Can we talk about NEETs?

[MrsBennetsPoorNervesAreBack]

Sorry if there's a thread already and I've missed it. But I want to talk about NEETs.

Apparently, we are potentially going to have 1.25million young people not in employment, education or training by the early 2030s. This is quite an alarming number, and it feels like we're failing an entire generation - both the NEETs themselves, who don't seem to have very much going on in their lives that might give them a sense of satisfaction or achievement, but also their working peers who will presumably end up having to support them via the tax system.

I really don't want this to be a thread with lots of judgement or criticism of these young people - it seems to me that we must have failed them somehow as a society. I also want to steer clear of party politics if we can. But I really want to understand why we have so many young people in this position right now.

Does anyone have a child in this situation who would be willing to share why they find themselves in this position? What are the barriers to them studying or getting at least a part time job? Are they happy with how things are right now? Are they trying to change their situation? What do they actually do all day? Are they surrounded by friends who are in the same position? What do they do about money? And what do you feel about the whole situation as a parent?

If anyone is willing to share, I really hope we can avoid a pile-on in which the young people and/or their parents are subjected to a character assassination. I would like an honest and frank exchange of views and experiences because I do genuinely want to understand the root causes of this issue, but if it descends into blame and fingerpointing, then the whole conversation will get derailed.

For full disclosure, I do have a dc in the middle of the 16-24 age group, but neither she nor any of her friends fall into this category.

1. The jobs market is rubbish for everyone. More competition for jobs and raising the pension age also means older people are sometimes in jobs that young people would have gone into as a weekend job. Also cost of living. Pensioners taking on 'easy' jobs to supplement their income. My local McDonald's seem to employ a lot of older people. The supermarkets also do too but with the rise of self checkouts, the closure of food counters and cafes even a supermarket job is limited now whereas in the past this would have been an option for young people to do alongside school.

1. Lack of resilience and respect. I work in a school and we had some year 10 students on work experience. Not all, but one group had to be sent home and their school contacted due to their behaviour. They did not want to do the tasks they were given as they were boring, so they opted out and refused, and they swore in front of the children and were encouraging them to 'play' fight (this is primary school children).

Also linked to the next point....

1. Social media and phones. Wanting to spend their time on phones all day long. Being shocked that phones aren't allowed in some workplace settings (like a school) and you can't just scroll through whatever the latest app is when you fancy it. I think some young people now see it as a choice whether to work or not and of course not working is the better option where they can do what they want without being pulled up on it.

1. Overdiagnosis of things like anxiety. I was an anxious child, still do have some level of anxiety as an adult. We no longer teach children that this is normal. Things like exams can cause anxiety but young people are often allowed to take days off for anxiety and push for a diagnosis rather than accepting that it is ok to feel anxious and that with exams for example the way to overcome that is to prepare for them and take steps to reducing the anxiety.

Also in terms of some behaviours, school enables them (especially primary school). The reality of the real world is then a big shock when you don't have multiple adults saying it's ok to not do something essential and allowing you time out constantly.

@NoraLuka For clinical depression there is evidence that physical activity outdoors helps, which is why the NHS offers advice on the Green Gym projects. www.nhs.uk/mental-health/self-help/guides-tools-and-activities/exercise-for-depression/ Whether into social media and screens before or not they can help perpetuate depression. No she wont "snap out of it" but you want to explore the underlying reasons for the depression while also doing everything you can to stop it becoming worse. If medication isnt helping then try mindfulness and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).

No idea what happened to my numbering and paragraphs!

There are several issues at play:

It’s not as easy or nearly impossible to get a job as a 15/16/17 yo and gain experience/get your foot in the door.
There aren’t enough jobs for the amount of people that want/need them.
The “little” jobs are disappearing, particularly in retail.
Most jobs need some form of qualification, extra tests , funds. Someone mentioned labourers, you can’t even get onto a site now without spending money to get you CSCS card, then more money for the health and safety test and so on.
Apprenticeships sound good , but they are highly competitive and very area dependent.
Schools don’t really arrange work experience anymore, despite requiring it to happen. DD had to do one day in y8 to begin with. Who’s going to take a random 13 yo in?

Some of these young people are unable to work either temporarily or permanently due to disabilities. Again this has various reasons . Serious disabilities where the person just can’t. Lack of vocational avenues and schools only focused on academics, the actual school environment which can damage some children further, lack of support, intervention, long waiting lists , poor mental health services etc. Just kicking the can down the road.

High competition and high demands for the jobs that do exist.

Countries that have low level of NEETS offer businesses incentives to hire young people, there are funded and varied options for vocational routes and there is a strong communication and cooperation between schools, business and government (central and local) to ensure young people can actually get a job.

None of those are modern conditions – they are just modern abbreviations used to describe conditions that people suffered in silence in past times. Or were locked up in institutions.

Except KFC, which still refers to fried chicken whatever decade we're in. Nice try.

Didn’t think it would be long before the severely ignorant piled on.

“ ADHD, ASD, PTSD etc” as you put it are not modern conditions, the first two are for life and the latter you are lucky if you get any treatment for it.

