Examination of witnesses
Dr Gianfranco Addario, Graham Cowley, Barry Fletcher and Professor Lisa Russell.
Q60 The Chair: Good morning. Thank you very much for coming to our fifth evidence session of the committee looking at social mobility. We are most grateful for your time, and we have a whole lot of questions for you. I am not going to introduce committee members. You can see their names in front of you, and we have Lord Ravensdale online. We hope to stick to time and be finished by about 11 am, but let us start straightaway with my asking you a question. This is a session predominantly on NEETs. We have heard definitions of them, but it would be helpful to hear from all of the panel how you define that rather unfortunate acronym.
Dr Gianfranco Addario: The definition of NEET is one of the key aspects in research of people who are not in employment, education or training. There are multiple ways of defining it and, unfortunately, no single definition is perfect. In my research, I tend to use the definition from the Office for National Statistics, which, in essence, identifies NEETs as people who are not in employment, not enrolled in education and not waiting to start work or education.
The Chair: Can I just interrupt you to ask whether you think that that is an adequate definition? That is the one that we are familiar with, but is that sufficient?
Dr Gianfranco Addario: It is not sufficient, because it does not consider a number of aspects. First, it does not consider unpaid work, which is quite relevant, especially when we think about caring responsibilities. We know that a lot of young adults look after their siblings, their own children or older adults. It also does not consider volunteering. Volunteering work is currently considered as NEET in the official statistics, which is a significant problem, because we know that, when people try to enter the labour market, they may need to engage in some volunteering to get work experience. It also does not consider insufficient employment—for example, employment that does not get you out of poverty—or people engaging in seasonal jobs for a limited amount of time.
Graham Cowley: I have nothing to add to that answer.
Professor Lisa Russell: It is probably pertinent to say that the definition also does not distinguish between an isolation phase of being NEET and a more longitudinal understanding of being NEET. It does not distinguish between somebody who is NEET for a couple of days and somebody who is NEET for a couple of years. A more longitudinal understanding or definition of NEET might be helpful if we were able to gather sufficient data to support that.
Barry Fletcher: The current ONS definition is the one that we utilise in our work. In most ways, it is useful. We especially make the distinction that some definitions also take account of where someone is doing part-time training, whereas the government definition does not. That is helpful, because we certainly look at that earning or learning aspect. Although it would not include voluntary work, for example, it is helpful in understanding the group that you need to focus on. I completely agree with the professor that the question of length is often a really critical aspect of that, and I am sure that we will talk about that more through the discussions.
Q61 Lord Young of Cookham: I was looking at the briefing that we got, and I read that you, Mr Cowley, chaired a government-funded pilot to improve social mobility. This is a Select Committee looking specifically at social mobility. I wonder whether I could just ask what conclusions you drew from that particular project that might help inform this committee with its conclusions.
Graham Cowley: Thanks, Lord Young. It should be said, first of all, that we focused primarily on secondary school-age young people in Blackpool. That was because that was what our research identified as the main issue. At primary age, young people were doing reasonably well and, in the secondary phase, for a variety of reasons, they followed a different trend. Once they got to tertiary education—and we have an excellent college and sixth form in the town—people were then picked up, but the secondary school phase was the really key issue.
We found that literacy in particular was key to young people being able to access the whole curriculum. We launched a town-wide literacy campaign and had a way of measuring the achievement of young people, so we could see the movement across the bell curve of achievement across the town. Literacy was a really key issue in school.
Inclusion was another, where there was just a disproportionate number of young people being excluded from school. We brokered an agreement between the various trusts across the town to try to stem that, and succeeded for a time in reducing the number of exclusions by about 70%. Unfortunately, the disparate system that we have, frankly, mitigates against that kind of collaboration without a bit of funding and help.
Lord Young of Cookham: Can I press you on that? Could you just explain why the system is disparate and how it might be made slightly more structured and cohesive?
Graham Cowley: Academisation is a reality and has had some superb benefits, frankly, in terms of individual schools and the standard of education. Nevertheless, in a place, it can tend to lead to a lack of co-operation between schools, and even, potentially, to schools competing against each other for young people. There is a role for us who work over that system, and for councils, to foster collaboration, to fill the strategic space, and to show people the benefits of working together. That was definitely something that I learned.
Probably the short answer to your question, Lord Young, is that place is a really important thing in terms of social mobility. It is about an understanding of the place. It is about getting people to collaborate and work together. That was a huge lesson for me and a wonderful thing to be able to do. As I say, it needed a bit of capacity and resource. Unfortunately, we no longer have that. We tried our best to keep that going, but it has fallen away a bit, frankly.
Q62 Lord Watts: I very much agree with the literacy issue, but what did that tell you? My own view about this is that it starts in primary school. We do not concentrate enough on primary school to make sure that kids have the skills that they will need in later life. We often put resources into the secondary sector and further education, but not into primary. Do you agree with that and did you try to address that issue?
Graham Cowley: I fully agree with that. In fact, I would go even further and say that it starts in early years, even before they get to school. The term “good level of development” is now being used nationally around the levels of achievement of young people before they get into school. Another one is “school readiness”, which is more of a useful tool for teachers to understand how well really young people are prepared, even for reception years. I completely agree with that.
One really key thing that it did show us was that, with a universal offer across the town, we absolutely moved the bell curve of achievement to the right. We had real, quantifiable success, but it was very difficult to move the really stubborn, lower elements of the bell curve. For the reasons that you suggest, they were starting off from such a low position and, if we could have got to them earlier, we might have had more success.
Q63 Lord Ravensdale: Data is one of the areas that we are focusing on within this committee on social mobility, so this question is around data. I wonder whether you could tell us what the existing data tells us about those who are not in education, employment or training—for example, how many, what their characteristics are, what their geographical distribution is, and any changing trends over time.
Barry Fletcher: I have some key points. At the moment, we have just under a million young people—987,000—who are classified as NEET. That is a rise of about 300,000 over the last three years, so that is a really important point I would make to the committee. We are seeing a really significant rise from a reasonably historical low post the pandemic. We saw a historic low and have moved up to what is now an 11-year high in terms of that data. That is approximately one in eight young people, moving towards one in seven young people, of that age group, just to give you a sense of the proportion that exists.
That splits between those who are unemployed and those who are inactive. The inactive group is slightly larger than the unemployed group, and there are more men than women in the overall group. The increase that we have seen more recently has been greater in young men, so we see the number of young men increasing more quickly during that period than that of young women.
A big change that we have seen in that split, especially if we look at the previous decade, is the rise in ill health and inactivity within that, especially mental ill health. The number of young people who are in that group due to mental ill health has doubled. If you look at the most recent growth—I take the last three years as post pandemic—it has been made up mostly by mental ill health. Autism and ADHD are also major parts of that, if you look at the data on why individuals are in that situation. You ultimately see much higher rates for certain marginalised groups—for example, young people leaving care or people with a learning disability. Care leavers have rates that are around four times higher than their peers.
The overall picture is an increasing one, one where you are seeing more ill health and, ultimately, one where you are seeing individual groups and cohorts who have greater barriers grow in number.
