Almost every week, I read another report or piece of research that highlights the issues young people face today. Anxious. Glued to their phones. Not “work-ready”.

Despite the doom-laden headlines, we see something different. At Make (Good) Trouble, we run media training, podcast workshops and a holiday drama club for young people. The young people we work with are full of potential, energy, ideas. They turn up, they try new things, and they have plenty to say when someone asks – and listens.

So I want to say two things. First, the problem isn’t young people. It’s the system they’re trying to get into. Second, there are two jobs to do, and we need to do both: help young people build confidence and skills, and change the things that are stacked against them.

In short: nearly a million 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK are not in education, employment or training (often shortened to NEET). That’s one in eight. Yet 84% of those surveyed for the government’s Young People and Work review said they want a job, education or training. Changing that means building young people’s confidence and skills, and fixing a jobs market that isn’t letting them in.

Why are so many young people out of work? It’s the system

If you have any skin in this game, take a look at Young People and Work, the independent review led by Alan Milburn for the Department for Work and Pensions. Its interim report, published in May 2026, tells us that nearly a million 16 to 24-year-olds are not in education, employment or training. That’s one in eight. Six in ten (the majority) of them have never had a job, up from four in ten twenty years ago.

It would be easy to blame young people for that. Milburn doesn’t. His review surveyed young people who are out of work and education, and 84% said they want a job, education or training. What he heard, again and again, was young people applying for dozens of jobs, sometimes hundreds, and hearing nothing back.

More demand-side changes are needed

For years, he says, the answer has been to help young people become more employable, giving them better skills and more help with their CVs. That’s the ‘supply’ side. It matters, but it isn’t enough if the jobs market isn’t letting them in. In his words, “the demand side matters as much as the supply side”. 

And this door has been closing:

• Entry-level jobs are scarcer and many ask for way more experience than an 18-year-old can acquire.
• Recruitment has moved online and been automated. A young person can be screened by a portal, a test or a recorded video interview before anyone has met them. (The conversations we’ve had with young people about this process are too depressing for words.) 
• Apprenticeship starts for young people have fallen by more than 40%, according to Milburn’s review.
• When an employer is nervous about the risk, jobs tend to go to older workers with a track record.

Milburn’s conclusion is that Britain has no real system for getting young people from education into work. That’s what I mean by systemic.

Why are young people less confident speaking up?

Nobody is born confident. You get there by doing things, usually badly at first, in places where it’s safe to get them wrong. A lot of those places have gone, or shrunk.

• Saturday jobs. Milburn points out that part-time work for teenagers had been declining for two decades before the pandemic. That’s where a lot of us first learned to talk to strangers, and to a boss.
• Youth clubs. His review describes youth clubs, libraries and community centres closing, and youth services being cut. (If you’re interested in what happened to youth clubs, read: ’Up the Youth Club’ by Emma Warren: A hidden history of UK youth clubs.) 
• Drama. Its share of A-level entries has fallen 58% since 2010, according to the Campaign for the Arts.
• Speaking in English lessons. Since 2014, the spoken part of GCSE English Language hasn’t counted towards the final grade.
• Work experience. In some places, Milburn was told, it now depends on who your parents know.
• Face-to-face time. The pandemic took it away at exactly the age when you learn about interacting and engaging with people.

So it’s no surprise that when the National Literacy Trust surveyed more than 105,000 UK 8 to 18-year-olds in 2025, only four in ten felt good at speaking in front of an audience. Or that in the Institute of Student Employers’ 2025 survey, 42% of employers said school and college leavers fell short on verbal communication, up from 22% two years earlier.

It becomes a loop. Speaking up makes you anxious, so you avoid it. You avoid it, so you never get the practice. Without the practice, the next time is even harder. 

Do this: build young people’s confidence and skills

None of that means we should just wait for the system to fix itself. Young people need chances to practise now, and that’s something we can all get on with.

Young people say so themselves – and not just to us. In Milburn’s survey, 64% said skills like speaking would make a real difference when applying for jobs. And the oracy charity Voice 21 found that teaching speaking skills directly builds confidence.

We see it in our own work:

• At our holiday drama club in East Sussex, which we run with Dragon Drama, young people come back year after year. We’ve watched huge changes in their confidence, in how they work together and in how they speak up for themselves. (It’s joyous!)
• At Wakehurst, we’ve spent the last three summers helping work experience students turn their week into a podcast. One student, Swasti, told us she started the week nervous and finished it feeling a lot more confident talking to people.
• In our media training workshops, charities’ youth ambassadors rehearse live interviews until the nerves stop getting in the way. We’ve written more about media training for youth ambassadors.

What these have in common is simple: real tasks, a safe space, and adults who take young people seriously.

Do this too: what employers, schools and funders need to change

I don’t want to pretend a workshop fixes a jobs market. If we only ever work on young people, we’re telling them the problem is them. It isn’t. Here’s what else needs to happen.

Young people at Make (Good) Trouble’s drama club using creativity and teamwork skills to make a boat from sticks in the forest

If you’re an employer:

• Reply to applicants. Young people told Milburn that silence is worse than rejection, because a rejection at least gives you something to work with. 
• Look again at any ‘entry-level’ job that asks for experience. 
• Put a human being somewhere in your recruitment process.
• Offer work experience with real tasks in it, and open it up to young people whose parents don’t have contacts.

If you run a school, or set the rules for schools:

• Make room for speaking, drama and the arts. They’re where a lot of young people learn to be heard.
• Treat work experience and careers guidance as core, not an afterthought.

Do you hold the purse strings?

• Fund the places where young people get to practise being themselves: youth clubs, holiday clubs, community spaces.

And all of us:

• Change the story we tell. Milburn rejects the caricature of a generation that isn’t interested in work, and so do we.

His final recommendations are due later in 2026. We’ll be watching for them.

Young people are our future

This stuff keeps me awake at night. And puts fire in our bellies to try and make a difference to the system. Milburn ends his foreword by saying that young people haven’t given up on work, so we mustn’t give up on them. We couldn’t agree more.

The young people we meet are full of potential, energy, ideas. They are our future. Let’s invest in them, by building their confidence and skills, and by fixing what’s stacked against them.

If you’d like to help us get this message out there (you could start by sharing this post!) or talk about workshops for the young people you work with, we’d love to hear from you, so please get in touch.