A long-running worry in British public life — young people drifting out of education and work with no one quite keeping track of them — has hardened into a hard number. The count of 16- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training, known as NEET, has climbed past a million, and the government in England is responding by demanding that local councils get much better at knowing where at-risk teenagers are.
A million and rising
In the first three months of 2026, about 1.01 million young people aged 16 to 24 across the UK were NEET — 13.5% of that age group, according to the Office for National Statistics. It was the first time the figure had topped a million since 2013, and the rate has been rising since 2021.
The makeup of that total matters for policy. The ONS found that only around 39% of NEET young people were unemployed in the usual sense — out of work but looking for it. The larger share, roughly 61%, were "economically inactive": not in a job and not currently seeking one, a group that often includes those held back by ill health, especially mental-health conditions.
The tracking problem
Part of the difficulty is that officials cannot always find the young people they are meant to help. Councils in England are responsible for keeping tabs on the education or training status of 16- and 17-year-olds, but for many teenagers that status is simply recorded as "unknown" — leaving them, in effect, invisible to the services meant to support them.
To close that gap, the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, has told a group of councils facing the greatest challenges that they must agree improvement plans over the coming months, Schools Week reported. Central to the effort is a "risk of NEET indicator" tool, which pulls together signals such as school attendance, special educational needs, mental-health needs and experience of the care system to flag pupils at risk before they disengage, the government said.
A wider review
The push sits within a broader examination of youth and work led by Alan Milburn, a former Labour cabinet minister, commissioned by the government to diagnose why so many young people are falling out of the system. Milburn has warned that, without action, the current NEET rate of roughly one in eight young people could climb toward one in six — framing the issue as a generational risk rather than a passing blip.
His interim work has drawn particular attention to the growing number of young people who are out of work because of a health condition or disability, a trend that complicates the traditional focus on job-searching and training places.
Support and skepticism
Supporters of closer tracking argue it is a precondition for help: a young person the state cannot locate is one it cannot reach with an apprenticeship, a college place or mental-health support. Better data-sharing between schools, councils and other services, they say, is among the most practical levers available.
Others urge caution. Charities and campaigners have warned that pushing young people — especially those with mental-health difficulties — toward work without adequate support can backfire, and that identification must be matched by genuine help rather than pressure. There is also a longer-standing unease, familiar from other data-sharing schemes, about how much information the state gathers on individuals and how it is used.
What happens next
For now, the immediate change is administrative: councils sharpening how they monitor teenagers, and a risk tool intended to catch problems earlier. The larger questions — why youth inactivity has risen so sharply, and what actually reverses it — await the full findings of the Milburn review, expected later in the year. The million figure has given the debate an unavoidable urgency; whether tracking translates into help is the test still to come.
