Bridging the Gap
What is already in motion, what is missing, and what it would take to build something that outlasts a funding cycle.
Over the past five articles I have laid out the shape of this problem from several angles: the numbers that have not moved, the promises that were not kept, the private sector involvement that was diluted, the digital skills gap that widened, and the alternative value systems that are out competing the traditional pathway. This final piece is about direction.
I am not going to pretend to have a comprehensive policy blueprint. I do not think anyone does, and I am wary of people who claim to. What I have is a decade of experience delivering skills training to young people, lived experience of being a NEET myself, and a clear view of where the gaps sit between what is being announced and what is actually reaching the people who need it.
Let me start with what is already happening, because there is genuine momentum right now and it deserves honest acknowledgement.
What Is Already in Motion
In the past few months, the government has announced the most significant youth employment intervention in years. The £1 billion package announced in March 2026 includes a £3,000 Youth Jobs Grant for employers hiring 18 to 24 year olds who have been on Universal Credit for six months or more, an expanded Jobs Guarantee now covering all eligible 18 to 24 year olds (previously capped at 21), a £2,000 apprenticeship incentive for SMEs taking on under-25s, and new foundation apprenticeships in hospitality and retail. The total investment in the Youth Guarantee and Growth and Skills Levy now stands at £2.5 billion over three years, targeting up to 500,000 opportunities.
The National Youth Strategy has been published for the first time in two decades, explicitly recognising youth workers as essential infrastructure. Fifty Young Futures Hubs are being rolled out by 2029, and £350 million has been committed to building or refurbishing 250 youth facilities. The Milburn Review into youth inactivity is due to deliver its interim findings this spring.
This is real money, real structural commitment, and a level of coordinated policy attention that the youth employment sector has not seen in a very long time. I want to be clear about that, because dismissing it would be unfair and unhelpful.
However there are gaps. The IFS (Institute of Fiscal Studies) has pointed out that the wage subsidies and jobs guarantees are likely to directly reach only a proportion of the nearly one million young people who are NEET. Around 280,000 NEET young people are not on out-of-work benefits at all, which means they are invisible to a system built around Universal Credit eligibility. A further 320,000 are on UC but are not required to search for work, mostly due to health conditions, and DWP data from 2022 to 2025 shows that 91% of 16 to 24 year olds who have been in this group for six months were still on benefits 18 months later.
Policy is necessary, but by itself it is not sufficient. There are gaps between the announcements and the reality that need to be filled by employers, by communities, and by the people who actually work with young people face to face.
What Employers Need to Do Differently
Signing a pledge is not the same as changing how you hire.
The evidence from 2013 to 2015 was clear: what moved the needle was employers putting real resources into direct, hands-on engagement with young people, not making training materials available online and not adding a diversity statement to a careers page. It was actual programmes with actual trainers in actual rooms, connected to genuine employment pathways.
Three things would make a material difference if employers committed to them now.
First, rethink the experience requirement. If your entry-level roles require two years of prior experience, they are not entry-level. The catch-22 of needing experience to get experience was a barrier when I was starting out, and it has not gone away. AI is now automating the routine tasks that juniors used to learn on, which makes this even more pressing. Companies need to design roles that build capability from scratch rather than assuming it already exists.
Second, use the subsidies that are being offered. The £3,000 Youth Jobs Grant and the £2,000 apprenticeship incentive exist right now. The Growth and Skills Levy is opening short courses in AI, digital, and engineering from April 2026. Apprenticeships for under-25s at SMEs are fully funded. These are not charitable gestures; they are funded pathways with a commercial upside. PwC has estimated that closing regional youth employment gaps alone could deliver a £26 billion boost to GDP. The economic case is already made.
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Third, bring the trainer back into the room. Digital toolkits and self-serve platforms have their place as supplements, but they are not replacements for human-led skills development. The outcomes I saw at Freeformers came from a person standing in front of a young person and seeing them, not from a login portal or a PDF. Employers who partner with delivery organisations to provide in-person, structured training will see retention, loyalty, and capability that online modules simply cannot produce.
What the Education System Needs to Confront
The skills mismatch between what is being taught and what employers need is not new, but it is accelerating. The OECD has shown that the jobs growing fastest bear almost no resemblance to the careers most young people aspire to, and that gap has not meaningfully changed in 25 years.
Two shifts would make a significant difference.
Earlier and more sustained career exposure is essential. The echo chamber problem I described in Article 2 is not solved by a single careers day. It requires sustained contact with people from different industries, starting in primary school and continuing through secondary. The Education and Employers charity has demonstrated that even brief, well-structured encounters with working professionals can shift young people’s perceptions of what is available to them. For young people in communities like the one I grew up in, where the range of visible career paths is narrow, this kind of exposure is not a nice addition to the curriculum. It is a structural necessity.
Digital skills also need to be treated as foundational across the entire curriculum, not as a standalone subject. The ability to structure information, manage documents, communicate professionally online, and use data with confidence needs to be embedded in the same way that literacy and numeracy are. The assumption that young people are digitally skilled because they use phones needs to be challenged at every level of the education system, because as I have shown across this series, it is an assumption that is costing us £23 billion a year.
What Communities Need
750 youth centres have closed over the past decade. Youth services funding has been cut by 70%. The physical spaces where young people used to encounter different perspectives, receive informal mentorship, and discover pathways they did not know existed are largely gone.
The government’s Young Futures Hubs are a necessary start, with 50 planned by 2029. But 50 hubs for a country with nearly a million NEET young people will not break the echo chamber problem at scale.
What is needed alongside the hubs is community-level digital skills infrastructure: a network of spaces, potentially embedded within existing community centres, libraries, and faith organisations, where young people can access structured digital skills support alongside mentorship from people who have navigated similar barriers. The model that worked at Freeformers was human-centred. It placed a trained facilitator in a room with young people and built confidence alongside capability. That model can be replicated locally without waiting for a national programme to be designed, tendered, and commissioned.
And for young parents, particularly young mothers who are being priced out of the system by childcare costs, the answer is not simply more childcare funding, although that is clearly essential. It is flexible delivery. Training that works around school hours. Programmes that allow you to bring your child. Sessions that can be accessed in blocks rather than requiring a five-day-a-week commitment. The system currently assumes full-time availability, and most young parents do not have that. Programme design needs to meet them where they actually are, not where the system assumes they should be.
What I Am Creating
I did not write this series just to describe the problem. I wrote it because I have been here before, I have seen what works when it is done properly, and I can see where the bridges need to be built.
Over the coming months, I will be developing practical solutions in this space. I do not have every answer, and I would not trust anyone who claimed to. But I have a decade of delivery experience, a view of what is missing, a growing network of people who care about the same things and a serious ache to get it right for the future generations.
If you are an employer who wants to move beyond pledges and into meaningful youth skills delivery, if you are an educator frustrated by the gap between what you are teaching and what your students actually need, if you are a fellow practitioner from the Freeformers era or any other programme that produced real outcomes, or if you are a policymaker looking for insight from someone who has been both the statistic and the trainer, I would welcome the conversation.
Because if a decade has passed and we are still looking at the same numbers, writing about the problem is not enough. It is time to build the response.