NEETs don’t all have these conditions.

Finally military service is the last thing many with these conditions need. The military won’t take anybody on adhd meds and you’d need to be free from said meds for 3 years. They won’t take anybody with ptsd because of the high stress and trauma involved with the military and with ASC you are heavily screened.

They are all disabilities for a reason. Your dismissiveness of how difficult they are to live with is insulting.

I have younger teens (16 and 13) so don’t have the experience that some parents posting here have. I’m really conscious of trying to support my children as they move towards adulthood. It seems that teens are kept ‘younger’ and more dependent than when I was that age. Parents seem to do so much for them and seem to me to be overprotective. Is this a factor? Many of my friends with teens still organise their lives for them, pack their school bags, make their packed lunch etc. I’m seen as quite a harsh parent because I expect mine to do this themselves. My oldest was saving for something at 13, he got himself a paper round, got himself up early every morning and did it. I was proud of him. But had multiple other parents say they wouldn’t allow their children to do a paper round, what if he was too tired from it or fell off his bike. I wonder how teens are meant to develop independence if they are wrapped in cotton wool all the time.

This is obviously a massively complicated issue and I assume multi faceted. But I wonder if we are starting this by treating teens as young children for far too long. I would be really interested to hear from parents of young adults on what we can do to support younger teens to prevent them ending up in the neet group.

Sometimes, sometimes not. If the number of people wanting jobs exceeds the number of jobs available (which, in the UK at present, it does), some people are going to be unemployed. The NEET in my life is applying constantly but just not getting a job. Dozens of applicants in my area for absolutely everything, including the most menial and low-paid stuff.

We do similar. NMW whilst young and training but by late twenties you can be on 30k plus a free house and council tax. Probably a 10k increase per decade of life if you increase responsibility and move around. Very very basic maths skills required. Like my 12 year old can do it. That’s all.

We have work experience from local colleges, do career talks there. But kids don’t want to do it. They don’t want to work jobs that are outside, manual and involve working weekends and bank holidays.

Gov also need to make it much easier to employ youngsters. Traditionally we always had a teenager doing cover. But risk assessments, extra breaks, the Sunday limit and high pay mean we just don’t have U18’s now. A while ago we tried to get a permit from the local council to employ an U16. Friends son who was so keen. It was a nightmare. Teams of paper to prove that using a brush was safe. Ridiculous system where they never even came to see the workplace and said they weren’t allowed to use one very safe bit of machinery because it sounded a bit factory like. Drive a tractor with a PTO shaft from age 14 though - fill your boots.

I'm sorry, but if he is so clever, why did he need your help and that of the job centre? That does not suggest to me a young person who is self-sufficient and able to face life alone. That also does not sound like someone who is particularly employable, sorry to say.

I went in for a particularly competitive field. I did over 100 applications and more than 60 first and second round interviews to get my training job. Not once did my parents intervene, nor would either I or they considered it appropriate for them to intervene.

I think, with respect, the way we parent is part of the problem. Why are we still interfering in the lives of young people who are or should be in employment? It's nuts!

My 19 year old son is in this situation. He had to withdraw from university 5 months in on medical grounds. He isn’t well enough to work or study and isn’t entitled to any benefits. Fortunately we are willing and able to support him. You never know what’s around the corner.

I've already commented on both the other threads from the perspective of a parent whose teen has a number of difficulties snd has really struggled to access education despite working hard and wanting to do well.

Unfortunately the threads are just full of people who bang on about how they did paper rounds/washed pots/went down the mines from when they were aged 11 forty years ago and this generation of young people are just lazy snowflakes who can't be bothered to work.

It's all over the news about how high youth unemployment is at the moment, especially with the increase in AI and automation. Reports saying that when jobs are scarcer, young people are the ones who suffer first because employers go for those with experience.

If it's difficult for the average young person to get a job, how much harder will it be for my autistic teen who has selective mutism? Who will give a job to someone who can barely speak, especially when you look at the types of rigorous recruitment processes that seem to be used for even the most basic jobs now.

Times are tough for all young job-seekers and for the ones with any additional difficulties, the future really does look bleak.

@RavensLight couldn't agree more. This does disadvantage young people whose parents can’t support them while they work for free but it seems like many of them are being subsidised by parents anyway. I volunteered to help me get into a competitive career and my sister paved her way back to work after a long illness through volunteering

Exactly this! At the weekend I watched my sister fully sun tan lotion her 11 year old. My 8 and 7 year olds do themselves under supervision and with a little assistance if needed. Why can't the 11 year old do this simple task herself (supervised if she will be slapdash, which I don't have the impression she would be)?

We get young people in on a regular basis and generally I find that over the last ten years or so, they have an increasingly poor work ethic (with one extremely noticeable exception tbf), and are focussed on to what they are entitled, not what they need to do for themselves. This shows in their performance and their readiness for the world of work. I was far from perfect in this respect (still lacking tbh) but I had no misconception that anybody would "give" me anything. I had to pull up a former trainee recently who told a senior that he would be unable to do something because he had plans. If he had not rescinded this statement pretty sharpish, he would not have got the work (my profession is "eat what you kill", not salaried) and this very influential senior would never have worked with him again. Tbf to the former trainee he cracked on - but just the idea that you could turn something like that down and not realise that there would be long-term consequences is crazy.