Dr Gianfranco Addario: My research focuses primarily on quantifying risk and seeing which subgroups of the population are at greater average risk of being NEET. In my research, the main group that seems to be at greatest risk of being NEET is of people who grew up in a low-income household. The socioeconomic status in the household where a person grew up seems to be the biggest driver for an increased risk of being NEET.
We also find some differences in the data. We looked at a range of protected characteristics and found some differences also by ethnic background. For example, Asian people in general have a lower level of risk of being NEET. However, within the Asian group, there were some strong differences between people from Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds, with young adults from an Indian background having a significantly lower risk compared to those from a Pakistani or Bangladeshi background.
We also found some regional differences. For example, in the north-east and the East Midlands, we found that there is a greater accumulation of risk factors, so the average risk of being NEET tends to be slightly higher. However, at the moment, when we look at geographical differences, we are in the process of running a more detailed analysis at a local authority level to try to identify where those risk factors accumulate across England.
Professor Lisa Russell: Broadly speaking, the risk factors can be distinguished as personal, social, cultural or economic in their character and nature. It is true that it is higher in areas of deprivation, and perhaps more so in urban areas. While statistics vary and it tends to be quite complex—you might have higher rates in smaller towns and cities in the north, as well as in bigger cities such as Birmingham and Newcastle—a lot of it seems to be related to areas of social deprivation.
The important point to think about is that risk factors are just that. They are not going to predict who is going to become NEET; they are just going to give an indication, so it is important to understand that. The second point that I would like to make is that it is an accumulation and an interaction of these risk factors. The more of these risk factors a young person may exhibit, the greater their likelihood of becoming NEET, so it is not just one thing. It is much more complex than that, so it is important to think about that.
The Chair: We are looking for areas where we can make recommendations to the Government on things that they can do to improve the situation. We understand the ambiguity and complexity, and we know that we are searching for things that may not be available.
Graham Cowley: On that specific note, the current data does not lead us to solutions for some of these people. It categorises them in terms of their mental well-being, but that really is a symptom and underlying that are a series of social issues that need to be tackled.
In Blackpool at the moment, we are trying to categorise tiers 1 to 4 of the need and support levels of these young people, so that we can create a more bespoke support package for each. Tier 1, for example, would be those people who are generally work ready and whom it would be productive to connect with DWP, job offers and that sort of thing. Tier 4 would be those who are completely distant from the job market and the idea of work, frankly. They need a different stepping-stone solution to engaging them, inspiring them, giving them confidence, exposing them to the world of work, and eventually getting them up to tier 1. That is just a solution-based issue, but we are having to do that almost outside the current data system, if you follow my meaning.
Q64 Lord Ravensdale: Could I just make one related point there? That was a really interesting response. We talked about the growth to just under 1 million over recent years, and there were a number of factors talked about, such as ill health, autism, et cetera. It would be interesting to maybe expand on that. What are the drivers for the increase? What is behind some of those factors that are causing the increase?
Barry Fletcher: We have been doing quite a lot of work on this recently. We would highlight three key areas when we think about that rise, especially over the last three years. A critical one is mental ill health. We are seeing that rise be pronounced, and that is becoming almost the most common reason why young people say that they are not able to work. It is just important to highlight that. That was not the case even five years ago, but it certainly is now, so that is really important.
We are also seeing changes in the support that is given to young people. We have seen a drop in the level of support. We had programmes in the past that were generally European-funded. They came to an end and were replaced by something called UKSPF, which I am sure you will know about. That did not focus particularly on this group and, therefore, the quantum of investment and support given to NEETs has dropped markedly. Figures are very difficult to come to, but it would not be an exaggeration to say that it certainly halved around that time. That is really important to note because, irrespective of the level of challenges, a group of young people have generally always needed support to make that good transition into work.
I am sure that this may come up later, but apprenticeships are an important part of this too. We have seen a major drop in the number of young people undertaking apprenticeships, with a 40% drop in under-19s over the last decade. We are a What Works centre and focus a lot on what makes a difference. Apprenticeships are one of the most impactful ways that you can support young people into work. Basically, we have seen a massive drop in the number of young people doing those, which has coincided with a wide range of other challenges.
As Professor Russell highlighted, there are a mixture of factors that will influence someone. We can look at, for example, personal challenges around mental health combined with reducing opportunity when it comes to apprenticeships, which are often a very good pathway for young people. It is especially important because the research that Gianfranco undertook for us looked at the lack of level 2 qualifications—GCSEs—often being a really big aspect of that. If you do not get your GCSEs, your likelihood of then being NEET, especially of becoming long-term NEET, is massively increased, at triple the rate.
In the past, apprenticeships have been a pathway for those young people who maybe did not get level 2 qualifications to then be able to get on and get a good job. This is not just about getting any job, but about getting a good job. That pathway is pretty broken at the moment. If young people are struggling at school, they often find themselves NEET and find themselves staying there for the long term.
The Chair: It is depressing, but thank you very much. Because this is one big subject, in a way, quite a lot of the questions that we are planning to ask may have been covered by things that you have already said, but we want to be sure that we have caught all the things from your experience that we need.
Q65 The Bishop of Lincoln: Exactly as you say, what I was going to ask has largely been covered. I have spent most of my ministry working in the north-east, and now in the east of England, where more than a quarter of NEETs live. In terms of the drill-down stuff that you have done in Blackpool, Mr Cowley, what is going on? As you have been doing research on redefinitions around the north-east and the east of England, where the biggest proportion of NEETs are, is the sort of work that you have been doing in Blackpool going on in these regions too?
We were thinking in terms of preventive measures. You have talked about early years onwards. What would be the key interventions in addressing the risk factors? How regionally defined can those responses be?
Dr Gianfranco Addario: My research explores essential differences and the accumulation of risk factors across the different local authorities of England. Because of that, we will also be covering areas outside of Blackpool, so extending also to the north-east, for example. We will not be doing anything specific to support local authorities or inform the use of a risk index in those areas. In essence, the scope of our project is to produce evidence across England, but then to inform the use in a local setting only in Blackpool.
The Bishop of Lincoln: I was thinking about how applicable that is going to be in terms of policy. We have a new combined authority in Greater Lincolnshire. What would you be able to provide that would lead to preventive action? Presumably, the research that you do in the north-west will have application elsewhere. I am interested in what you see as being, as it were, the political levers that would make that research take effect.
Graham Cowley: I am non-political, and it is difficult to make those connections, but the operational connections are already starting to form. For example, in Blackpool, in our tiers of need, we have identified tier 3 as a real issue for us. There is very little support for those. The kinds of things that are needed include experience at a workplace for one or two hours a week to get people used to the concept of work. It just so happens, talking to colleagues in Yorkshire, that they have reached the same conclusion, and we are starting to work together. Those sorts of national and maybe regional collaborations are starting to form. It is born out of everybody. This is a national issue and everybody is wrestling with it, and so, operationally, there are fairly good networks.
The Youth Futures Foundation works across the country. For us in Blackpool, as one of six or so of these initiatives that are going on at the moment, a huge amount of learning is being shared between partners. We have been invited to London and have shared learning, so it is there. Politically, I am afraid that I cannot answer that question. I just hope that everybody will be open to wanting to work together in the future.
