Every now and then a story, or a report, crystallises what everyone working in children's services has been seeing on the ground and saying for some time; young people who have grown up under the effects of austerity are simply not getting a good deal.
Alan Milburn's interim review of young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) is one of those moments.
The headline figure is stark: nearly one million young people across the UK are now NEET and the cumulative cost to the country of that inactivity is £125bn, but the more sobering figure is a human one. Just six in 10 of these young people have never had a job and 60% are not looking for work at all.
There's an opportunity to build genuine accountability for long-term outcomes. Currently, there's no pooled funding stream for young people disengaging between 18-24, or performance framework holding any institution to account for sustained participation. The welfare system shows the same gap by responding to disengagement late, treating contact with young people as administrative rather than as a chance to guide them into work or learning.
What struck me most was not the scale of the challenge, but that we already know who many of these people are. We understand the links between poor attendance, unmet special educational needs, mental ill-health, childhood disadvantage and later disengagement. In many cases, the warnings are visible years before they reach a crisis point.
Yet our systems identify risk without acting collectively on what they know. The review puts this starkly. The education system knows which children will struggle at age five, and again at eleven and 16 but unfortunately lacks the architecture, funding, or accountability to act on what it knows. This is not a criticism of any one service. Schools, colleges, health services, local authorities, employers and voluntary organisations are all working hard in difficult circumstances.
A young person does not separate their mental health from their education, their housing from their employability, or their family circumstances from their future ambitions. Our systems shouldn't do so either.
The review reinforces the message that children's outcomes must be the organising principle around which services are designed and policy shaped. Educational attainment matters, but it cannot be the sole measure of success. Similarly, the review found that health is no longer a background factor in NEET, it's central, with one in five NEETs having a health condition.
There's an opportunity to build genuine accountability for long-term outcomes. Currently, there's no pooled funding stream for young people disengaging between 18-24, or performance framework holding any institution to account for sustained participation. The welfare system shows the same gap by responding to disengagement late, treating contact with young people as administrative rather than as a chance to guide them into work or learning.
The review describes youth disengagement as a moral crisis. I believe it is also a test of leadership. Every statistic represents a young person with potential. The challenge now is not understanding the problem; it is having the courage to organise our systems around the outcomes young people deserve.
So, the question for leaders is straightforward: are we prepared to continue with the status quo when the costs are so high for individuals, and for the country?
Ann Graham, ADCS president 2026/27
