The​ teenager was born, it’s sometimes said, in America in the mid-1950s, when Little Richard released ‘Tutti Frutti’ and Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Thirty years later, the Thatcher government made a less exuberant contribution to the way the transition to adulthood is imagined. A new type of policy problem had come to light in the form of the working-age youth who was not in work, education or training, and risked getting stuck in that situation. Typically, these were working-class young men who might have expected to follow their fathers into industrial manual work, only to find their opportunities eroded by persistent deindustrialisation, then stamped out altogether by Thatcher’s devastating monetarist experiment of 1980-81.

The Tory instinct at that time was to moralise such problems, as with the adjacent example of teenage mothers. But when a particular category of benefit claimant becomes overpopulated, it is made someone’s job – whether a social scientist or a civil servant – to figure out what is going on, and what might practically be done about it. The first major policy response was the 1986 Social Security Act, which made income support for 16 to 18-year-olds conditional on enrolment in a Youth Training Scheme.

In the 1990s, as the talk of ‘feckless’ and ‘disaffected’ youth receded, the statistical analysis of this demographic sharpened. In 1993, the sociologist Howard Williamson coined the term ‘Status Zer0’ to categorise young people who appeared to be going nowhere. The term circulated in Whitehall for a few years before an unnamed Home Office civil servant decided to replace it with the less pejorative-sounding ‘Neet’: Not in Employment, Education or Training. Addressing long-term youth unemployment was one of New Labour’s stated ambitions on entering government in 1997, a rare instance in which it promised to solve a problem by spending more money (funded by a windfall tax on privatised utilities). Neets were publicly inaugurated as a policy problem in a paper issued by the newly established Social Exclusion Unit in 1999, ‘Bridging the Gap: New Opportunities for 16-18 Year-olds Not in Education, Employment or Training’.

In the years since, Neet rates have become an international indicator, deployed by the OECD among other bodies to compare national policy successes and failures. The category mutates depending on national data collection practices. In the UK, as elsewhere, it now tends to refer to those between 16 and 24, the expanded age range reflecting the far greater proportion of young people passing through higher education. In the Neet league tables, the Netherlands has consistently had the lowest rate and Turkey the highest. Ireland has been applauded for bouncing back from the doldrums of the Eurozone crisis in the early 2010s. The UK currently languishes in the wrong half of the table, with just over a million people between 16 and 24 not in employment, education or training, 13.5 per cent of the cohort. Leave out 16 and 17-year-olds (most of whom are at school these days) and the figure rises to 16 per cent. This is the highest rate since the early 2010s, when the global economy was still suffering the immediate aftershocks of the financial crisis. Those who look for the cause of today’s resurgence of Neets in a more recent global shock, the Covid pandemic, need to explain why British youth seem to be suffering a worse pandemic hangover than their contemporaries in comparable nations.

The UK’s Neet problem has attracted a lot of political attention since Labour took office in 2024. In November 2025, Alan Milburn, a former Labour health secretary, was asked to conduct a review of the evidence and policy options. He produced an interim report in May. Further reports, policy recommendations, focus group findings, stakeholder perspectives, league tables and national case studies have been issued by think tanks, charities, school leaders, academics and NGOs. As part of their ongoing campaign against universities, conservative newspapers have seized on one particular policy response to the Neet problem, which is that the fiscal and political priority of higher education should be reduced in favour of vocational and further education. On this score, Milburn has been happy to feed them bait to draw editorial attention, selling short what is in fact a far more sensitive and exploratory piece of work than the headlines reflect.

For the most part, the British policy establishment no longer moralises about young people’s attitudes to work. It is an indication of how far we have progressed beyond Thatcherism, at least on the discursive level, that the second chapter of Milburn’s 219-page interim report is given over to the first-hand experiences of young people themselves. An accompanying report, ‘Inside the Mind of a Young Neet’, by the policy adviser Shuab Gamote and long-time Labour wonk Peter Hyman, includes dozens of moving testimonies from those who have fallen between the cracks of employment, education and training. These are a reminder that beneath the crude statistical classifications there are thousands of unique stories of complex needs, alienation and dashed hopes.

But public policy cannot be tailored to individual cases. Andy Burnham, now in Downing Street, has indicated that he wants devolved powers (mayors in particular) to take the initiative on this issue, which would allow the specific features of different regions to influence policy. But Milburn’s final report, which is due in the autumn, will suggest a national policy strategy. In these fiscally straitened times, the worry is that policy proposals will tend to emphasise forcing people into the labour market using sticks as well as carrots. In any future trade-off between defence spending and welfare, it is pretty clear which part of the welfare budget will attract the most critical scrutiny (clue: it won’t be the ‘triple lock’ on pensions). Any future right-wing government, whichever party leads it, would only hasten moves in this direction, and would do so without bothering to stop and ask how the world looks from the perspective of an unemployed teenager.