The Chair: Can I just pick up on that question of sharing the lessons of what is working between areas and initiatives? Is there a formal structure for doing that, or is it the fact that you know somebody here and so you talk to them? Clearly, one of the things is looking for solutions that, as you explained, may not work in different parts of the country, but sharing what has worked in areas should help others, in principle.
Graham Cowley: It is more the latter, for sure. It is more the informal, but I absolutely agree that there is value. Even though knowledge of place is fundamental, there are, undoubtedly, themes that can be shared. I know that Professor Russell is working on that.
The Chair: Presumably, trying things and projects that do not work is also important, in order to learn from them.
Graham Cowley: Yes, absolutely.
The Bishop of Lincoln: I was very interested by what you said about people who are not defined as NEET but who are involved in voluntary work. Having worked closely with people with severe and enduring mental health needs from teenage onwards, volunteering, to them, is very often the only opportunity for work and, indeed, for public engagement outside the home. With increasing numbers of young people experiencing severe and enduring mental health needs, is there research into the way that volunteering is a positive power for getting people out of the NEET situation?
Graham Cowley: In terms of our tiers of support, it is absolutely one of the stepping stones and jigsaw pieces that can lead young people into full-time work. As you said, Chair, it may be the final answer for some young people, but it is a purpose in life. It gives them self-worth. It is a vital part of the jigsaw puzzle.
The Chair: I do not want to stop people, because what you are telling us is really helpful, but we have only half an hour. I do not know whether Lord Johnson wants to narrow his question.
Q66 Lord Johnson of Marylebone: I will try to adapt it a tiny bit. The rise in NEETs seems to coincide with this very rapid decline in the number of apprenticeship starts, particularly for young people and at lower skills levels. Could you give a feel for why this decline in apprenticeship starts at that lower level of skills has happened? What initiatives could employers undertake to boost the number of starts at those skills levels? Are there any other steps that they might take in that regard?
Barry Fletcher: Fundamentally, the launch of the apprenticeship levy, which has been around for a reasonably significant time now, gave significantly more control to employers. There are many benefits to that, but it took away some of the levers that Government previously had to push apprenticeships to prioritise young people.
Previously, if you wanted to fund more apprenticeships, you were much more likely to get that funding if it focused on young people. The funding was very targeted towards young people, and there was an expectation that apprenticeships would do that. There was also, under the previous system, no allowance to have current staff undertaking apprenticeships in the same way and at higher levels, because there used to be a requirement around prior learning and you could not necessarily do the same thing again.
So there were definitely some significant changes made as part of that levy. Therefore, what we have seen is, often, very rational action by employers to say, “I want to train my current team, and sometimes my more senior team, at higher levels, and I want to invest my apprenticeship levy in that”. Unfortunately, at the same time, we have seen a reduction in the number of young people undertaking them.
It is important to add, though, that the biggest reduction in apprenticeships among young people has been among SMEs, and that is the group that previously did the most apprenticeships for young people. We have seen a big drop there. The number of apprenticeships delivered by larger employers has gone up during that time, but has not focused as much on young people.
The system is now designed such that young people are not prioritised in the way that they could and should be. If you look at international examples of the best apprenticeship systems, they tend to focus much more heavily on young people. That is not to say that retraining is not important. We have a massive retraining challenge in this country. We have a need to transition people from certain jobs into others, especially into more technology-focused roles.
But should the apprenticeship system be the tool to do that or should it be that focus that asks, “How do we take young people on a pathway into good jobs?” Certainly, our argument would be that apprenticeships should be a bigger part of that. I know that the Government are looking at that as an option and have used the term “rebalancing”. That rebalancing is really urgent to address this challenge.
The Chair: Can I just apologise for misleading the committee? This session can go on until 11.30 am, so there is not the time pressure that I said there was. Do not inhibit yourselves.
Professor Lisa Russell: The young people within our dataset have a desire to work. There is a desire to get on apprenticeships. It is highly competitive. One of the real barriers that many NEET young people face in any post-16 destination is getting GCSE maths and English. A lot of repetition in the education system occurs. If you do not reach the level requirements at GCSE, you are forced to do maths and English, and that acts as a real barrier in terms of the pathway moving forward.
We need to be thinking about an education system that helps people hop on and off it without trying to create barriers in its place. Apprenticeships are definitely one of those key stepping stones that we can invest more thought in. We also need to think about the support structures around how we get those young people into that place where they are able to apply for those apprenticeships, or the prior pathway, if that makes sense.
Graham Cowley: Just to add to that point about preparing young people for access to work, the project that we are working on at the moment with YFF in Blackpool is about connecting young people in education with the world of work, getting in early, trying to introduce the concept of work at a really early stage, and doing that on an annual basis. There is lots of research that shows that, if you can create that pathway and imbue young people with the idea of work, when the apprenticeships are on offer, they are more inclined to go and get them.
It is about the push and pull in all of this. The pull is the apprenticeships, but there has to be a push to enable and inspire young people to want to do these things. In our experience, I have to say that not everybody wants to work. Unfortunately, there has been a change in attitude—I do not know what drives it—to the concept of work. We need to get in early and redress that balance.
Q67 Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath: I am interested in what role the education system plays in those who are not in employment, education or training, how the system could be improved or changed through recommendations that we might make, and things that you have to say to focus our minds on what might work to get young people in education. You have talked a good bit about apprenticeships, which are about getting them into work, but is there more that the education system could be doing?
I would be very interested to pursue your point, Mr Cowley, on academisation. While it has had good aspects, it has also had some unintended consequences, one being precisely the lack of sense of place and joined-up working with other agencies, particularly local authorities. I would be interested in following up on that.
Professor Lisa Russell: One of the emerging findings in our MINE research is the idea that the careers information and guidance landscape is incredibly fragmented. Quite frankly, what setting you are in really influences what sort of careers guidance you get. It is not even at a local authority level. Some settings might buy in certain careers information guidance. Others take a more independent view. It is massively varied. You might go into one mainstream school that has, for example, a music teacher who has a couple of hours a week in which to try to deliver quality careers information and guidance to all their year 10s and 11s. Just down the road, you might have another school that has much more resource around that.
That is something that we need to address in the education system, particularly for NEET young people, because there are some people in our dataset who are vulnerable to becoming NEET and have been excluded from school but are interested in work. They need informed, independent advice in terms of where to go next, which is not happening in an equitable way at the moment across the country. It is not even a geographical thing whereby one local authority is doing it one way and another is doing it another. Pupil referral units, and mainstream and non-mainstream schools, are all operating differently. It very much is the case that the deal and the quality or independent advice that you may or may not get depends on where you are.
The other thing that is probably important to know is that, in our research, lots of young people have experienced broken trajectories through the education pathway, as you might expect. They are moving in and out of various provisions and, quite often, miss out on that year 10 work experience or the careers fair event. It does happen, but, if they do not attend, they miss out on that crucial element. For this particular group of young people, more could be done to ensure that they are getting fair, independent careers information, guidance and advice in terms of what the next step is, whether that is an apprenticeship or whatever it might be.
Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath: Can I just tease that out a bit further? What would you do, if you are saying that this is an important recommendation that we could make, around those young people who are repeatedly trying and failing maths and GCSE post 16, not having secured the level 2 necessary qualifications? There is a lot of talk about what we should do about that. From your point of view, what should we do?
Professor Lisa Russell: It should not hold as much significance as it does moving forward through the education pathway. Just because you are not good at maths and English—I got a C at GCSE maths and English—it does not mean that you cannot contribute to society in a fruitful way. Lots of what I hear from young people who have been excluded from school is that they feel undervalued and unheard. There is a huge amount of stress around GCSE. They are very aware of the economic currency that a GCSE carries, especially around maths and English.
When you think about that in the context of a mental health crisis and why young people are perhaps disengaging from education systems and employment spheres, you need to think about all these things together. Why are we putting so much pressure on our young people to try to get that maths and English? It really is a gateway in or a gateway out, and that is not helpful, in my opinion.
Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath: To press this point, would you say that there should be less importance on it at school between years 10 and 11, or do you do something different with those who have not achieved their GCSE in English and maths?
Professor Lisa Russell: It is just about having a variety of subject choices rather than it being so prescribed in terms of maths and English. Of course maths and English are important, and I do not want to downplay that, but there are other subjects. It is perhaps about the level of GCSEs rather than just focusing so adherently on maths and English.
Baroness Blower: Following up on what Baroness Ramsey said there, there was previously a committee, chaired exceedingly ably by Lord Johnson, looking at the curriculum that young people experience from 11 to 16. There was an absolute meeting of minds that there is a need to have something in addition to GCSE English and maths, which looks much more at functional skills and the kinds of skills that people need to develop. This is not something that is easier and that you offer to some group of people. It is about making things more appropriate. It would be interesting to hear if you happen to concur with that position, which is one that has been offered to us in the Lords previously.
Professor Lisa Russell: I would absolutely agree with that. The difficulty is that you need something that has currency on the post-16 market and that employers understand. Another difficulty if we have bite-sized qualifications is what currency that gives that individual moving forward. I have literally sat with young people who have a portfolio this thick of certificates, but they mean nothing when it comes to post-16 destinations and trying to get volunteer work or any kind of paid work. Yes, absolutely, but we need to think about that with caution.
Q68 Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath: Mr Cowley, would you go on to the academisation and the role of education at that level?
Graham Cowley: Chair, if I may just add to the points made, this does not have to be an either/or. This is about a journey into work and beyond. Perhaps the solution is to offer a variety of choice at school age and to get young people into entry level-type work, and then for the system to allow them to come back into education and do the necessary qualifications that will help them thrive in the workplace.
I will give you an anecdote. I went into our college. There was an IT course, with two female lecturers and all male students. I asked, “Why is that?” Their answer was, “Girls tend to come to us when they’re in their mid-20s and they’ve got various things out of the way in their lives. They come back and they’re the stars at 24”.
For me, this represents the journey that different people have in life and the need to have a flexible system that offers people choice so that they can thrive in school in the way that they need to, and then get into work and thrive in the workplace. I do not know the answer, but that is the concept, and it reflects the reality of people’s lives and their ability to deliver potential.
If I can move on to academisation, the downside of academisation has been the fact that trusts have taken schools in different places and, therefore, the ability for schools to work together operationally and to share resource is really quite difficult. Where you have a trust that controls schools in a place, it is much easier and works really well.
It is the place issue that again gets in the way of some of this, and then introduces this concept of one trust fighting with another for young people. Frankly, they are consumed by day-to-day demands and lack of resource. Therefore, they just do not have the time or ability to think about working together. That is where the system needs something to fill that strategic gap. Local authorities are also bereft, frankly, of capacity. On the voluntary and charity side, we try to fill that gap in some ways, but a more structured approach to that would really help.
Barry Fletcher: I can add a couple of points. The education system is very much designed around the next educational stage. When you look at primary into secondary into higher education, our education system is focused on how we get people from one education stage into the next, so from GCSEs into A-levels or from A-levels into university. What that sometimes misses is that only 40% of young people go to university at the age of 18, so 60% do not. Our system is very well designed for the 40%, but quite poorly designed when we look at the 60%.
On this point around GCSEs, but also around vocational education more broadly, the evidence is really clear that some earlier vocational options really work for groups of young people who may be more disengaged from mainstream education. That is not to say that English and maths are not exceptionally important. One of the challenges that we now have is that the number of lower-skill roles is reducing and, therefore, we are going to need more rather than fewer people with a higher educational level for the jobs of the future. Therefore, we have to be really careful that this is not about saying that we want less, or less ambitious, education for individuals, but about understanding that not everyone is just going to go through those stages in a linear way.
My point was just thinking about that challenge and about how schools think about that. Some schools do that brilliantly. They connect really well with the world of work. They connect really well with alternative options that are not university, especially apprenticeships. There are, unfortunately, too many that do not, which means that there are a subset of young people who get disengaged. We are seeing that disengagement in attendance and in other aspects, and that is really important.
Dr Gianfranco Addario: My point at the moment is that we focus quite a lot on how important GCSEs are for post-16 pathways. The evidence that we are collecting at the moment, mostly in Blackpool through focus groups with caseworkers and front-line staff, talks mostly about what happens in primary education, and specifically reading abilities. If a kid in primary education does not get sufficient reading skills, their education pathways tend to be disrupted, because they are unable to catch up with the consequent education. This is what we are finding quite strongly at the moment in our main project. We do not yet have the statistical evidence, but this seems to be quite important in determining the risk of being NEET.
Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath: Mr Cowley, I am interested in your experience of the opportunity area that you were leading for Blackpool. We are going to have Justine Greening, who set them up as Secretary of State, in a subsequent session. In a prior session, we asked questions about initiatives such as levelling up and opportunity areas. We were told that the problem with evaluating these schemes or initiatives is that they do not get reviewed from the beginning, and there is no evaluation written in, so it is very hard to then do it retrospectively.
Those were some of the responses that we have had. Because I am going to be asking Ms Greening about opportunity areas, I wondered what your qualitative—or quantitative if you have anything—thoughts were on your opportunity area. How did it go? Did it work? Did it help these young people?
Graham Cowley: It is a mixed picture, I am afraid. What did work was the ability to broker collaboration, to bring people to the table with a relatively small amount of government funding, and to attract people to come and work together to set out a strategic approach for tackling these issues in a place. That had not been done before and worked very well. We were able to identify our priorities. I covered two of them earlier, but the third one was careers. It was about trying to give young people links into working and to imbue them with this idea of work and confidence that they could be what they wanted to be.
We evaluated—and there is documented evaluation of the areas that we worked on—some compelling evidence, particularly on the literacy side and exclusions, but we are, frankly, never good enough at evaluation or sharing best practice. The thing that pains me most is that, at the end of the day, there was some legacy of continuing collaboration, and we continue to work on that, but the lack of resource, the lack of time that people have to come to the table, and the lack of things that we can offer to help them do what they want to do have meant that a lot of it has frittered away.
