available to start.
But another 588,000 were economically inactive.
They were not working, studying or training but did not meet the official definition of unemployment because they were not actively seeking work or were unable to start work within the required period.
That changes the way we should think about the problem.
If someone is unemployed, the obvious response is to help them find a job.
But what do we do with someone who has stopped looking?
That could involve many different circumstances. It could be a young person who has become discouraged after repeated unsuccessful applications. It could be someone dealing with a disability or long-term health problem. It could be someone who has simply become detached from education, training and the labour market.
The statistics don't tell us why every individual is NEET.
But they tell us that nearly 600,000 young people are outside both work and education without actively looking for work.
That is much harder to solve.
The danger of becoming disconnected
There is a point at which being temporarily out of work becomes something more serious.
A young person leaving school or college without a job or training opportunity may initially be NEET for only a few months.
But the longer the gap becomes, the harder it can be to explain on a CV.
Skills can become rusty. Confidence can fall. Networks disappear. Employers may ask what the applicant has been doing.
Eventually the problem can become self-reinforcing.
That is why youth employment statistics should not simply be treated as another monthly economic indicator.
A 20-year-old who spends a year outside the labour market is not just a statistic for this year's unemployment figures.
It can influence their earnings, skills, confidence and employment prospects for years to come.
There is some good news — but we shouldn't overstate it
The latest figure is lower than the previous quarter.
The proportion of 16 to 24-year-olds who were NEET fell from 13.5% in January to March to 13.0% in April to June.
The number also fell from 1.011 million to 981,000.
That is encouraging.
But the ONS itself warns against putting too much weight on short-term movements in these figures because the Labour Force Survey estimates are subject to sampling variability, particularly when looking at smaller groups. The ONS recommends looking at longer-term movements rather than drawing strong conclusions from a single quarter.
And the longer-term picture is not particularly comfortable.
The latest figure remains higher than a year ago.
Scotland has a different way of measuring the problem
There is an important Scottish wrinkle here.
The ONS does not publish its NEET estimate for individual Scottish local authorities. It specifically directs users towards separate statistics produced by the constituent countries of the UK.
Scotland uses the Annual Participation Measure, produced by Skills Development Scotland, which looks at 16 to 19-year-olds and whether they are participating in education, employment, training or personal development.
The latest published Scottish figures show that 93.3% of 16 to 19-year-olds were participating in 2025, leaving 3.9% recorded as not participating, although the methodology changed with the introduction of HMRC employment data and comparisons with earlier years therefore need care.
For Highland, the picture was better still.
Skills Development Scotland reports that 95.0% of Highland's 10,296 young people aged 16 to 19 were participating in education, employment, training or personal development in 2025.
That is an encouraging figure.
But it should not lead us to conclude that the problem has disappeared.
The Scottish and UK figures are not directly interchangeable. Scotland's Annual Participation Measure covers 16 to 19-year-olds and uses administrative data to identify participation, while the ONS NEET measure covers 16 to 24-year-olds and is based on the Labour Force Survey.
They are measuring related problems from different angles.
What happens after 19?
This is where the Highland figure becomes particularly interesting.
If 95% of 16 to 19-year-olds are in a positive destination, what happens to the remaining 5%?
And what happens when those young people move beyond the age covered by Scotland's main participation measure?
There is a danger of concentrating heavily on the school-to-college or school-to-apprenticeship transition while paying less attention to the transition from the late teens into the early twenties.
That is precisely the age range in which the ONS figures show the largest problem.
Indeed, 894,000 people aged 18 to 24 were NEET in April to June 2026, equivalent to 15.2% of everyone in that age group.
So the problem becomes considerably larger once we move beyond the immediate school-leaving years.
Rural Scotland faces its own challenge
For somewhere like Caithness, the statistics need to be considered alongside geography.
A young person in a large city may have hundreds of employers within relatively easy travelling distance.
A young person in a rural community may have a much smaller labour market.
There may be excellent opportunities in engineering, energy, tourism, construction, care, food production, transport and other sectors, but they are not necessarily located within easy reach of every young person's home.
Public transport can become part of the employment equation.
So can housing.
A young person might have found an apprenticeship or job but discover that there is nowhere affordable to live near it.
Alternatively, the job may involve shifts that don't fit available bus services.
These are not problems that appear in the ONS NEET definition.
But they can determine whether a young person moves from education into employment or becomes disconnected from both.
The economic cost is bigger than today's unemployment bill
It is tempting to see NEET figures as a social problem.
They are.
But they are also an economic problem.
Britain is dealing with an ageing population and growing pressure on public finances. Businesses regularly complain about shortages of particular skills.
At the same time, almost one million people aged 16 to 24 are currently outside education, employment or training.
That doesn't mean that all 981,000 could simply be put into jobs tomorrow.
It would be wrong to suggest that.
But it does raise an obvious question.
Are we making enough use of the potential workforce we already have?
If even a proportion of those young people could be helped into sustainable employment or training, the benefit would extend far beyond reducing a statistic.
It could mean more tax revenue, less dependence on benefits, greater consumer spending and, perhaps most importantly, people acquiring skills at the point in their lives when those skills can shape their entire working future.
We also need to stop treating every NEET young person as the same
The term "NEET" is useful for statisticians but rather blunt when describing human beings.
A 17-year-old who has just left school and is deciding what to do next is very different from a 24-year-old who has been economically inactive for several years.
Someone looking for work is different from someone who has stopped looking.
Someone needing an apprenticeship is different from someone who needs intensive support before they are ready for employment.
The statistics therefore tell us where to look.
They don't tell us exactly what to do.
That requires local knowledge.
Could employers play a bigger role?
Perhaps one answer lies in making it easier for employers to take a chance on young people.
Not every young person needs a university place.
Not every young person needs a conventional college course.
An apprenticeship, paid work with training, a supported first job or a period of practical experience may be a much better route for some.
That is particularly relevant in rural areas where traditional graduate employment may be limited but skilled occupations can offer excellent long-term careers.
Highland already has a substantial apprenticeship infrastructure. Skills Development Scotland says there were 2,428 Modern Apprentices in training in Highland at the end of March 2026, with 1,510 Modern Apprenticeship starts during the preceding year.
The question is whether we can make those routes sufficiently visible and accessible to the young people who are currently outside the system.
Almost one million is too large a number to ignore
The ONS figures don't represent a sudden collapse in Britain's youth labour market.
The number actually fell during the latest quarter.
But neither should we dismiss them as simply another fluctuation in the statistics.
981,000 young people is a very large number.
And 588,000 of them were not actively seeking work.
That is perhaps the figure that deserves the greatest attention.
It suggests that the challenge is not simply creating more vacancies.
It is about reconnecting young people with education, training, employers and the confidence to believe that there is a place for them in the working world.
Scotland has some strong mechanisms for doing that, and Highland's participation figures are encouraging.
But the national figures remind us that the transition from childhood education to a productive adult life does not end when someone leaves school.
For some young people, that transition can take years.
And if we want to understand Britain's future workforce, perhaps we should be paying at least as much attention to the young people who aren't yet part of it as we do to the jobs that employers say they cannot fill.
Read the full ONS report HERE