Britain’s particular version of the Neet crisis is in several respects unlike those of thirty or forty years ago. ‘Young people are different from those who came before them,’ as Milburn’s interim report puts it. ‘Not worse. Not lazier. Not less intelligent. But different in ways that have material consequences.’ However this difference is grasped, it opens onto social, cultural and economic questions that exceed the limits of labour market policy or education alone – larger questions, perhaps, than the government had intended to address. The difference between the problem that confronted the Thatcher government and the one that now confronts Burnham’s is that the former was fundamentally about unemployment. Getting young people into training was seen as a way of making them more appealing in the post-industrial labour market. Today, the majority of Neets are not ‘unemployed’ but economically ‘inactive’: they are not looking for work, but living outside of the labour market and the education system, supported variously by their families and by disability benefits. Anyone inclined to dismiss these young people as welfare scammers will need to account for the fact that an extraordinary 314,000 people between 18 and 24 are not in work, or education, or in training, or receiving benefits. They have effectively disappeared off the government’s grid.

There has been a proliferation in recent years of depressing stories of young jobseekers enduring a constant stream of automated rejections. Many of them have ample qualifications (‘One in seven Neets has a university degree,’ bemoaned the Telegraph in its coverage of the Milburn report). A quarter of unemployed Neets have been looking for a job for more than a year. Economic explanations abound. When Starmer’s chancellor, Rachel Reeves, hiked employers’ National Insurance contributions, she was criticised on the basis that it would deter employers from hiring. Rises in the national minimum wage (which is lower for 18 to 20-year-olds, and lower still for under-18s) are blamed for making first-time workers too expensive. Others speculate that the long-awaited AI ‘jobs apocalypse’ may have come for young graduates first.

Economists themselves have plenty of cookie-cutter suggestions for how to tackle youth unemployment: make young workers cheaper, give them training, subsidise employers to take on school-leavers. But the inactivity problem is of a different scale and substance. The rise in Britain’s Neet rate since the onset of the pandemic is almost entirely due to the rise across the cohort as a whole in youth disability, which has doubled since 2016 (the biggest surge has been in the most severe category of disability, as gauged by Work Capability Assessments). A growing proportion of disability consists of debilitating depression, anxiety, ADHD and autism, which between them account for nearly two-thirds of the Personal Independence Payments (PIPs) paid to young people.

Among 15 to 24-year-olds, Britain has the highest rate of anxiety disorders (24 per cent) and the highest rate of depressive disorders (12 per cent) of any country in the OECD. These rates have been rising steadily, not just since Covid but since 2010, especially among women and girls. Put all of this together and it appears that Britain’s Neet problem is just one manifestation of wider epidemiological and psychosocial trends that move independently of market forces, are not reducible to the incentives of the benefit system, and are worse than those seen in comparable countries.

Some inevitably respond to these alarming statistics by questioning whether all such disabilities are ‘real’. In March last year, in the run-up to the Starmer government’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reform PIPs, Wes Streeting, the then health secretary, raised the spectre of ‘overdiagnosis’ as a problem bedevilling both the NHS and the welfare state. A row ensued, which subsided after Starmer backed away from the policy change, but Streeting clearly wanted to keep the debate going. In December, he invited the clinical psychologist Peter Fonagy to conduct a review of mental health and neurodevelopmental diagnoses in the UK. His interim report was issued in March. Whether Streeting intended it or not, in selecting Fonagy he was inviting a degree of empathy and epistemological reflexivity that is unusual in government thinking. Fonagy is also a psychoanalyst, and was never likely to come down unambivalently on either side of such a politically charged debate, still less go along with any simplistic talk of ‘overdiagnosis’. As his report explains, there are various ways of trying to gauge the prevalence of mental health conditions: population-level surveys, administrative data (including rates of diagnosis), self-reporting and so on. None provides a definitive answer as to who is ‘ill’ and who is not.

The evidence shows that depression and anxiety rates among young people began to climb around 2010. The pandemic, by contrast, saw a dramatic rise in the identification of neurodevelopmental disorders by patients, parents and clinicians. Between 2018 and 2025, rates of self-reported autism rose by 180 per cent, compared to 50 per cent for mental health disorders. The number of children and young people waiting for an ADHD assessment rose from 21,000 in April 2019 to 270,000 in December 2025. One of the groups most likely to seek help for autism is girls starting secondary school.

