Matthew Elliott is a member of the House of Lords and President of the Jobs Foundation
The Prime Minister declared last month that the King’s Speech was “a King’s Speech for the young people whose gifts lie in their hands, and who work hard.” I want to believe him. But the young people graduating from university or leaving school this summer could be forgiven for concluding that it was nothing of the sort.
Since the last King’s Speech, the number of young people not in education, employment or training (the NEETs) has risen to more than one million. Youth unemployment has climbed to 16.2 per cent. At the turn of the millennium, when I graduated from the London School of Economics, it was 11.6 per cent. A quarter of a century on, we are going backwards. And the King’s Speech offered no serious legislative response to any of it.
I was reminded of what serious ambition actually looks like when the Jobs Foundation visited the David Nieper Academy in Alfreton as part of the research for our Ladders of Opportunity report. Work and Pensions Secretary, Pat McFadden, followed us there last week. The Academy is connected to the David Nieper clothing company, a business that still designs and manufactures everything in Derbyshire and is run with a straightforward philosophy: hire for attitude, invest in local people, and build an organisation your community wants to be part of.
Post-18, the Academy has effectively eliminated NEETs among its leavers, with quite literally zero NEETs. Post-16, it is under 1 per cent. The Academy achieves this despite being in a disadvantaged area through its focus on employability, with students going through career interviews, enterprise projects and structured public speaking – experiences designed to build the confidence and practical skills that employers actually look for.
Pat McFadden, drawing on conversations with pupils at the academy, noted that confidence is one of the biggest barriers young people face when entering the workplace. The employment prospects of pupils from David Nieper Academy speak for themselves about how pupils are given the confidence to enter the workplace, and other schools across the country could learn from their success.
This brings us back to the King’s Speech, and the scale of the missed opportunity it represents.
If the Government were serious about the NEETs crisis, we would have seen a Bill to reform how our education system prepares young people for employment, embedding the kind of structured employability pathways that the David Nieper Academy has pioneered. We would have seen a Bill to reform welfare so that it better supports those who genuinely need it while removing the barriers that keep others from work. And we would have seen a Bill to help businesses create jobs and provide training opportunities, recognising that Getting Britain Working requires the private sector to be a partner, not an afterthought.
Instead, the King’s Speech was largely silent on all three. The Government has said it will “respond to the Milburn Review,” but this does not give a sense of the urgency required to truly tackle this problem. The interim findings of the Review lay out the huge scale of the problem and Milburn himself warned of “a lost generation.” But the gaping hole where youth employment policy should be suggests either that the necessary changes do not require legislation, or that they have been deferred to the Autumn Budget. Neither explanation is reassuring to the young person who is NEET today and for whom the trend, if it continues, points in only one direction.
There is also the larger looming threat that the King’s Speech didn’t mention: AI. Research by the British Chambers of Commerce shows that the share of businesses using AI has doubled in a year, from around a quarter to over half. A large recruiter I spoke to recently told me that 58 per cent of people who come to them having lost their job do not go on to find a similar role elsewhere. They move into an entirely different job, with new skills, in a new field. Our labour market is undergoing a fundamental transformation, and the pipeline of young people entering it is already severely depleted.
The parallel I keep returning to is the electrification of British industry in the 1930s. We were late. We kept steam-powered factories running long after our American and European competitors had moved on. Future historians may well write with similar disbelief about how the UK failed to prepare its workforce for the AI transition, not because we lacked the talent or the ingenuity, but because we didn’t have a proper plan for its arrival.
The solutions are out there, and the Jobs Foundation has been working to find them. This Summer we will publish a new report focused specifically on the gap between school and employment and how to stop young people falling through it into long-term NEET status. We have interviewed employers who are getting this right, including the likes of EY, Tom Kerridge, and the David Nieper Academy, to understand what really works to get people into employment or training.
The David Nieper Academy shows what is possible when an institution decides that youth unemployment is simply not acceptable and builds everything around solving it. The Government needs to find the same resolve. The King’s Speech suggests it has not done so yet.
