The Milburn Review: One million young people. And we’re still asking why.

In 2026, the UK has one million young people who are NEET: not in education, employment or training. Let’s take a moment to let that land. One million young people, at the very start of their adult lives, disconnected from the systems that should be helping them build a future.

The Milburn Interim Review, published last week, names something many of us working in this space have felt for a long time: our education, health and support systems are no longer serving this generation. But what it also does, powerfully, is reflect back something we see every day at Envision. Young people are not the problem. They never were.

The numbers are hard to ignore

The Review estimates the cumulative annual cost of nearly one million NEET young people at £125 billion. That is more than we spend on education each year.

We are, as the Review puts it starkly, paying more to manage the consequences of disengagement than we are prepared to invest in preventing it. The call for early intervention couldn’t be any clearer.

What makes this particularly difficult to accept is: it is not a pipeline problem. The young people are there. The jobs are there. This is a connectivity problem. The challenge is rarely a lack of ambition from young people, but a lack of opportunities to build the relationships, confidence and real world-experience that create connections to work and further learning.

Nearly 30% of NEET young people now hold good GCSEs or equivalent. Over 21% have a Level 3 qualification. 15% have a degree. These are not young people who failed at school. These are young people the labour market is failing to absorb.

The Saturday job

When I was a teenager, I had a weekend job working in a local restaurant. At the time, it didn’t feel particularly life-changing. It was quite unremarkable and mostly a means to an end. But looking back, it taught me things that are genuinely hard to replicate in a classroom: the habit of showing up on time, working under pressure, holding responsibility and learning how to interact with new people. Little did I know what foundation that weekend job was quietly building in the background.

The Milburn Review talks about the loss of the Saturday job. The number of 16 to 17 year olds doing any paid work has nearly halved since 2006. The consequences are becoming increasingly visible. Today, six in ten young people who are NEET have never worked at all. Twenty years ago, that figure was four in ten. This isn’t through lack of interest. The pandemic accelerated what was already in decline, removing the ‘informal scaffolding’ through which young people learn to navigate the adult world. The result is a growing gap on both sides.

Employers describe young people arriving underprepared, with higher anxiety and less experience of the workplace. Young people describe a labour market that feels closed off and hard to enter. Both sides are looking across the same widening gap, and neither has the bridge.

This gap is not abstract. It shows up in very real, very ordinary moments for young people trying to access work. Only last week I spoke to one of our Envision graduates, who had been looking for a part-time role around his studies for 18 months. After countless emails with no reply, he’d walked into shop after shop with a paper CV and asked for a job – eventually he spoke to a manager who offered him a trial shift. I applaud his tenacity… I’m not sure I would have had that at his age.

These young people are not the problem

“Too often young people are described by what they lack. We see them as a list of risks to be managed or problems to be fixed.”

That framing is not just unfair, but completely counterproductive. The most important thing the Milburn Review does is refuse to accept the deficit narrative about young people. When they spoke to young people directly, it found them thoughtful, resourceful and often more capable than the systems around them seemed able to recognise.

That is precisely what I see. Young people who are under real strain, yes. But who are also curious and determined, and desperate for someone to take them seriously. They are not lazy. They are not less capable than we were. They are different, because they grew up in genuinely different conditions: a pandemic that hit during their most formative years, a digital world that has reshaped how they connect, and a labour market that has quietly removed many of the entry routes previous generations took for granted.

As the Review puts it: much of what we observe reflects the world they were given, not the world they chose. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to be 18 right now….

The inequality hiding in plain sight

The Review is also unflinching about who bears the burden of this failure. It is not evenly distributed.

For the most advantaged young person, the probability of becoming NEET is 1%. For the most disadvantaged, it is 25%. Deprivation multiplies the risk eight-fold. Pupils eligible for free school meals are over 21% less likely to reach the Good Level of Development at the end of early years compared to their more affluent peers.

And the Review traces the thread all the way back: the soft skills (or essential skills, as we’d call them) deficit that employers describe does not begin in the teenage years. Its roots are in the first years of life. Early social and emotional development, communication, the ability to work alongside others: these are shaped long before a young person ever sets foot in a secondary school.

Children in poverty are twice as likely to be lonely. Lonely children become disengaged young people. Disengaged young people become the NEET statistic. And the NEET statistic becomes a £125 billion annual cost.

What needs to change

The Review is clear that we cannot train our way out of this. Better CVs and interview practice matter, but they are not enough when the labour market itself has thinned its entry routes. We need employers to step up alongside us.

When I speak to business leaders, I hear genuine enthusiasm to do more and some who are doing wonderful things to help prepare future workers. But often this willingness is tempered by concern. Employers feel ill-equipped to support young people presenting with anxiety or unfamiliar needs. They want to help, but do not always know how.

That is a solvable problem. But it requires investment on both sides: preparing young people for the world of work, and preparing the world of work to receive them.

The Review calls for meaningful employer encounters, not just two weeks of work experience but volunteering, projects, mock interviews, taster sessions woven throughout secondary education. Maybe most importantly there needs to be clear opportunities to work with trusted adults, develop their essential skills, confidence and agency and help young people regain a sense of control over their futures.

The Review states that the education system cannot claim to prepare young people for the labour market while keeping employers at arm’s length from the classroom. I could not agree more. We cannot expect young people to navigate a world of work they have rarely had the chance to see, experience or contribute to. We all have a job to do here.

At Envision, we believe every young person has something to give. A skill, an aptitude, untapped potential.  The Milburn Review is speaking our language. But belief is not enough. Neither is relying on goodwill. What we need is sustained, systemic commitment from employers, from government, from educators, and from organisations like ours who sit at the intersection of all three.

The young people are there. The opportunities exist. But too often they are not reaching one another. Our job now is to build that bridge.