Q69 Baroness Garden of Frognal: Following on from this, I worked for City & Guilds for 20 years. We had very basic vocational qualifications—the NVQ level 1, for instance—but I worked on a schools programme called certificate of pre-vocational education, which most people have entirely forgotten about. Kids could get qualifications for mending motor cars, cooking or looking after little furry animals.
It was quite interesting because that gave them the confidence about learning. Nobody had ever given them a certificate before, and suddenly they were getting a national certificate for something. The teachers all reported that, when they went back into mainstream school, they had much more confidence about learning other subjects. It was laughed out of court. The academics all said that it was not stringent enough, but the difference that it made to little people and, actually, adults who had never been given a qualification, to be told, “You’ve got this national qualification”, was fantastic.
I just wonder whether there are any other initiatives like that to say, particularly to the ones who are likely to be NEET and who are never going to be university stars, “You are brilliant at motor cars” or something like that, and give them that confidence about learning that would then translate into greater confidence about learning. I do not know if you have any views on that.
Graham Cowley: Two things are relevant to this. First of all, I completely agree. Our panel has agreed that this other option of more vocational-based education is a really important thing, and it would be a fantastic thing for the committee to get its shoulder behind, frankly. For us, it would be great.
There are two examples that I can give you of that in Blackpool. One is the YFF project that is going on at the moment. We are developing something called the connected curriculum, which allows young people in year 10 in one of our schools to have a whole day out in college, studying for a vocational qualification, and they will get their certificate. This is a trial, and it will be evaluated, but already, informally, attendance at school for that cohort of young people has gone up for the very reasons that have been suggested.
Another is that the council runs what is called a chefs’ academy for young people who are having some problems in school. They are able to come out into a fully kitted-out kitchen and start to train around being a chef. That has had some really great impact. However, only yesterday, I found out that the demand from schools for places was almost zero now. We believe that the problem is that it costs the school money to get the kids out of school and into this other vocational work, and they do not have the money to do it. That is anecdotal and I heard it just yesterday, so I would hope, Chair, that that could be explored by your committee.
Having spoken to many head teachers, in both Blackpool and Liverpool, I know that they really want to have the capacity in the system to give young people a vocational alternative, but it does seem that there are issues that are stopping them from doing it, and probably they are financial.
Barry Fletcher: There was a scheme called Young Apprenticeships, which was run back in 2010 or slightly before. It was evaluated and showed some impact. It was focused on the 14 to 16-year-old group, and was about giving a vocational option. There are quite a lot of international examples of the same. The systems in Germany and Austria, et cetera, tend to look at having some of those options from the age of 14.
My point on this would be that it is not about making that distinction and saying, “That person is taking that academic route, and that person is taking a different route”. It is about saying that there are some options, and we know that some of those options work. We also know that this is not a question of someone going forward and then getting really good GCSE results by going down one path. It is probably a question, unfortunately, of them not doing that and ending up in the NEET group, because we see that consistently, and their likelihood of doing that becomes extremely high.
It is about how you offer some of those better options. The trial that we are undertaking with Blackpool on the connected curriculum is about trying to think about a different way of doing that, which is not so binary between completely different pathways, but maybe combines both.
I had the pleasure of meeting with some of the young people undertaking that programme, and you could just see a different view about them understanding what they might do next. They had the experience of going to college at a slightly younger age, so the experience of making that transition was easier, because they had been and had experienced it. It was exposing them to different options, and they could see the link between some of their academic subjects and what they needed to do in those vocational opportunities.
That link is often an issue. If you look at all the surveys on young people, especially those who are struggling at school, they struggle to see a link between what they are learning now and the job that they might be able to get in the future. That link is so important in order to get people motivated and focused.
Baroness Garden of Frognal: Of course, time was that schools used to have metalwork, woodwork and cookery all on offer. So many schools have done away with them and do not have those facilities any more.
Lord Evans of Rainow: Home economics.
Baroness Garden of Frognal: Is that what it was called?
Lord Evans of Rainow: It was called home economics.
Baroness Garden of Frognal: It was called cookery when I did it.
Lord Evans of Rainow: Well, it was in the 1970s.
Baroness Blower: It was called domestic science before it was called that.
Baroness Garden of Frognal: Yes, it was.
The Chair: Could we not have an argument about this?
Baroness Garden of Frognal: The point is that there were youngsters who really shone in those areas and who were going to fail totally when faced with GCSE English and maths. Giving people confidence about learning is hugely important.
Q70 Lord Evans of Rainow: My question is specifically to Professor Russell in the first instance, but I would then just like to expand to the Blackpool evidence that you have kindly provided. Can I just declare that I left school without maths and English? I did something called a certificate of secondary education, which ruined you for life, because everybody wanted O-levels. I clearly was not up to O-levels, so I could not do apprenticeships, and I was NEET for a bit, but I did spend six years getting a degree at night school at the Manchester Metropolitan University’s new business school in its first year, in the 1990s. It is good to meet you. Thank you for coming.
Could you describe to us what your research has found out about the experiences of those who are currently NEET and the professionals working with them? Does your research suggest that different interventions are needed for different people?
The Chair: Can I just add to that, Professor Russell? One of the things that the committee would like to do is talk to people who are NEET. That is, so far, proving a bit of a challenge, and so, if you can speak on their behalf to us at this stage, we may yet succeed in doing so. Lord Young, by the way, has a Parliamentary Question. He is not bored of hearing you; he has to go to the Chamber.
Professor Lisa Russell: The NEET category, as we have heard, is quite heterogeneous. It covers a range of young people. The short answer is yes. We should have different, more bespoke forms of intervention. Much of our research was trying to map what intervention looked like nationally across the country. During our first phase of the MINE research, we asked local authorities what intervention they had in place. As we moved into phase 2 of the research, we then looked across six case studies, five of which were geographically bound and one an elective home-educated floating geographical site.
It is clear that what is understood as “intervention” varies completely massively. It is important to note, as we think about quality intervention, that much of the system is a data-driven box-ticking exercise. If a young person moves from one place to the next, that is seen as a positive thing. Much of our data would critique that and say that just moving a young person from one place to the next can have detrimental rather than positive consequences, so we really need to think carefully about what we mean by the term “intervention” and how that transcends at the grass-roots level through local authorities and then the education settings themselves.
Some vary according to age. Lord Watts was talking about pre-14 intervention. What came back in that dataset was that there was very little intervention pre 14. Much of it was concentrated at 14 to 16. It is very much funding-driven, so it was the ESF, now replaced by the shared prosperity fund. Different local authorities are using different forms of funding in different ways. The funding really drives what intervention is happening where, and how that is evaluated and measured.
There is probably an argument that says that some of it is quite short- term. We know that transition points in education are vulnerable points for young people dropping out of the system. Pre and post 16 would be one of those vulnerable points. Arguably, it would be interesting to think about provision that covers those transition points, because we know that they are a weak point.
