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Engaging Youth Enquiry Briefing Paper 3: Rates of Post-16 Non-Participation in England
Nuffield Review/Rathbone
Published October 2008
The category Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET) was formally created by the Social Exclusion Unit in 1999. This group of young people had been a growing policy concern since the late 1970s and early 1980s, largely as a result of the collapse of the youth labour market, increasing rates of youth unemployment and crime, and disturbances in Inner City areas such as the Toxteth riots. The term 'NEET' was closely associated with ideas about the emergence of an underclass in societies undergoing long-term economic and social change, and it focussed the policy gaze in the British context on 16-18 year olds. A plethora of policy initiatives, from early youth training programmes to financial incentives to remain in education and training (such as the Education Maintenance Allowance), have been deployed to encourage young people to stay in education post-16. Challenging Public Sector Agreement (PSA) targets have been set to reduce the proportion of young people who are placed in the 'NEET' category. A further response to this issue has been the legislation to require young people to remain in some form of education and training (up to the age of 17 by 2013 and then 18 by 2015).
In order to understand the reasons why young people fall into the 'NEET' category the following are essential:
robust estimates of the size of this segment of the 16-18 population,
an appreciation of the lives of the young people who fall into this category, and
an understanding of the reasons why they disengage from education and training.
This briefing paper examines how estimates of the number of young people who are 'NEET' are derived and what they reveal about the historical and geographical trends in the proportion of 16-18 year olds classified as 'NEET'. In addition, the paper draws on evidence from the Connexions service to look beneath the headline 'NEET' statistics to explore the heterogeneity of the young people who are classified as 'NEET' and generate some understanding of the reasons why they enter the 'NEET' population.
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