As International Youth Day highlights young people’s aspirations, we review what works for those not in education, employment or training

This year’s International Youth Day theme, Different Contexts, Common Aspirations, is a reminder that whatever a young person’s circumstances, what they want tends to be strikingly consistent: dignity, meaningful opportunity, and a genuine route into work or learning that fits them.

In the UK, that aspiration is colliding with tough circumstances for the more than one million young people not in education, employment or training (NEET).

Writing in The Guardian this week, Richard Partington set out how two decades of cuts to preventive services have left the state paying to manage the consequences instead. The NEET crisis alone now costs an estimated £125bn a year and rising. Partington frames Alan Milburn’s review as a test of whether the Burnham government will use the autumn budget to rebuild what the thinktank Demos calls a preventive state, investing early rather than firefighting later.

But what should services look like in practice for NEET young people specifically?

Our comparative research across EU countries, where NEET rates have steadily reduced, offers some operational answers to the question. We identify four tested conditions that recur wherever a country has actually brought its NEET rate down.

Four key conditions for young people’s employment services

One relationship, not a rotating cast of services

Sweden’s Navigator Centres, still the standing model cited across EU regional policy, give each young person a single case worker who follows them across education, health, employment and family support. France’s Second Chance Schools work the same way, pairing each trainee with one tutor for the length of their programme and beyond. For a young person navigating a difficult transition, having one trusted person who stays with them matters as much as any single service on offer.

Funding that outlasts a single spending cycle

France’s Second Chance network took in almost 18,000 young people in 2025, up 4.4% on the year, and held its 61% positive-outcome rate steady, evidence the model keeps working at scale. Its leadership has also said publicly that funding uncertainty from regional government is now limiting how many more young people it can reach. Good provision needs funding that young people, and the staff supporting them, can rely on for more than one budget cycle, exactly the kind of preventive investment that’s hardest to sustain when a treasury is watching costs land immediately and savings arrive years later, under a different government.

A genuine route into work, not just a course

Germany’s Einstiegsqualifizierung and Luxembourg’s structured traineeship contracts both place young people directly into supported work placements with an employer and a workplace tutor, paid throughout, treating the placement as real work rather than a holding pattern. Luxembourg updated the legal basis for its scheme as recently as March 2026, keeping the offer current for the young people using it now.

Reaching young people who’ve stopped expecting to be reached

The Finnish outreach youth work programme targets early school leavers and NEETs aged under 29. Outreach workers, who are mainly trained youth workers employed by the municipalities, work closely with pupil welfare teams in schools and follow-up on school drop-outs. Successive evaluations have shown that youth outreach work contributed to lower rates of social exclusion and a statistically significant lower NEET rate. Across every Youth Guarantee-style scheme our research has examined, the same pattern holds: young people already close to the labour market tend to do well, and those furthest from it need active, sustained outreach to be found and engaged at all. The success of the UK’s Youth Guarantee will depend on how well it finds and works with the young people hardest to reach.

“We know what works. But the steps needed are time-consuming, labour-intensive, budget-hungry, and you only get results in the next election cycle,” says Kari Hadjivassiliou, Principal Researcher at the Tavistock Institute.

Young people in the UK need systemic changes to enable those four conditions: one relationship, sustained funding, a genuine route into work, and the outreach to make sure nobody is left outside it. Rebuilding a preventive state needs to include employment services for young people that are informed by the mass of evidence showing us what works.

If you’re working on youth employment, NEET reduction or active labour market policy and want to talk through what the evidence means for your context, get in touch with Fatima Kamaté on +44 (0)20 7417 0407 or f.kamate@tavinstitute.org

Read more

• UN International Youth Day 2026: Different Contexts, Common Aspirations
• Our June 2026 statement: Enabling pathways out of NEET status: the European evidence tells us what works
• Partington, R. (2026). Britain is paying the price for failing to invest in its young people. The Guardian, 9 August 2026.
• Milburn, A. (2026). Young People and Work: Interim Report. Department for Work and Pensions, 28 May 2026.
• Youth Futures Foundation (YFF), (2025). What works in reducing NEET rates: a comparative study, November, https://youthfuturesfoundation.org/publication/what-works-in-reducing-neet-rates-a-comparative-study/
• Réseau E2C France (2026). 2025 activity results, published 31 March 2026.
• European Competence Centre for Social Innovation, (2023). ESF+ Support for Targeting Vulnerable Youth: Review of Finish and Portuguese Cases and Recommendations, November, https://socialinnovationplus.eu/app/uploads/2025/09/Recommendation-paper-Youth-outreach-Finland-and-Portugal_2023-November.pdf
• Hadjivassiliou, K.P. (2016). What Works for the Labour Market Integration of Youth at Risk. Thematic Paper, DG EMPL High Level Learning Exchange, Stockholm.
• Hadjivassiliou, K.P., Tassinari, A., Eichhorst, W. and Wozny, F. (2016). Assessing the Performance of School-to-Work Transition Regimes in the EU. IZA Discussion Paper No. 10301.