The whole system, even in terms of local authorities and how they are organised and resourced, is very much segmented between pre and post 16, but we know that those transition points are vulnerable points. It might be worth thinking about provisions that try to bridge that gap. That is really important, but it is not really happening because of the structure of the education system, the organisations and the funding systems that drive what is happening.
Lord Evans of Rainow: Thank you for that. That moves nicely on to Mr Cowley and Dr Addario. Blackpool is highly relevant, because you mentioned place, and place is very important to this investigation. Blackpool is, loosely speaking, a seaside resort. Other seaside resorts around the country, so Newquay, Skegness and the like, are very similar.
Your experience could be used as best practice, or you could certainly share that. If that bell curve moved, as you described, that is relevant to Skegness, Newquay and the rest, so that can be used. Also, your example is more of a rural area, but it is still relevant, so the committee can learn from that. Could you follow up with some evidence on how you shifted that bell curve, so that we could learn from that for elsewhere in the country? You do not need to answer that now.
In your evidence, Dr Addario, you talked about data. Professor Russell, you also referred to data. The state has data from the day you were born to the day you die, and everything in between. When you go to school, you go through key stages 1 and 2. In your report, it says that too much of the data is at 16 and by then it is too late, in essence. Lord Watts rightly talked about key stage 3, which, in old money, is when you take your options. Young people in old-money year 3 had to make a decision. I remember having to make those decisions about which subject you do or do not take, so that is another key stage.
I would suggest that, when you leave primary school for high school, from a state point of view, you have invested five years of primary education, and you are about to invest another 10 years of state education. That costs money. At the end of it, these people become NEET. What a waste of time and money.
Could we use data, as you said in your submission here? Government departments, usually education and DWP, as you say, provide information that helps with educational pathways, but, in your evidence, you say that we need information from elsewhere, such as the department for housing, for example, or the Office for National Statistics.
If you can bring all of that together, using—I am going to say this again, I am afraid—artificial intelligence. You can very quickly identify these people the moment that they are in the education system, so that they can be targeted all the way through. When they go on from primary school and they cannot read, you can put the limited resources where it matters and, to your bell curve, get right to the hard-to-reach people. Then the state can focus its limited time and resources on those who really could be helped. How can the state better use data to enable you all to do your jobs better?
The Chair: If you do not agree with Lord Evans’s analysis, you are also welcome to comment on that.
Dr Gianfranco Addario: First of all, before I start, I just want to say something that Graham would probably agree with, and that Professor Russell mentioned as well. Data is one of the components. There are also other qualitative considerations that people need to make to decide how to consider risk in pupils.
The main thing that we are trying to develop through our project is an index to measure the level of risk across students in schools after primary education. We are looking from age 10 up to age 16. Our main aim is to look at the level of risk annually, how the risk accrues year on year, how the risk evolves, and what the different trajectories are, so that local authorities can intervene in problematic schools and problematic areas, or identify students who are on a trajectory of becoming NEET.
In this research project, we are primarily using data from local councils. We are not going to take the data centrally, but we are using data that local councils and authorities already have. The main reason why we want to do this is that it will make monitoring easier. They have the data there. It is readily available. They can immediately look at and understand the level of risk in all the students they have in their schools. This is the main objective that we are trying to implement with our project.
There are limitations in the data. Most of the datasets, such as the one that we are using at the moment, are based on data from the Department for Education, linked with data from HMRC and DWP about employment and benefits applications. We have data from HESA, the Higher Education Statistics Agency. We have data from NCCIS, the national client caseload information system, which holds data from students between age 16 and 18.
We do not know anything outside of education. We do not know anything about people who are not in public schools. If someone is home-educated, which we know is a big problem, or is educated in a private setting, we are unable to identify what is happening with them, because we look mostly at data from the DfE. This is one of the issues, and crossing-checking data across different government departments will help us build a better picture.
Another issue is that the data we are using is for England. We do not have the same type of data for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. The fact that the education systems in those countries are devolved also creates problems, because we risk creating an evidence base that works for England but may not apply in the same way in the devolved nations. Also, if someone were to build a research project to look across the four countries, there would, in effect, be four different applications and four different submissions, thereby creating quite a heavy research project.
Professor Lisa Russell: Just to re-emphasise the point, a huge amount of resource is used to collect this data, with the intent to try to target resources, but it is important to note that this is implemented very differently across the country.
There is the RONI—risk of NEET indicator—tool. Guidance from the DfE came out most recently in January 2025. It is like a calculator. It has a list of a load of indicators. Different local authorities, and different settings within them, implement or do not implement that calculator in different ways. You are never comparing apples with apples. Given the dataset that we have, it is very difficult to conclude with those causal links, because people are using that RONI tool in very different ways.
When we ask local authority representatives how it is used, we have two opposite ends of the spectrum. You will get some people who say, “We don’t use it at all. We don’t need to collect this data, because our people on the ground know who these people are, and they would rather invest the time in supporting a young person, rather than filling out a load of paperwork”. The other extreme is where other local authorities and settings are using it as it is laid out in the DfE. Then a whole range of other stuff is going on in between.
We have to ask what data we are collecting, why we are collecting it, and to what end. There is an argument to say that some of that resource, money and time might be better spent trusting professionals in the field to know their job and who these young people are, and helping them support those young people, rather than have them filling out paperwork.
Lord Evans of Rainow: We have the same in the health service in terms of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, so it is an issue. How can we learn from those professionals who know who they are, if they do not put the data into the system? I appreciate that you have some homework to do in terms of that, but how can we help the whole nation if we do not get that data inputted where it matters? Is it a case of having an industry standard? I come from a business background, where you have an industry standard and best practice, so you can say to any organisation going into your sector, “This is the industry standard; this is best practice”. It sounds to me like, with what you have here, there is not such a thing.
Professor Lisa Russell: The RONI tool is guidance. It is being implemented very differently across the country, so there is a big question: “Of what use is that data?”
Lord Evans of Rainow: There is no best practice and no industry standard.
Graham Cowley: I completely agree. We need a system-based solution for the application of data. It is about making schools accountable for the way that this is done, whether that be through an Ofsted kind of approach or whatever.
If I could just explain, for young people in year 6 going from primary school into year 7, this is another area where the disparate nature of the trust landscape makes itself apparent. There is a rich amount of intelligence held within the teacher base around individual pupils at year 6, but, if they are in separate trusts, that is not always passed through to year 7 in a systematic way. It could be systemised. The next three years are then bereft of systemised support for those young people until they hit the options year, and then things start to kick in. That is a huge gap in the system that really ought to be relatively easily fixed.
It was remarkable to me to see that a secondary school head teacher did not speak to and had never met the head teacher of a primary school that was a key feeder school. I was amazed. You cannot rely on individuals, and it needs to be systemised.
Q71 Baroness Blower: You have, broadly speaking, answered this, Professor Addario. The first element of this question was to outline the aims of your project. Clearly, the aim of your project is to identify risk factors and see what can be done about them. The second part of it, which you have touched on, is how it could be used by local councils to improve the opportunities and outcomes of those at risk of being NEET.
