NEET Zero

Problems are mounting for young people trying to get a job. Here are a few suggestions.

Attentions spans are getting shorter. A friend admitted she rarely reads past the first line of a WhatsApp. I’ve probably lost her already with this post. An appalling new product called Blinkist summarises non-fiction books in 15 minute audio summaries, so high performing alpha males can pretend to have read them. “The Future of Reading — stay ahead of the curve with access to key insights from top non-fiction books”. Let’s hope millions plunge off that curve into the ravine below. Read the bloody book you smug, arrogant, know-nothing meathead.

But in the spirit of the modern zeitgeist I realise the Goat needs to crisp it up for the modern, distracted reader. And here’s a sprawling, complex subject: Gen Z, the Anxious Generation, the Beaten Generation, Generation NEET. And what to do about it?

Alan Milburn, Blair’s old health minister, just published an uncrisped-up 200 page report into Young People and Work. It’s depressing but worth a read. Of course you’re not going to read it. But maybe read the crisped-up Foreword. Or at least this bleat.

This is what his report says.

There are a rising number of NEETs (not in employment, education nor training). One in eight 16-24 year olds are NEETs and six in ten of them are not even looking for work. One in seven NEETs are graduates. 45% of 24 year old NEETs have never had a job. They are disengaged, outside the system. A decade ago the UK was around the EU average for NEETS, now only Romania is worse. Since then NEETs with a work-limiting health condition have increased by 70% and the proportion of disabled NEETs citing mental health as their primary condition has almost doubled to more than four in ten.

My son’s girlfriend is one of them - signed off work forever due to anxiety and ASD (autism spectrum disorder). She’s a nice girl, quite smart, but was bullied at school and is very timid. Now she’s trapped. If she gets a job - probably part-time, minimum wage, high travel costs and involving a cut in her net income - there is a large risk it would not last - it may not work out or else the employer could not keep her on due to the high employment costs of new unskilled staff. And if she loses that job she would find it hard to claim disability benefits again, because she showed she was capable of work. She wants to work, to be a contributing member of society. But the risk is too great. £750 every 4 weeks is a lot to lose.

Without a PIP (a personal independence payment) you get a lot less. My son is a NEET with ASD too, but does not have a PIP. He’s always looking for work and has had lots of jobs, but none have worked out permanently, primarily due to his condition. He gets £338 a month universal credit. It’s not a lot is it? £78 a week.¹

I went with him to the job centre. The “work coach” was modelling classic negative Gen Z traits - bored, listless, disengaged. Most of the interview was spent on checking up on how hard he was trying to get a job, because he would lose his benefit if they could get him to admit he was trying for less than 35 hours a week. The job coach had no jobs to offer, and no apprenticeship schemes or training schemes. “No, not really”. But he perked up when asked if my son should apply for health disability benefit because of his ASD condition. “Great idea” he said, enthusiastically. It would get him off the “work coach” caseload. He is still trying for work at the moment and keeping an eye on the handful of apprenticeships available - mainly dental nurses and childcare where we are. But pretty soon he may be tempted into the twilight world of permanent benefits.

Why the massive increase in mental health problems for young people? Apart from the obvious reason that you get double the money and the government is actively encouraging it? It seems increasingly likely that social media is to blame for a lot of it - see Jonathan Haidt’s excellent and well-researched book The Anxious Generation. Brains have become “rewired” with very negative consequences for many young adults.

My daughter (23) is probably one of those. But she has a degree (and a huge student debt) and is working as a childcare assistant 4 hours a day. Full time jobs are hard to come by. Employers blame the high minimum wage and high employer national insurance. Alan Milburn says: “the youth share of the labour market has decreased even as employment overall has increased. Entry-level roles have become less plentiful and more demanding. Apprenticeship starts for young people have declined by over 40%. In other words, the first rungs on the old career ladder have weakened.”

AI is having an effect - thinning out jobs at entry level especially for graduate roles. The media is full of stories of graduates being rejected for hundreds of roles. Graduates end up deleting their degree from their CV so they can get a job stacking shelves in a supermarket.

There’s another problem that Milburn mentions. “Employers talk of a generation that is less work-ready. Many young people arrive in the workplace with anxiety, low confidence and, in some cases, health needs employers do not feel equipped to support. The result is caution. The safer hire is the older worker with experience. The young person with potential but no track record loses out.”

Employers also talk of graduates who are unable to do basic tasks like take notes of meetings and who are terrified of face to face contact and making phone calls. We older graduates left university without knowing much, but we could listen to or read stuff, understand it and apply it, without needing a computer to do it for us. It was our only skill really. Modern graduates who used ChatGPT to get through their degrees (and 92% do) have never acquired or have lost that core skill.

But I think the problem is even more fundamental - our entire education system is bafflingly disconnected from the adult world of work. Apart from teaching us to read and write it’s often no help at all. I wrote about this in No more oxbow lakes.

I left education knowing nothing about the ordinary adult world. I hadn’t grasped the basic hard reality of getting and holding down a job, of economic viability - the concept of customers and competition, putting myself in the customer’s shoes or the boss’s shoes. Understanding how organisations work. How adults think. I was not fit for purpose.

I knew nothing about other adult things - taxes, money, bills, how to clean, how to cook, anything about cars, DIY, electrics, relationships. But I was taught about some things - oxbow lakes, logarithms, the abolition of serfdom by Alexander II in 1861 (that got me a quiz question right 20 years ago), cutting up locusts, Caesar subjugating the Helvetii. The important, useful stuff.

