Schools have become a “pipeline” to worklessness for a large cohort of young people in the UK, according to an influential former Labour adviser who has called for urgent action to help a “lost generation”.
Peter Hyman, a former adviser to Tony Blair and Keir Starmer, told the Guardian the government should ban social media and enact radical education reform to tackle the “national scandal” of young people who are not in education, employment or training (Neet).
Launching a major new report which is expected to influence government policy on Neets in the UK, Hyman called on ministers to overhaul a system that trapped the young in a “rejection economy” where they were being failed by the education system, employers and social media companies.
The former headteacher said he was shocked at the sadness and despair experienced by school leavers who felt abandoned, ill-equipped and unable to enter an increasingly competitive jobs market. He added that close to one million were being wrongly classed as “snowflakes”, when in fact they were being “failed by government and the state”.
The UK has the third-highest rate of young people who are Neet among Europe’s richest countries, after a sharp rise to almost one million – the highest level in more than a decade.
Fuelling a growing sense of alarm in government, it comes as the former Blair-era cabinet minister Alan Milburn prepares to publish a highly anticipated report into the crisis in youth jobs next week.
Milburn told MPs on Wednesday that Britain risked facing a “generational problem” that was worse than the damage inflicted on young people by the 2008 financial crisis.
The rate of 16- to 24-year-olds who were Neet peaked at 16.8% in 2012 amid soaring unemployment after the banking crash. The rate fell back, although has since increased sharply to 12.8% amid a difficult jobs market and growing problems with mental ill-health.
“On the face of it we’ve got a smaller problem. But what I want to say to you is – you’ve got a bigger problem. Because the nature of the problem is more entrenched,” Milburn said.
“It’s a labour market problem, it’s a jobs crisis – but it’s being fuelled by a health crisis. And so these two things are self reinforcing: you have a vortex; a spiral. And it has enormous consequences.”
The report, Inside the Mind of a Young Neet, argues the UK must stop blaming young people for a system that has let them down. Co-authored by researcher Shuab Gamote and the former headteacher, it draws on conversations with more than 400 young people across the UK.
The report states that Britain’s workless youth faces “a unique combination of challenges including: poverty, Covid, loneliness, social media addiction, and economic shock”.
It adds: “We have created circumstances – run the economy into the ground, locked children away during lockdown, regimented them in schools, turned a blind eye to bullying, given them the social media tools of destruction – and then let them drift.”
A joyless education system that focused too heavily on passing exams and too often failed to address bullying and mental health problems left too many young people without qualifications or any sense of potential pathways to training or work, Hyman said. “I was shocked by the level of vitriol and hatred these young people used when talking about school,” he added.
The report also talked to multiple young people who had spent years “doing nothing”, with this “bedroom generation” victims of “a taught and learned helplessness that our system encourages”. They often felt unable to gain experience required for even entry-level jobs and wanted vocational options signposted, more work experience and more flexibility from employers, it said.
Asked if the government, which is carrying out a consultation into a ban on social media for children, should enact a ban, Hyman said: “From our conversations with young people it’s clear the government needs to ban social media for the under-16s.”
But it also needed to provide youth hubs and opportunities for young people to connect in real life and learn new skills, he said.
“The young people we’ve spoken to crave more social connection and places to go,” he said. “It’s no good saying ‘get off your phone and do something’ if they don’t have anything to do nearby.”