I would just say to you that anyone who has been a teacher, as I have for over 30 years, and is looking at the risk factors listed in your evidence would absolutely know those things from their professional practice. I am entirely sympathetic to what Professor Russell has said, which is that there are certainly schools that are very concerned about this but do not want to use the RONI index and the paperwork, because they focus on trying to work on these aspects in the first place.
Could you come to something that might be a recommendation for us about the helpful nexus between having more information about these risk factors—which, as we all agree, are not predictions, but risk factors—and having the kinds of data that we are also concerned about? We have only the resource that we have. Schools do not have enough money to do the things that they have to do when they are in the classroom in front of children, so we need to be quite careful about how much data we are asking for and, if we have it, then asking people to do something about it, as opposed to what we rightly expect of professionals, which is to have regard to all these things and to take action in the face of them.
Dr Gianfranco Addario: Yes, absolutely. When we went to Blackpool, we learned about the data journey that was going on around RONI. We realised that schools were asked to report data on students multiple times—for the school census, for RONI—so they were filling out a lot of paperwork multiple times, and this data was going in different directions.
In our research project, we made a priority of not collecting new data and of reducing the amount of data that people were reporting. We did this by using data that the local council is already collecting as part of its statutory duties. It has to collect the school census and pass this information over to the DfE. We are using the school census, so it is not new data. It is not something that needs to be compiled ad hoc for this.
This is the difference with RONI, which requires the head teacher or pastoral teams in schools to go in and complete a document for each student. In this case, we are looking at data that is already there, already collected and already processed. The reason why we are moving in this direction is that, for us, in Blackpool it was very clear that there is a lack of resources. Again, it was quite important to reduce and optimise the resources that the local council and the schools had.
Moving to the usage of the index, you mentioned that teachers will already know that those risk factors are risk factors. The point is that we do not see the usage of this index being limited to teachers. For example, it can be used by local councils to understand the levels of risk between schools, the distribution in the local area, and how the risk is changing year on year.
Q72 Lord Hampton: We have heard all these problems about identifying data, how it is fragmented, and the interpretations of it in different ways. In my last committee, which was on preterm birth, there was a real problem that, while local areas were doing brilliant stuff, it was just not getting shared. Is there a frictionless way that you can get all this data in a central place where everybody can use it, and in a form that takes out the fragmentation and the different interpretations?
Barry Fletcher: There are already systems that could be expanded and used better. NCCIS, which was mentioned, is a system that is used for 16 to 17 year-olds. Local authorities fill in that data, which goes into the DfE centrally. At the moment, that focuses only on 16 to 17 year-olds.
The new youth guarantee that is being launched is for 18 to 21 year-olds, but we have no way of looking at the data for those individuals to find out whether young people are getting that guarantee. There is no accountability mechanism between central and local government as to whether that is happening in areas. A potential recommendation would be around extending that out to 21. It used to be up to 20. That would not be particularly costly. The system already exists. It would then give us granularity of information about those young people.
I agree that, when it is in school, it is less of a risk, because you have teachers who know and understand those pupils, and we have lots of data. When we really lose that data is post 16, when they often fall out of that system, and many of those young people, to be really clear, have not claimed benefits, so they do not then go into the Jobcentre Plus system. More than half of the NEET group are not on benefits.
If we want to do something about this, and address it and become better, we need to understand who those individuals are and be able to target the right interventions and support towards them. There is something really interesting there around using the systems that already exist, and maybe extending the collection that we could do.
Professor Lisa Russell: There is an issue around data sharing. If we were all collecting the same data and there was ease of access around that, that certainly would help some of these NEET young people. Some of the young people who are vulnerable to becoming NEET are moving in and out of various settings, and that information and data quite often get lost along the way, but it is for those particular individuals that that data is most pertinent.
There absolutely is a place for collecting data, but we need to think really carefully about what data we are asking people to collect and why. Everybody needs to be using it in the same way, and everybody needs access to it, if it is going to have any use, basically. Otherwise, it becomes quite redundant and a paper exercise.
Q73 Lord Watts: I am not sure how much benefit comes from keeping on evaluating things. There is a danger that you can overdo that. As I said earlier, we need to concentrate on primary years. I do not accept that kids do not need the basics in maths and English, or technology, by the way. If we can concentrate on those three things and make sure that kids have the basics when they leave primary school, it would go a long way to resolving the problem that we are talking about today.
What might the Government do to stop kids getting into this situation again in the future, or to help kids who are in this situation get back into mainstream? Do you have two ideas that could address that?
The Chair: If you have three, we do not object to that. We need all the ideas that we can get.
Barry Fletcher: I have a long list, but I could do a couple, as I am conscious of time. The first is a really good idea that one of the Lords came up with around an apprenticeship guarantee. At the moment, if you want to go to university, the Government agree that they will fund that through the loan system, and you will be able to get a place at university if you meet the criteria. That does not exist in the apprenticeship system. Ensuring that every young person, if they want to do an apprenticeship and are able to do so, has that opportunity would be a really positive step forward. It does exist in many countries, where they have that dual system of those being able to go towards university and those going to apprenticeships.
We are seeing a really significant rise in NEET rates and, unfortunately, are likely to see further rises. We do quite a lot of work looking at this, and our modelling would certainly suggest that that is likely to rise further than it is today. Therefore, this is probably the time for some type of wage subsidy scheme. There have been previous examples. We have evaluated some of that, and they do make a difference.
They are quite expensive, but a wage subsidy scheme targeted especially towards those who are longer-term NEET or do not have level 2 qualifications, which are the two really critical aspects that I would highlight, would be beneficial. It has been shown, through the future jobs fund, Kickstart, et cetera, that there is strong interest and take-up from employers when you offer those sorts of schemes. The time is right for something like that to exist.
Graham Cowley: I would just offer learnings from the way that the health service is going at the moment in terms of prevention. There is a realisation that we cannot continue to cope with this tide of need that we are getting in. My ask is reflected from the cost, time and difficulty of turning around lives post 18 when people are NEET. I am from business and I think there really is a business case to shift the dial more into the prevention end of this. You generally have a captive audience in schools. You can get to these kids; you can get to their families. You can change their lives more easily that way. My ask would be for a system-wide shift to rebalance the treating of symptom with the treating of cause. That would be great.
Professor Lisa Russell: Qualifications matter, but the reality is that some of these young people are not in a place where they are able to sit down, study and learn. There is a question around perhaps increasing welfare provision in schools. You could put a welfare officer in every setting. When we think about mental health issues, SEND, particularly undiagnosed SEND—this is a huge cohort in our dataset as well—and issues around bullying, there is a huge case to think about the welfare of these young people. We should have a caring education system. Lots of our young people do not feel cared for by our current education system.
I am an international research consultant at Indie Education, which has masses of alternative education provision across Australia. It has the equivalent of 1.5 welfare officers in every setting that it operates in. When I was at school, there was a school nurse and that kind of thing. All those things have disappeared. The reality is that schools are now front-line services and are dealing with a huge number of issues, which are directing teachers’ attention away. We have an issue around teacher retention. Being a teacher is also quite stressful. These people want to help these young people, but feel like they cannot.
