Well before coming to office, Labour signalled its intention to address the ‘NEETs problem’. In government, it commissioned ex-minister Alan Milburn (previously employed by the Tories to try and improve social mobility) for a ‘review’.
On the day his ‘interim’ report was published, ONS figures showed over a million 16–24-year-olds as NEET (13.5%) but 15.8% of all 18–24-year-olds – or approaching 1 in 6 of the age group. This latter figure is more significant, because, as acknowledged by Milburn, young people are legally required to be in education or training until 18. In otherwords there shouldn’t really be any 16–17-year-old NEETs.
Previous reports by the Tories concentrated on blaming individual inadequacies – this was also evident in statements by then Secretary of State Liz Kendall when Labour came to office. A major strength of Milburn’s report is the recognition that youth joblessness should be considered a ‘structural’ – rather than an individual or even a ‘cyclical’ problem. Unlike Kendall’s castigation of the 60% of NEETs who were ‘economically inactive’ (officially not looking for work) as a snowflake or ‘soft’ generation, Milburn argues that over 8 out of 10 NEETs would take up a job offer, even if they’ve currently given up looking and that half have never been able to get one.
Though accepting that, ‘for a sizeable minority, the labour market no longer performs the function it once did’ (206) Milburn doesn’t provide a serious historical critique of the market driven deindustrialisation, let alone the rentier and finance propelled capitalism that followed – encouraged by Tony Blair. After all he was one of his ministers! But we can assume he’s referring to the way in which the manufacturing jobs of the past, which protected by mass trade unionism, at least provided some securities have been replaced by precarious employment at the lower end of the service sector. Nevertheless, intensified by external shocks – the financial crisis, Brexit, Covid and international conflicts; he reminds us that the NEET rate has only fallen below 10% once in the last 20 years.
Like others, Milburn is correct to highlight the effects of disengagement, instability and anxiety on young people’s wellbeing, their mental health conditions and to point to the dangers of a ‘lost generation’ – a term that has been used at regular intervals to describe the detachment and increasing hopelessness felt by young people, hence the title of our earlier critique (Ainley and Allen 2010). His comments about the emergence of an increasing withdrawn ‘bedroom generation’ hooked on social media will resonate with many.
But despite accepting that employers don’t take on young people like they used to, Milburn continues to offer ‘human capital’ explanations. These emphasise the need to reduce the ‘supply-side’ barriers to employment, particularly the skill deficiencies of NEETs, ‘inadequate’ education being central to this. He points to rates of unemployment for graduates are much lower (only one in ten NEETs have degrees) while half of 18–25-year-olds without GCSEs have spent a period of time as NEET.
His enthusiasm for moving school outcomes away from an obsession with exam grades may find support, even if other claims about NEETs being ‘failed’ by the education system will be more controversial. Though recognising the ‘heroic efforts’ of teachers, Milburn points to continued inequalities within and between schools, the failures to provide real vocational educational opportunities in further education. and the disconnection of apprenticeships from young people.
His arguments for replacing the welfare state with an ‘enabling’ working state reflect current government thinking generally and have sent alarm bells ringing on the Labour left about the future of universalism. But concerns about the ballooning benefits bill and the expense of keeping young people out of work, should also be tempered by statistics showing that (as Milburn acknowledges) approaching half of NEETs don’t claim anything at all. On the contrary, it’s spending on an ageing population – the ‘baby boomer’ pensioners – that’s a major reason for much of the increase.
NEETs, Grads and Apprentices – a general crisis of youth employment.
The nature of his brief means that Milburn gives scant attention to other groups of young people who ‘leave education, find work and move on’ (207). But on the contrary the two are closely linked. As the ‘youth jobs’ of the post-war period, including traditional apprenticeship routes, began to disappear and only being offered training without jobs, working class young people voted with their feet and remained in full-time education for much longer. Taking on board Tony Blair’s assurances that it would improve employability in the new global economy, thousands scooted off to higher education.
Milburn refers to increased HE attendancd as a ‘shock absorber’ and that the long-term decline in youth employment has been ‘partly offset by a long-term rise in participation in education’ (219). However, it’s also the case that increases in educational attainment have taken place at a much faster rate than the increase in the technical requirements of work. In reality, contrary to Blair, increased automation and the disappearance of manual trades, has meant that large chunks of 21st century work requires less skill. There’s clear evidence that the increased availability of AI is reducing the number of entry level positions that employers have recruited junior staff for. It could also be argued, the growth of remote working practices has had a considerable effect.
With the breakdown of collective and often informal transitions into local industries, employers have increasingly used educational qualifications as recruitment ‘proxies’ . With plenty of graduates available, degrees have become the new ‘norm’ – the equivalent of 1970s O-levels maybe ? But in the post-war years graduates generally transitioned into ‘middle-class’ professional and managerial employment, a world away from the experiences of the labouring classes. These days, despite completing a pile of application forms and with a mountain of debt, many will end up ‘over-qualified and underemployed’ part of a new ‘working middle’ where traditional class lines have become blurred and the graduate ‘premium’ increasingly marginalised.
More recently, sections of the press and other media influencers have been encouraging those heading to higher education to consider apprenticeships as an alternative, arguing that ‘learning a trade’ is now more valuable than getting a degree. But apprenticeships have not embedded themselves in the way that was intended. The current apprenticeship scheme was launched in 1994, as an ‘alternative’ to university, but if the 350 000 annual enrolments is well below what was intended, more significantly, under-19s make up less than a third of these. The majority of starts are by existing staff and there’s been a noticeable increase in the number of employers using apprenticeship money to fund management trainees.
As a consequence, non-graduates face being bumped down the labour queue into precarious employment in the service economy (graduates from less prestigious universities also risk ending up in these!) where they are competing with other sections of the ‘reserve army’ of labour. In this scenario, without an overall increase in the number of jobs (in hospitality and retailing, vacancies have been falling), Milburn’s concerns about over £120 billion of lost output will mean little if anybody moving up the jobs queue is only able to do this at the expense of somebody moving down, or being forced out of employment altogether.
Milburn steers clear of specific policy proposals – we’ll have to wait for the final version due later in the summer. The government will claim that it’s already putting right some of the things that Milburn highlights – for example, offering 30,000 work placements for the (very) long term unemployed. Reported as another ‘crisis’, Milburn’s finding attracted significant media attention. But as has been argued, the decline in opportunities for young people has been an endemic feature of recent years, as they have in been other countries – even if, because of ‘cultures and structures’ there are major differences in the way youth unemployment has been handled.
Rather than a shopping list, or even the ‘systems reset’ Milburn calls for, what’s really needed is an alternative plan for the green economy of the future, including not only mandatory placements in ‘good work’, but also at least some form of job guarantees for those young people who need them. A Labour leadership contest at least provides this opportunity, but will this go far enough?
Education, Economy and Society 