Office for National Statistics written evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee inquiry into youth employment, education and training

Dear Ms Abrahams,

As Director General for Surveys and Economic Statistics at the Office for National Statistics (ONS), I am responding to the Work and Pensions Committee’s call for evidence for the inquiry into youth employment, education and training.

NEET Statistics

As the Committee will be aware, the ONS is the UK’s National Statistical Institute, and largest producer of official statistics. Statistics relating to young people not in employment, education or training (NEET) are a devolved matter, with responsibility for NEET statistics falling to the devolved governments for their respective countries and the Department for Education (DfE) for England.

These different authorities do not use a common methodology for producing their own NEET statistics. This is largely because they do not have the same policies and conditions relating to when people can leave education. Consequently, the likelihood of different young people being NEET in each country is due in part to these different policies. 

Each country produces its own set of NEET statistics, using their own methodology, that they feel are appropriate in the context of the education policies in that country.

With the agreement of the authorities responsible for NEET statistics in each country, the ONS produce and publish a limited set of UK NEET statistics. The method used is a single methodology agreed across the responsible authorities, based on quarterly Labour Force Survey (LFS) interviews, only for the production of this limited set of UK NEET statistics. As such it does not necessarily reflect the method used in each of the countries, which may make use of additional data sources, versions of datasets compiled at different frequencies, and differing presentations of age relative to the school year or chronological age. Consequently, the resulting UK NEET statistics are not equal to the sum of the NEET statistics produced in each country using their own methodology.

Young people who are NEET may either be unemployed, that is, not employed but actively seeking work and available to start work, or economically inactive, that is, not employed and not actively seeking work or available to start work.

Are there some young people who are more likely to be NEET than others?

In the latest release, for the three-month period October to December 2025, we estimated there were 957,000 young people aged 16 to 24 years who were NEET in the UK, accounting for 12.8% of people in that age group. Of these, an estimated 411,000 were unemployed and 547,000 were economically inactive. Since the pandemic period, the number and proportion of young people who are NEET has increased, but the trend has been relatively flat for the last two years with a small increase in the latest quarter.

Young people aged 16 to 17 years are the least likely to be NEET, largely because of policies relating to the conditions for leaving full-time education. Around 70,000 young people aged 16 to 17 are NEET, which represents between 1 in 25 and 1 in 20 of this age group. Young men aged 16 to 17 years are more likely to be NEET than women.

Around 890,000 or 1 in 7 young people aged 18 to 24 are NEET. Of these people, around 2 in 5 are unemployed, which means they are currently actively seeking work, with the remaining 3 in 5 not currently seeking employment.

As with the younger age group, young men aged 18 to 24 are more likely to be NEET than young women. However, young men who are NEET are more likely to be seeking work than the young women. Consequently, a slightly higher proportion of young women are NEET and not seeking work than men.

As part of our broader work to maximise the use of available data to strengthen our understanding of the labour market, the ONS is undertaking a small project using 2021 Census data linked with health, education and labour market records. This work will provide additional insights into NEETs in England and support the Young People in Work (Milburn) Review, commissioned by the Government in November 2025. We will provide further updates as the project progresses.

We hope this is useful to the Committee’s inquiry. Please do not hesitate to contact us if we can be of any further assistance.

Yours sincerely,

James Benford