There is a huge gap there around welfare provision. You have the captive audience and, if resources were tapped in there to help the root causes of whatever is going on, including the cost of living crisis, which we have not even touched upon, and everything else, that might go a long way to get young people ready to then get their qualifications. The problem is that lots of these NEET young people are not in that place where they are able to sit down and do that exam or whatever in the first place. It is about that preventive work earlier on.
The other thing that I would just like to mention, which we have not touched upon, is the rise in the elective home-educated population. It is increasing in size, and it is also very much changing in nature. It is our responsibility to think about the link between that EHE rise and what that might mean for potential NEET status, because we do not know that data just yet. Again, it is a crisis that is happening right now.
There is a difference in the EHE cohort. Elective home education works very well for some individuals and families where it has been an active choice, but there are many families within our research where elective home education has not been a choice. They have felt coerced or pushed into that journey, because the mainstream school has not worked, for a variety of reasons.
At the moment, there is no independent, universal guidance for young people or families about what it means to embark upon a home education journey. Families are being thrown into that situation—at crisis point, may I say—without any understanding about what they are doing. You have young people sat at home in their bedrooms, who are not being elective home-educated, and yet, under our systems, are recorded as being EHE, so are being masked and hidden under figures that are not represented in the NEET figure.
This is an area that we really need to think about, especially in the aftermath of Covid, where, basically, lots of young people and families have spent time at home. I have spoken to families at home who are struggling to get their young son or daughter out of their bedroom and into any kind of setting at all. Those people really need support and help.
The Chair: That last bit in particular is extremely helpful, because we have not covered that, and it is in your evidence. Thank you very much.
Dr Gianfranco Addario: My recommendations are substantially aligned to those expressed by Graham and Professor Russell. A key action would be to tackle the root cause of the NEET problem. For that reason, for example, we are looking at risks emerging after age 10, so after year 6 in school.
The Chair: Is there anything that we have not asked you or that you would have liked to have said to us? There are a couple of things that I would just add. Professor Russell, you made some references to international comparisons in Australia. If any of you had the time, could you do us a short note on those international comparisons, where there are things that we could learn from them, as well as on things that we have not covered? Our inquiry is going on until the late autumn, so please feel free to come back to us with further information. I hesitate to put more work on you, because you have given us so much of your time already. In the final couple of minutes, is there anything that you would particularly like us to be sure that we have covered that we have not in this evidence session?
Barry Fletcher: We would be happy to provide some information on international comparisons. We have some work on that already, so we are happy to share that, if that would be useful.
The final point that I would end with is that, while we have talked about a lot of the challenges today, there is also a huge opportunity here. When we talk about international comparisons, the Netherlands has the lowest NEET rate in the OECD, at just over 3% of young people, compared to 13% in the UK. We did some work that suggested that, if we were to be able to reach the rate that the Netherlands has, it would mean that 500,000 more young people would be in education or employment, which would add about £69 billion to the economy. Of course, this is a challenge and, in many ways, a problem that we need to think about, but there is a huge opportunity, if we can address it and be ambitious about it.
The key here is being ambitious for all young people, because, at the moment, I would say that our system is not always ambitious for the young people who end up in this situation. Of course, we should continue to set our goals on having as many young people as possible get the highest possible education and outcomes that they can, but we should also try to ensure that everyone gets at least a good job, and setting an ambition to be as good in the OECD would be one that we should be ambitious for.
The Chair: That is very compelling data to end with about the Netherlands and us.
Q74 Lord Evans of Rainow: Mr Cowley, you mentioned a cohort of hard-to-reach NEETs in the bell curve, who do not look at work as being a route for social mobility.
Graham Cowley: This is born out of talking to colleagues in the third sector who are working on the front line and trying to engage with these young people, as we speak, in Claremont ward in Blackpool, one of the most deprived in the UK. Two days ago, I asked my colleague what his general theme was that was coming out of engaging with these young people.
I should say the college is hugely supportive. It is doing outreach English and maths in the community centre there. It is going out with third-sector colleagues, knocking on doors and trying to encourage these young people to come into college. We have had some success, with a few getting into college, even that distant from the workplace.
His response to me was, “These kids are on the internet 24 hours a day and don’t want to work for anything less than 40 grand”. I had the reaction some of you are having. He said, “You may laugh, but that is the reality”. There is something about what is going on in the minds of young people. Again, if we can get to them earlier and imbue them with a sense of, “You need to put a shift in to get what you want in life”, there is a real value in doing that.
Lord Watts: My experience of young people is that they are not stupid. If they are in a group that think that their options are very narrow, that they are going to earn very low incomes, and that there is no future for them, that is probably one of the groups that says that they are not interested in working. The exaggeration would be the 30 grand or the 40 grand. If you do not have the skill set, going back to what we were saying before about the basics, your aspirations are lower and lower, and it is then more comfortable to stay in the house than it is to try to find your way through life. Would you agree with that?
Professor Lisa Russell: Our data would strongly agree with that. We need to be really careful about putting negative perceptions across of young people. There are a minority of young people who do not want to work, but, within our dataset, most of the young people we speak to just want to get good GCSE results, get a job, be able to go on holiday once a year, and have a family and a comfortable life. That is what the vast majority of our young people tell us.
We also have evidence within our dataset of the 81 young people we have spoken with who have started their own businesses, created their own social media platforms and that kind of thing, and are actively engaging in work in ways that they can, but we need to think about making employment work for young people so that it is worth their while and they understand the meaning behind it, which we have touched upon.
Something that we have not really discussed is the importance of relationships, which can be cemented in education and in employment. In essence, young people just want to be heard and be valued. We have young people within our datasets who have literally applied for hundreds of jobs and got nothing back in return. Age can be a barrier. If they are under 16, there are certain things that they can and cannot do in terms of hours working and so forth. Lack of experience is a key barrier to a young person engaging in work, and this is where the education system should come in with the year 10 work experience and that kind of thing.
There are real things that we can do on the ground. We should be careful when we talk about young people, because they are a huge group. Lots of young people do want to make a substantial change in society and to just lead a normal life, like all of us, really.
The Chair: If you have trains to catch, leave the room. I am afraid I have conceded a final question to Lord Johnson, but no more after that.
Q75 Lord Johnson of Marylebone: I just wanted to pick up on the points that Professor Russell was making about elective home education. I was very struck by your suggestion that a proportion of learners in home education are, in effect, NEET. I wondered whether you might give a feel for what proportion it is of the roughly 150,000 or so who are now in elective home education but might not be in education and are, really, NEET.
Professor Lisa Russell: We do not know. This is the really scary thing. We have only started gathering data on elective home-educated young people. All I can give you is anecdotal evidence on the ground. There is a real issue around data sharing as well. There will be a huge amount of the elective home-education population who we will not even know about, because they are not in communication with the local authorities. What I can tell you with confidence is that that group is growing quickly. At the minute, local authorities feel that they need more support in terms of having some kind of mandatory power around elective home education.
The Chair: Thank you very much. You have given us a great deal of help and told us some pretty sobering things that will cause us to think about and decide where we are going with this inquiry. Thank you very much indeed, and thank you for all the work that you are doing in this area. It has been invaluable.