The young are trapped by hideously low expectations

Virtually everyone who is concerned about the future of the United Kingdom is worried about the recent news that more than one million young people – around one in eight 16- to-24-year-olds – are not in education, employment or training (NEET). The number of NEETs has grown by 195,000 over the past two years.

According to a government-sponsored review of NEETs, 1.25million young people will not be in work or education within five years. Already, 530,000 are recipients of out-of-work benefits such as universal credit. Alan Milburn, a cabinet minister under Tony Blair and author of the report, said he had a ‘deep concern bordering on fear’ about the future of young people in the UK.

Milburn’s review has done a thorough job of conveying the bleak extent of what he rightly describes as a ‘moral’ crisis. Unfortunately, however, he and others charged with analysing this phenomenon have failed to apply the same thoroughness when it comes to its causes. A widely reported study published last week, Inside the Mind of a Young NEET, makes many of the same mistakes as Milburn’s review. Both reports are obsessed with dispelling the claim that the NEET generation is ‘lazy’.

Inside the Mind of a Young NEET, co-authored by educationalists Peter Hyman (also a former speechwriter for Blair) and Shuab Gamote, argues ‘that Britain must stop blaming the one million young people not in education, employment or training, known as NEETs, for a system that has let them down’. This sentiment was stridently echoed by Milburn during the interviews that he gave to the media on Thursday, the day his review was released.

Hyman and Gamote’s report praises today’s youth as a ‘resilient, talented generation’, failed by a system designed for a world that no longer exists. Its authors dedicated it to the ‘extraordinary young people who were willing to share their lives with us’.

The attribution of resilience and extraordinary qualities to young people, who in many cases are reluctant to leave their bedrooms, is a demonstration of the pandering tone that runs through both reports. They see young people largely as victims, devoid of any responsibility for the situation they find themselves in. Unsurprisingly, both reports repeat the popular myth that today’s youth are uniquely incapable of the demands of work, often because of some kind of mental illness.

Inside the Mind of a Young NEET tends to present young people as actual or potential mental-health patients who suffer from the trauma inflicted by their life experience. The report notes that:

‘We listened to many young people with traumatic stories to tell about their family life, school, attempts to work, mental health. We need to ask ourselves as a nation: What are we doing to the next generation? Why are so many growing up in pain? Why is the system failing them so badly?’

The Milburn Review is also strongly influenced by the mental-health narrative. Milburn states that: ‘For the first time, in perhaps two centuries, changes in health, especially mental health, are impeding economic growth and causing a contraction in the supply of labour.’ This belief appears to be based on the fact that, in 2025, 44 per cent of NEETs reported having a ‘work-limiting’ health condition – an increase from 26 per cent in 2015.

One of the most regrettable consequences of the medicalisation of the NEETs is that it treats young people’s accounts of their circumstances uncritically. Inside the Mind of a Young NEET notes that, ‘[m]any young people told us they wanted to work but felt they could not immediately cope with 35 or 40 hours a week’. It added that ‘part-time work, supported work, trial shifts and gradual increases in hours would help them build confidence and get used to the routines of work’.

The central point here – and the one that is missing – is that a significant number of young people believe that they cannot cope with full-time work because they have grown up being told that it is unreasonable to expect them to do so. The authors don’t seem interested in why generations of young people in the past regarded full-time work as an opportunity, rather than a challenge beyond their apparently low capabilities. If they had tried to address this question, they would have discovered that work was not perceived as something so exceptional that it required a prolonged phase of transition.

In its desire to avoid any criticism of the attitude of the NEETs, Inside the Mind of a Young NEET simply acquiesces to their attitude towards work. For example, it reports that ‘[s]ome young people have got into a habit of quitting fuelled by social media… Young people told us about the promotion online of instant success, which leads to a quitting culture if things take time.’ It adds that ‘some young people told us they enjoy the dopamine hit of a new job but then get bored very quickly and want to move on’.

Of course, there is nothing new about feeling bored in a job and wanting to quit. What is new is that supposed experts of young people’s lives represent this attitude as new, and one that didn’t exist prior to social media. Instead of analysing a culture that has relegated the importance of having strong work ethic, the authors of Inside the Mind of a Young NEET simply repeat the infantilising philosophy that has kept many otherwise capable youth on the sofa.

To his credit, Milburn has recognised that what is at stake is ‘more than an economic crisis, it is a moral one’. However, he is reluctant to draw out the logic of his insight, which is that no economic or health policy will deal with this problem unless the morality sustaining low expectations is challenged.

The NEET phenomenon is the outcome of a regime that systematically infantilises young people. From early childhood, young people are treated as ‘vulnerable’ and incapable of agency. Yet, at the same time, they have their egos inflated and are regularly told that they are ‘unique’ and ‘extraordinary’. The consequence has been perverse. The young are inevitably going to be disappointed when the world doesn’t treat them as unique and extraordinary. And, when that disappointment occurs, it is medicalised as a mental-health condition.

Every type of transition – from childhood to primary school, from primary to big school, from secondary to higher education to the workplace – has its challenges. God knows that mass immigration, deindustrialisation and welfarism haven’t helped younger Britons. But they can undoubtedly cope with holding down a job. It’s high time the government recognised this.

Frank Furedi’s In Defence Of Populism is out now.