NEET: why children must not be written off

Amid growing concern about rising levels of young people who are not in education, employment or training, the BBC recently published an article featuring Kian, a young boy whose story illustrates the challenges faced by many thousands of young people. 

Kian struggled in school. He was often absent, sometimes attending only once or twice each month. His future looked bleak, but thankfully he was put in touch with a local charity that supports young people at risk of becoming NEET (not in education, employment or training). Kian began attending school regularly and, this year, got the grades he needed to enroll on a professional bakery course at college. 

A wonderful success story. But this transformation didn’t happen overnight. Kian’s support worker from the charity Right to Succeed, describes how she spent months just building up a relationship with Kian so that he trusted her enough to talk to her. Only then were they able to work together on supporting him in school and helping him to make plans for his future. 

Kian’s story reinforces what we already know about helping children who have given up on school and, sadly, have given up on themselves – it’s all about trust and relationships.  

It may seem so much easier and, in the short term, cheaper, to tackle persistent absence with consequences, fines and threats of legal action but for children like Kian, such measures only serve to erode the little trust they may have had in adults and authority figures and reinforces the perception that they are on the outside looking in.  

The time and resources that Kian’s support worker has invested in him will pay dividends in the long run, not only for Kian, but for all of us. Baking, he says, helps him “calm down and de-stress”. Once he finishes college, his dream is to have his own bakery and maybe open a chain of stores. Even if this dream doesn’t come to fruition, Kian is now on a secure path to finding employment in a field that he loves and contributing positively to society throughout his life. 

The tragedy is that this kind of support isn’t available for all the young people facing similar challenges. There are currently 872,000 young people in the UK who are not in education, employment or training. At Adoption UK, we know that adopted 16-25-year-olds are at least twice as likely as their peers to be NEET. Kian was lucky enough to live in an area where there was a local charity that was able to support him. What happens to all those young people without that support? 

The huge task of turning things around for young people with mental health difficulties, poor educational outcomes, limited access to post-16 options and impoverished visions for their own futures is too important to be left to chance, or to charity. It is manifestly unfair that the lucky few receive support, while the rest are left to beg for help from services that are too often under-resourced and over-stretched. 

Our society cannot and must not write off children like Kian. There are no unreachable children and there are no lost causes. The support Kian needed was intensive, time-consuming and, yes, probably costly, but it was worth it. Kian was worth it. All our children are worth it.