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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 in their boat built from sticks at the Make (Good) Trouble and Dragon Drama Holiday Club in Friston Forest, East Sussex

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.

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For the last three summers, we’ve packed up our microphones and headed to Wakehurst – part of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, tucked into the Sussex countryside – to spend a day with their Work Experience students. Our job: help them turn a week of hands-on learning into a podcast. Their job: tell us what it’s like to work, for real, for the first time.

Every year, we come away thinking the same thing. Good work experience isn’t a box to tick. Done properly, it’s one of the most valuable weeks a young person can have.

What is a Make (Good) Trouble workshop?

A Make (Good) Trouble workshop is a one-day podcast and storytelling session that helps young people on work experience placements make sense of what they’ve learned, build confidence in talking about their own achievements, and come away with a polished podcast episode and a written piece for their CV. We work with schools, charities and employers running work experience placements for 14–18 year olds, and we’d love to bring it to yours – get in touch to find out more. (We also run other kinds of creative workshops) 

The stuff school doesn’t teach you

You can learn a lot in a classroom. But nobody hands you a worksheet on how to introduce yourself to a room full of strangers, how to keep your cool when forty excited children are all asking questions at once, or how to pitch your own idea for a social media post and then see it go live.

That’s the gap Wakehurst’s work experience programme fills – and it’s why we love working with them.

Take Swasti, who worked with the visitor experience and commercial team: “At the beginning of the week, I was actually quite nervous… but as the week went by and I started looking at the other staff and how they do everything, now I feel a lot more confident to talk to people.” By the end of the week, she was guiding visitors around the site and running the till in the plant centre – real responsibility, not busywork.

Or Arthur, who spent his week in marketing and communications: “It gave me a brilliant sense of what the working environment here at Wakehurst is… my favourite part was creating social media posts because I got to go outside, look at it, do the research, and then put together, completely on my own, a social media post.”Knowing his work would be published – on Wakehurst’s Instagram and Facebook – gave him, in his words, “a sense of achievement.”

That’s the difference between shadowing someone and doing the job. Wakehurst trusts these young people with genuine tasks and ownership, and it shows in how they talk about their week.

Confidence, teamwork, and finding your voice

Ask any employer what they wish young candidates arrived with, and “confidence to contribute” will be near the top of the list. It’s also one of the hardest things to teach – you can’t fake your way into it. You have to be given the chance to practise it.

Charlotte, who worked in the learning department, ended up doing far more than she expected: “At the start of the week, I was definitely expecting to play a small role… however, I actually played a much bigger role when I was with some teachers. I even helped to teach some lessons, and I added a lot of extra information that I think was useful.” She wasn’t just tolerated – she was genuinely useful, wrangling school groups, transporting equipment, and even fielding a memorable case of mistaken identity during pond dipping (turns out excited eight-year-olds are very keen for a newt to be an axolotl).

Holly, working with the Marcoms team, put her finger on something we hear every year: “Everyone that works here… speaks well of what they do and loves what they do and is really passionate about it. It really rubs off on you.” Being surrounded by people who genuinely enjoy their jobs is its own kind of education – one no textbook can offer.

The nature effect

There’s another ingredient that makes Wakehurst’s placements stand out: it’s all happening outdoors, in one of the most beautiful landscapes in the country.

Sammy, who worked in the learning department, put it simply: “It’s made me feel happier just being outside quite a lot and quite at peace with the world… it’s helped improve my well-being.” Hannah, who worked in the Millennium Seed Bank, described how the experience shifted her whole perspective: “You can get a bit caught up in climate anxiety, but actually to be able to do something so hands-on and impactful… it’s made me feel really inspired that there are things that I can do.”

Abby, who spent her week in the seed bank’s lab, felt the same connection deepen: “After spending time with all the seeds and learning about how many species of plant are actually so critically endangered, I feel a lot more connected to the plants around me… it makes me feel like I need to do more work to protect the environment.”

This is where the real magic happens – young people don’t just leave with a stronger CV. They leave as genuine advocates for conservation, carrying Wakehurst’s mission with them long after the week ends.

Wakehurst work experience students recording sound effects - a buzzing bee - in the botanic garden

Work Experience students recording the sound of a bee at Wakehurst.

From placement to podcast

Our role is to help capture all of this before it fades. On the final day of each placement, we run a one-day workshop designed to help students make sense of what they’ve just experienced. We start with interview techniques training and show them how to use recording equipment, then the group spends the day interviewing each other, describing their week, and gathering sound effects from the gardens to build a real aural picture of their placement.

The result is two things: a podcast that gives listeners a genuine feel for life as a work experience student at Wakehurst – across horticulture, retail, education, marketing and the Millennium Seed Bank – and a written piece they can put straight on their CV.

It’s also, often, the first time these young people have been asked to reflect properly on their own work and articulate what they’ve learned. That skill – being able to talk confidently about your own experience – is one that will serve them in every job interview they ever do.

As Hannah put it, thinking back to reapplying after being unsuccessful the first time: “I think keep going if it’s something that you think you’ll enjoy. It’s worth it.”

Listen for yourself

Evergreen Appreciation – by Abi, Charlotte, Swasti, Arthur and Sammy, with additional sound effects by Ellen 🎧 Listen on SoundCloud

Germination, Communication and Everything in Between – by Holly, Sophia, Hannah and Lauren 🎧Listen on SoundCloud

Why this matters right now

We believe strongly in helping young people onto the work ladder – responsibly, and with real substance behind it. That matters more than ever. Entry-level jobs are getting harder to come by, and for a lot of young people, a well-run work placement is the only chance they get to find out what a workplace feels like before they’re expected to walk into one for good.

Wakehurst’s approach shows what’s possible when an organisation takes that responsibility seriously: real tasks, trust, and reflection at the end of it. The result is a group of confident, articulate ambassadors – for Wakehurst, for conservation, and for the idea that young people deserve to be taken seriously at work.

FAQs about our work experience workshops

How long is a Make (Good) Trouble workshop?

It’s a one-day workshop, usually run on the final day of a work experience placement, so students can reflect on the whole week while it’s fresh.

What age group is it suitable for?

We usually work with young people aged 14–19, matching the age range of most school and organisational work experience placements.

What do students come away with?

A finished podcast episode, a written piece they can add straight to their CV, and practical interview, communication and storytelling skills they’ll use in future job applications.

Do students need any experience with audio or podcasting?

None at all. We start from scratch with interview techniques training and how to use the recording equipment, so no prior experience is needed.

Can we run this alongside our own work experience programme?

Yes, the workshop is designed to sit on top of an existing placement, whatever the sector, to help students process and articulate what they’ve learned.

Get in touch

If you’re interested in us augmenting your organisation’s work placements with a Make (Good) Trouble workshop, get in touch.

Wakehurst work placements are open to young people aged 14–18. Contact wakehurstworkexperience@kew.org for information on how to apply.