It is difficult to know what to make of all this. Fonagy considers the possibility that rising awareness of these conditions and an increased willingness to seek help may be offsetting pervasive underdiagnosis in the past. Diagnostic classifications such as ‘autism’ have expanded in scope, enabling previously neglected groups (women and girls especially) to get the help they need. Even so, anyone working in education would be unlikely to take issue with Fonagy’s tentative observation that ‘diagnosis is now performing functions beyond clinical classification.’ His report goes on to say that, especially after 2016, the steep increase in autism identified in education settings through the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities framework ‘suggests that educational systems are not merely responding to diagnosis but are also shaping demand for it. This may help explain why diagnostic pathways can become heavily pressured, even where the most appropriate immediate response may involve practical, educational or psychological support rather than specialist diagnostic assessment alone.’ To be clear, this is not to endorse the ‘overdiagnosis’ thesis (which would imply a sharp distinction between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ syndromes), but to recognise that the culture has shifted where mental health and neurodiversity are concerned, and to acknowledge the extent to which diagnostic practices are entangled in societal and institutional norms. Nuances aside, what does seem clear is that the number of young people carrying diagnoses from school into the labour market will only increase.

Instead of focusing on the precise scope and application of a diagnostic category, the Fonagy review emphasises a point that should be uncontroversial: young people in Britain are experiencing much higher levels of distress than they used to, and higher levels than in comparable countries. Survey evidence shows that between the late 1990s and the early 2020s, the number of young people suffering a loss of self-esteem, social anxiety, an inability to concentrate and the lack of a sense of purpose rose significantly. Interestingly, it seems that over the same period, problems associated with anger, lying and transgression declined. If, as Winnicott proposed, ‘delinquency is a sign of hope’ (indicating that the young person feels sufficiently secure that they aren’t too worried about the consequences of their aggression), it seems that hope has been gradually snuffed out since the New Labour period. Negative feelings are being turned inwards. Efforts to separate a mental health epidemic from this wider social malaise are dishonest, and will do nothing in the longer term to confront the challenge of rising disability and inactivity. As Milburn’s interim report puts it, there has been a fall in the ‘functional capacity’ of young people, regardless of the labels applied to them or by whom.

There​ have been surprisingly few attempts at overarching analyses of what has gone wrong with young people. One exception is Jonathan Haidt’s controversial book The Anxious Generation, which argues that the replacement of in-person play, socialisation and risk-taking by on-screen alternatives has damaged adolescents’ ability to grow into independent adults. Another is a report commissioned by the Youth Futures Foundation and put together by a team from the University of Manchester and UCL, which sifts through various sources of evidence and comes up with four chief explanations. First, economic deprivation and insecurity, which correlate closely with various indicators of distress and disability, including mental health diagnoses. Housing insecurity appears to be particularly bad for the mental health of children, which should raise questions about the number of low-income families living in private rentals. Life satisfaction for the most deprived quintile of 16 to 24-year-olds has fallen more rapidly since 2010 than for their better-off peers. Second is the reduction of services for children and young people. The Milburn review notes that because of austerity, local government spending on youth services fell by 73 per cent between 2011 and 2024, and that children from disadvantaged backgrounds performed 12 per cent worse in exams at sixteen after losing access to a nearby youth centre. Third, as Haidt and his army of anxious middle-class parents will be unsurprised to hear, it does have some connection to phones and social media.

And then there is the fourth major factor, which may seem incongruous alongside the other three: worsening sleep quality. Sleep appears repeatedly in the literature on Neets and youth mental health. Fonagy’s review includes graphs showing that, since 2015, there has been a sharp escalation in the number of 16 to 24-year-olds who struggle to fall asleep, and also in the number who struggle to stay awake – changes that aren’t mirrored in the adult population. In their work with focus groups (which was also picked up by the Milburn review), Gamote and Hyman found that ‘in almost every conversation we had with young people about routine, sleep came first … One young man said that on weekends he did not go to bed at all. In Clacton, a young woman described finishing school at 3 p.m., going home, sleeping at 4 p.m., waking at 1 a.m. and gaming until school. For three weeks running.’ This is disastrous for the adolescent brain, as well as cutting young people off from the patterns and conventions of public and institutional life. Do these sleep disruptions produce mental ill-health, or does mental ill-health disrupt sleep? The constant availability of online gaming and scrollable media is plainly a factor, and is presumably what prompted the Starmer government to announce an overnight social media curfew (of dubious enforceability) for 16 and 17-year-olds.

