Does the answer to the NEET crisis actually require a psychological shift in the rest of us?
Burnham’s efforts to build 180 employability hubs around the UK over the next two years in an effort to bring down NEET numbers is admirable.
These hubs are modelled on the Dutch system and integrate mental health, employability, education and welfare services into one. They form part of a wider £2.5bn youth guarantee strategy to boost apprenticeship access and employability in the UK and manage the incredible 1.3million youth currently unemployed and in no form of training or education.
It is inspired, great to see a practical approach being administered, and I wish it well.
However, as someone that was born in the Netherlands, I can add an insight:
In order for this to really work at the national level, the UK has to get over one small thing:
- its obsession with class.
In other countries—Norway, actually all the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Germany--going into vocational training is socially respected. Their youth do not feel as though entering vocational work is shameful and some kind of second-rate option because university was too difficult for them, or in other ways—culturally, intellectually-out of reach.
But we are still a class-based country and whether consciously or not, we favour university graduates as leaders over vocational workers.
We might argue about this but it’s difficult to do so when Kier Starmer, like Andy Burnham, two of our most recent left-wing Prime Minsters, both went to Oxbridge.
And so did half their cabinets.
- Is leadership contingent on a university education, and an elite one at that, in the UK?
- Does this prejudice spawn broader dysfunction when it comes to how roles and employment are perceived socially?
- Is the problem of the NEET crisis actually more a reflection of a silent psychological undercurrent that wards the young off aspiring for roles that are more in line with their actual passions?
The core reasons for the rising NEET crisis are: a poorly designed welfare system, growing mental health and health among the young, and an insurmountable cost of living crisis that makes aspiring for anything at best exhausting, and at worst--pointless.
These are material, empirical realities. We cannot hold the class system responsible for NEET, not alone.
But what would really support the reintegration into work-and the mid-life crisis that pervades the lives of so many adults-is a broader shift in attitude when it comes to how society perceives and measures employment roles in the UK.
I feel this even in my own work: when I tell people I work in careers, they seem to think it’s some of kind second class job.
It’s the PERFECT one for me.
Shouldn’t that be the point?