Nothing has changed. Our education system is a huge waste of time. Milburn says Britain lacks “a participation system that is capable of taking young people from the world of education into the world of work. The labour market does not provide enough early entry opportunities. The education system produces qualifications but does not guarantee transitions. The health system is configured for treatment, not participation. The welfare system replaces income but does not build pathways.”

In other words they are siloes rather than inter-connected systems. Neither the education system nor the health or welfare systems are measured on getting people into employment. You are spat out of school or college with no relevant skills - some get a job and learn relevant skills while doing it, but many will not and get shunted into the health and/or welfare system, from which there is no easy way back to economic viability.

Milburn does not have the answers. His is an interim report, a diagnosis. But the Goat has a couple of suggestions for him.

First, we need to revolutionise education - from age 11, start preparing children for the adult world. Teach them basic psychology - how people’s minds work, how their fears or anxieties may manifest in other behaviours, how to support and comfort them, how to persuade them or sell things to them. Teach older children how taxes and benefits work, how the political system works, what councils and governments do. How to run a household budget. Basic economics - how businesses make money. Teach them how to cook, how to clean, how to look after a baby.

From age 14 introduce much more vocational training - hairdressers, electricians, bricklayers, lawyers. Let young people have a taste of what jobs are like. Involve real businesses who do this stuff. You will usually know after 4-6 weeks if this is for you or not. Even spending a short time trying out “real” jobs will give children a much clearer perspective on what these jobs actually involve, prepare them better for adult life and make them more empathetic to people in other walks of life. The worlds of work and education should be intertwined from age 14 onwards.

We will still need oxbow lake specialists (though presumably not many) and we want to kindle the interest of those of us who like that sort of thing. So teach geography for six weeks - enough for kids to know if it might be their thing or not. Oxbow lake lovers could go on to do more geography but everyone else could forget about it and do something more useful and enjoyable. You’d do the same with every other classic school subject, except that schools would try to bring every child to a minimum level of literacy and numeracy.

From age 14 onwards children would study a mix of subjects - either vocational or matching their personal interests. It’s important that children are encouraged to learn things that may not be much use to them economically but will bring joy into their lives. We want to spark interest and enthusiasm in children, not cram them with information - light fires not fill buckets. Encourage creativity, don’t crush it with useless facts.

So children would leave school with much more experience and understanding of the working world.

Next we need a viable pathway from benefits back to work. Fund proper work coaches dedicated to unlocking the skills of people not in work. As Milburn says: “Every young person has something to give: a skill, an aptitude, a potential. No young person should be written off because of where they start in life: the family they are born into, the school they attend, the health condition they have, or the barriers they face.” Don’t give up on them.

Change the benefits system. Encourage earning money from employment, not deterring it. Keep everyone under regular review - no-one should be written off and signed off on benefits for life. And perhaps some people on sickness benefits might not really need or deserve them. We need a carrot and stick approach.

The minimum wage, clearly a good thing in principle, can be a barrier to some young people entering the workplace. Expand apprenticeship schemes and government support to help people get started in the workplace, maybe at less than minimum wage to start with - some of us will initially not be very useful to our employers, but will become useful after a while.

These are a few suggestions.

While Milburn was publishing his thoughtful and practical paper, his old boss Tony Blair grabbed the headlines (especially in the right wing press) by publishing his own paper, deeply critical of Labour. It’s platitudinous and irritatingly self-congratulatory. In amongst the usual guff the key messages appear to be that we need to embrace AI, max out fossil fuels and back Donald Trump. Entirely coincidentally, the major contributors to his Institute are Trump supporter Larry Ellison (the billionaire founder of tech company Oracle and a massive investor in AI), the Saudi Arabian government and the U.S. Department of State. Still on the make and on the take after all these years.

Blair does devote a small part of his paper to employment and education, saying we should create “a major new partnership with the private and voluntary sectors for apprenticeships and training”. This should especially be geared towards “learning AI adoption”. Because AI will “displace jobs, though creating new ones”. “There is no point in debating whether this technological revolution is a good or bad thing. Just know it is a ‘thing’. In fact, it is ‘the thing’.

AI may end up making most of us redundant of course, or killing us. See AImageddon. But be reassured that Tony and his family will do very nicely out of it until then.

And this is nowhere near the end of Gen Zero’s 99 problems of course - high student debt and prohibitively high housing costs make it hard for those who do get jobs to make much headway. And like all of us they are living in a world of increasing political, economic and environmental uncertainty - a world run by idiots with even worse people waiting to take over. No wonder mental health issues are increasing.

On the positive side, in the modern world, no-one from Gen Z, or indeed any other generation, will have bothered to read as far as the downbeat conclusion of this piece. And the weather’s still good, and Take That are about to start their latest tour. My wife is going. Shortly after we started dating, she horrified my Beatle-loving uncle (and me, to a lesser extent) by claiming that Take That were better than the Beatles. To let me know if you made it to the end, please leave the name of a Take That song in the comments, or a Beatles song if Take That are not your cup of tea.

Thanks for reading!

1. When I was claiming the dole in 1984 I got £30 a week and spent almost all of it on drink - a pint was 75p then so I got paid 40 pints a week. Now it’s £6 minimum so he’s getting 13 pints a week, a third of what I got, though he spends his not on alcohol but on various other overpriced goods and services.