Matthew Elliott is a member of the House of Lords and President of the Jobs Foundation
The Prime Minister declared last month that the King’s Speech was “a King’s Speech for the young people whose gifts lie in their hands, and who work hard.” I want to believe him. But the young people graduating from university or leaving school this summer could be forgiven for concluding that it was nothing of the sort.
Since the last King’s Speech, the number of young people not in education, employment or training (the NEETs) has risen to more than one million. Youth unemployment has climbed to 16.2 per cent. At the turn of the millennium, when I graduated from the London School of Economics, it was 11.6 per cent. A quarter of a century on, we are going backwards. And the King’s Speech offered no serious legislative response to any of it.
I was reminded of what serious ambition actually looks like when the Jobs Foundation visited the David Nieper Academy in Alfreton as part of the research for our Ladders of Opportunity report. Work and Pensions Secretary, Pat McFadden, followed us there last week. The Academy is connected to the David Nieper clothing company, a business that still designs and manufactures everything in Derbyshire and is run with a straightforward philosophy: hire for attitude, invest in local people, and build an organisation your community wants to be part of.
Post-18, the Academy has effectively eliminated NEETs among its leavers, with quite literally zero NEETs. Post-16, it is under 1 per cent. The Academy achieves this despite being in a disadvantaged area through its focus on employability, with students going through career interviews, enterprise projects and structured public speaking – experiences designed to build the confidence and practical skills that employers actually look for.
Pat McFadden, drawing on conversations with pupils at the academy, noted that confidence is one of the biggest barriers young people face when entering the workplace. The employment prospects of pupils from David Nieper Academy speak for themselves about how pupils are given the confidence to enter the workplace, and other schools across the country could learn from their success.
This brings us back to the King’s Speech, and the scale of the missed opportunity it represents.
If the Government were serious about the NEETs crisis, we would have seen a Bill to reform how our education system prepares young people for employment, embedding the kind of structured employability pathways that the David Nieper Academy has pioneered. We would have seen a Bill to reform welfare so that it better supports those who genuinely need it while removing the barriers that keep others from work. And we would have seen a Bill to help businesses create jobs and provide training opportunities, recognising that Getting Britain Working requires the private sector to be a partner, not an afterthought.
Instead, the King’s Speech was largely silent on all three. The Government has said it will “respond to the Milburn Review,” but this does not give a sense of the urgency required to truly tackle this problem. The interim findings of the Review lay out the huge scale of the problem and Milburn himself warned of “a lost generation.” But the gaping hole where youth employment policy should be suggests either that the necessary changes do not require legislation, or that they have been deferred to the Autumn Budget. Neither explanation is reassuring to the young person who is NEET today and for whom the trend, if it continues, points in only one direction.
There is also the larger looming threat that the King’s Speech didn’t mention: AI. Research by the British Chambers of Commerce shows that the share of businesses using AI has doubled in a year, from around a quarter to over half. A large recruiter I spoke to recently told me that 58 per cent of people who come to them having lost their job do not go on to find a similar role elsewhere. They move into an entirely different job, with new skills, in a new field. Our labour market is undergoing a fundamental transformation, and the pipeline of young people entering it is already severely depleted.
The parallel I keep returning to is the electrification of British industry in the 1930s. We were late. We kept steam-powered factories running long after our American and European competitors had moved on. Future historians may well write with similar disbelief about how the UK failed to prepare its workforce for the AI transition, not because we lacked the talent or the ingenuity, but because we didn’t have a proper plan for its arrival.
The solutions are out there, and the Jobs Foundation has been working to find them. This Summer we will publish a new report focused specifically on the gap between school and employment and how to stop young people falling through it into long-term NEET status. We have interviewed employers who are getting this right, including the likes of EY, Tom Kerridge, and the David Nieper Academy, to understand what really works to get people into employment or training.
The David Nieper Academy shows what is possible when an institution decides that youth unemployment is simply not acceptable and builds everything around solving it. The Government needs to find the same resolve. The King’s Speech suggests it has not done so yet.