The picture that emerges is of a generation that is suffering both social and neurological dysregulation, and struggling to stay in sync with society at large, including education and the labour market. The global interruption in the everyday rhythms of childhood and community caused by the pandemic, on top of the hopelessness that had been growing over the previous decade, has left too many young people adrift from routine and basic executive function. Many employers, drawing no doubt on a mixture of prejudice and anecdotal evidence, have become wary of young people, especially those who disclose a mental health or neurodevelopmental diagnosis. Incentives then play a part: if the labour market proves unwilling to accommodate a young person’s needs, it may seem to them that their best alternative is ‘inactivity’ and PIPs.

Milburn’s interim report concludes with a damning sociological summary of what is happening, which only the most dogmatic neoliberal could read as fixable by market mechanisms:

Britain is no longer facing a marginal youth employment problem. It is confronting a systemic failure at the point where a generation is supposed to transition into adulthood. This is not a temporary shock. It is not a post-pandemic hangover. It is not a question of motivation or culture. It is a structural breakdown with profound consequences for economic performance, fiscal sustainability and social cohesion.

One interesting feature of this more expansive mode of policy inquiry is its resistance to the medicalisation of distress, both in the benefit system and the education system, and to the entrenching of binary oppositions between the ‘sick’ and the ‘well’, the ‘neurodivergent’ and the ‘neurotypical’. There is a progressive and a reactionary way of doing this (just as there have been radical and conservative traditions of anti-psychiatry), and the pressures of fiscal policy may end up determining which route is taken. But it is at least encouraging to see politicians reflect on the unhappiness of young people in terms that go beyond the burden they place on the NHS.

Policy lessons will no doubt be sought from overseas. The Netherlands has had a lot of success in reducing the ‘stickiness’ of the disability benefits system – whereby surmountable (or intermittent) mental and neurodevelopmental difficulties lead some individuals into long-term inactivity – by allowing much more fluid movement between employment, job-seeking and time out. But this has been enabled by the greater level of training and education provision there as much as by tackling unemployment. Many of the answers to the Neet phenomenon involve spending more public money in the short term, not less; we shall see how the Treasury feels about that approach to welfare reform.

There is some truth to the notion that Britain suffers from a lack of alternatives to university as a route into independent adulthood, though that is a consequence of the long-term neglect of further education and vocational training rather than a defect of higher education. At a time when higher education is already in financial freefall, we can expect a lot more noise around this issue in the coming months. But if we are in for a period of educational soul-searching, it would be odd if the discussion weren’t also extended to schools, which do more than any other institution to integrate children into social relationships, provide them with routine and influence their self-esteem. Pre-empting Milburn’s final report, Burnham has now expressed a desire for schools to be in closer contact with local employers, for children to be offered work experience from the age of fourteen and for technical qualifications to become part of the curriculum. But this goes back to treating the Neet issue as a problem of labour supply, rather than a deeper crisis of wellbeing.

Both the Milburn and the Fonagy reports recognise the contribution that early disengagement from school makes to subsequent mental ill-health and inactivity. Individual Neets will often trace their social withdrawal back to a particular misdemeanour, experience of failure or penalty received years earlier. For many British children, school is a place of stress, in which exam results are overbearingly important and there is minimal scope for other forms of self-expression or creative transgression. The behavioural discipline for which academy schools are renowned crops up in many of the testimonies collected by Gamote and Hyman: their respondents recall being placed in isolation rooms, eating their lunch alone and being routinely suspended. Fresh starts are not on offer. One young person said that being sent home as a punishment felt ‘like winning the lottery’.

In 2009, Britain ranked 25th in the world for reading, according to the OECD. By 2018, it was up to fourteenth – not bad, given that funding for schools had effectively been frozen in the meantime. But on another OECD metric, the UK was doing far less well. A survey asking 15-year-olds about their ‘sense of belonging’ in school found that, between 2003 and 2022, Britain experienced the sharpest fall of any country in the OECD. Schools were performing ‘better’ according to the measures most popular in Whitehall, but children were becoming lonelier, more anxious, more lacking in a sense of purpose, and less able to express normal teenage frustration in a way that they could expect to be tolerated or forgiven. Grappling with this fact won’t bring the disability benefits bill down in the short term, but it’s an appropriate response to the new consensus that something has gone deeply wrong for British youth.