Mumsnet uses markdown so if you use a numbered list without line spaces between the numbered items it will come out as a numbered list with line spaces, but (ironically) if you put a line spaces between the items of your numbered list, it will assume you were starting 3 separate lists and start each with 1.

1. A
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Please stop. If you've got nothing else constructive to say about the conversation, and are just looking for an argument, it might be a good idea .

Since you like acronyms so much ODFOD.

Why not just google it?

In my honest opinion it’s because society/education tells kids to aim for the stars. How you need a career. That working minimum wage is failing in life.

There’s loads of unskilled jobs out there that people who literally cannot speak English can do. But, would you want your only child to repot 900 plants a day, or clean hospital floors, or box up frozen desserts as their ‘profession’?

I used to work at a college with a 94% pass rate for Btecs. Failing a student wasn’t an option. It was meant to give every young person opportunity but it was just giving them and their parents false hope. At what point to parents face reality and young people accept the cards they’ve been dealt? Well, usually they don’t, and no wonder they end up with crippling anxiety/depression.

We need to install pride back into our young people. That there’s nothing wrong with an honest days work.

My son isn’t remotely socially anxious. He’s also intelligent, socially adept, and keen to work. He’s only just got a job after a year post-university looking for something.

For him I think there is an issue that he thinks he should be doing a fairly high level job in e.g. the City or at least quite well paid. He’s never done weekend or holiday work. This is largely I think because his father has always funded him way too generously in my view but he wouldn’t listen to me about it. His father also ended up extremely successful (so there’s a level of expectation) but worked incredibly hard. I’ve tried to get my son to do some casual work but he just ignored me. But when he went for interviews you could tell the interviewer was basically testing out what he’d been doing for the past year and whether he had the motivation to work hard.

I think it is incredibly hard for those seeking work at entry level. There are so many people competing for the same jobs and AI has cut out many of these jobs. But there’s also a sense of entitlement for some people where they won’t try and get service level jobs first (including my son) that would help them move onto the career ladder further down the line.

I told him to do courses or learn a skill that might be useful for interviews or in future jobs but he thought I didn’t know what I was talking about 😱.

He’s finally got a job after a year so phew but it’s been a tough old journey. It’s really unhealthy for them to be out of work for so long and if he didn’t have a very good social network and excellent mental health I think he’d have found it really hard.

His friendship group have tended to get professional type training roles in accounting, engineering or law or got jobs through contacts.

I think several things are needed.There was an employer on Jeremy Vine who had a fantastic idea. He is very much in favour of the minimum wage however all the add ons ( pension contributions etc)means he has to stump up £26k which he can’t afford as doesn’t get it back. Employing young inexperienced people is for the future. He felt the gov should pick up the adds ons for young people in first positions for a period of time from the money they’d save from benefits. Thus more would employ them and more would get a foot in the door.

I think the second thing is MH services are broken and in dire need of better funding and restructuring. 14 years of Tory austerity and Covid has lead to a bottle neck with young people let down by CAMHs flooding adult services. Both CAMHs and adult services leave treatable conditions to get untreatable.

The third is the dire education system since Gove reforms which alienates so many and prepares many for very little. SEND needs restructuring too which is beginning.

Fourth is the need for more apprenticeships. They’re harder to get on than getting into Oxbridge.

Fifth is the acceptance that pushing the retirement age back is going to keep older generations in jobs and push younger generations out. It must surely all filter down.

Exactly. There isn't the pool of teen jobs there used to be.
My DS19 fits several categories. He's very bright, ADHD, loves being online, had to leave 6th form because of crippling anxiety, largely nocturnal, socially isolated
However, he has ambition, wants to 'make the world a better place' and is starting an Access course in September.
Fingers crossed.

I agree not all NEETS have these conditions, in fact many don’t.
But I think research is needed into why we have so many more young people disabled by ASD, ADHD,PTSD etc than previous generations.

It’s always been around but maybe families and communities supported people better in the past. What’s changed to cause young people to be so much more disabled by these? If this was properly researched help could be appropriately targeted

I'm a former employment adviser and I agree. Competition in a shrinking job market means volunteering does help.

Have a look at

https://national.thelead.uk/p/labour-youth-unemployment-alan-milbnurn-report-uk-unemployment-childcare-costs-transport

This in particular is interesting

Fifty-seven per cent of working-age people in England live in areas where it’s very hard to access a workplace within 45 minutes using public transport. Young people between 16 and 24 have the lowest car access among the population, and the cost of running one is rising weekly as geopolitical crises hit fuel costs at home. Meanwhile women and girls also reported they had not pursued some employment or training options due to safety of transport available to them. More than a third of women surveyed by the British Transport Police say they have been sexually harassed or abused on a train,