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Back to index of Nerve 20 - Summer 2012
NEETs in the News
NEETs stands for “Not in Education, Employment or Training”. It is applied to young people, usually between the ages of 16 and 21. NEETs are frequently in the news, as “shock figures” about how many of them there now are, or as the subject of schemes to turn them into unNEETs. Young people are presented as idle, feckless, and potential, if not actual, members of the criminal classes. It says a lot about society’s attitudes to young people, that they are most often publicly discussed as a collective social problem, and labelled with a derogatory acronym.
The figures for numbers of NEETs, like most statistics, are a broad generalisation. They say nothing about how long the young people have been in that situation, or why. Some are carers for disabled parents or siblings, or are themselves disabled or have a chronic health problem. Some are on a gap year or doing voluntary work – clearly not an activity that is feckless or criminal! Many young people have only a short gap between finishing one course of education and starting another, or getting a job; they may be waiting to start an apprenticeship, or some other course of training. Few are NEET for years at a time. Statistics give an inaccurate impression. They say nothing about what young people individually do to make their way into the adult world.
Reports about NEETs seldom acknowledge the historic context. Their numbers have only become high enough to be considered a problem since the 1990s. Structural changes in the economy mean there are no longer many entry level jobs that teenagers can move into straight from school, and scarcity of work in general means they face more competition as many older people are prepared to take such unskilled jobs. The education system does very little to prepare school leavers for the intense competition they will face. There are fewer apprenticeships available than there used to be and a recent investigation by BBC Panorama found some of them to be fake.
The education system itself produces future NEETs. This has been so for a long time. As long ago as 1977, Paul Willis published his book “Learning To Labour”, a study of a group of working class boys and how they felt the school system set them up to fail from the start, and so they resisted the school’s authoritarian structures by being disruptive.
It seems little has changed. A study conducted in 2008 by the Nuffield Foundation found that working class youngsters had difficulty “coping with the school’s power and authority structures” and rejected the school because they were not treated with respect or allowed to learn in the ways that suited them.
The current government has made it more difficult for young people to make a future. It abolished the Education Maintenance Allowance two years ago. More recently it has devised the so-called “youth contract” which is as coercive as the mandatory work scheme it replaced. Young people are ‘promised’ a training or education place when they leave school but will have their benefits stopped if they refuse to take one they are offered. Such a scheme is wide open to abuse by DWP officials and companies that provide the training.
FURTHER INFORMATION:
“The Rathbone/Nuffield Review Engaging Youth Enquiry 2008”. Summaries of the report can be found at www.nuffieldfoundation.org/14-19review
BBC Panorama: The Great Apprenticeship Scandal. First broadcast 6th April 2012. Available to watch until 6th April 2013 via www.bbc.co.uk
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