A report that should arrest us
This morning Alan Milburn launched the Young people and work interim report. I tuned in to hear his speech and the follow-up Q&A, and I’d recommend you find the time not only to read the report but to listen to him speak to it.
It is arresting stuff. Not only because of the scale of the crisis being described, though the scale is staggering, and not only because of the policy detail, though there is plenty there worth wrestling with. But what especially struck me today was the moral seriousness with which Alan spoke about young people who are quietly disappearing from participation in the life of the country.
Over the last phase of my time at DWP, I shared my time between the team supporting this review and the jobs and careers service. Mine was a small contribution in the scheme of things, but enough to see at close quarters the seriousness, care and determination Alan and his team have brought to it. It also means I am not a wholly impartial observer. I want this report, and the final report coming later in the year, to be read carefully, argued with seriously, and met with a level of response that matches the gravity of what it describes.
Because this is a report that asks important questions:
What happens to a society when more than one million young people are outside education, employment or training?
What happens when the pathways into adulthood no longer reliably function?
What happens when institutions each hold fragments of a person’s story, but nobody holds the whole?
And perhaps most importantly: what kind of country are we becoming if we learn to normalise this?
The review’s argument is not that this requires a temporary focus or a short-term policy tweak around the edges. We’ve been here before, oscillating between panic and amnesia. We briefly notice a crisis, announce something, fund something, brand something, and then move on before anything has changed.
No, the argument is that there has been a structural break in how young people move into work, confidence, belonging and adult life, and therefore structural change has to be the response. And that means harder questions to answer about institutions, relationships, participation, and the kind of social fabric that is required for young people to flourish.
This should arrest government.
But that is the minimum we should expect from a report like this.
The question I want to press here is not first what government should do next, but what the Church should hear in all this.
Because it should also arrest the Church.
One million is a number, some one has a name
The latest ONS figures put the number of young people aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training at 1,012,000.
At that scale, the figure becomes anaesthetising. It belongs to news bulletins, select committees and spending reviews. It becomes something for the machinery of the state to deal with.
But bring it a bit closer.
Spread a figure like that across the country’s few hundred local authorities, and now the impossible national number looks like a few thousand young people.
Bring it closer again.
Here in Croydon, with a couple of hundred churches across the borough, it starts to sound less like an abstraction and more like names.
That maths is rough, of course. Young people are not units to be allocated and churches are not franchises of the public sector. Some are tiny and stretched. Some are already shouldering deep local pain. Some of those churches are doing amazing work leaning into their gifts for youth work, family support, mentoring, refugee and asylum welcome, pastoral care, prayer, employer connections or community organising.
But the maths offers something important nonetheless.
One million sounds impossible.
Twenty sounds like names.
And that is a better place for the Church to begin.
With names.
Because that is how Jesus teaches us to see people.
A crisis of participation
The report is not just about unemployment. It is about participation: who gets to take part in the life of the country, who is left outside it, and what happens when the systems meant to carry people into adult life stop doing that reliably.
It describes a labour market where the first rung is thinning out. Entry-level jobs now demand greater experience. Recruitment is remote, automated and filtered. The young person who might once have walked into a shop clutching an application, spoken to a manager and been given a chance is now often rejected before another person has looked them in the eye.
It describes an education system that can see risk early but does not always have the incentives, capacity or connective tissue to respond early. Absence, SEND, family adversity, poor mental health, weak exposure to work: these things do not suddenly appear at 16. They accumulate. A young person does not simply “become NEET” as though a switch is flicked on a birthday. Shamefully and scandalously, their path has often been forming for years.
It describes a health system increasingly overwhelmed by the needs of young people, especially around mental health, disability and neurodiversity. But it also describes a deeper problem: treatment without participation. Diagnosis without belonging. A fit note without a future. A system that can name what is wrong more readily than it can help someone discover what is still possible.
It describes a welfare system that must, rightly, protect those who cannot work, but which too often pays attention to incapacity without building pathways of capability. Our institutions end up holding fragments of a life while no one holds the whole person. And our failings are not only cultural. They show up in our priorities too, with the report showing around 25 times more is spent on benefits than on employment support for young people.
Most painfully, it describes young people who are not refusing life. As the voices captured in the companion report Inside the Mind of a Young NEET make clear, many want work, learning, purpose and contribution. They are not idle so much as tired: tired of applying and hearing nothing back, tired of repeating their story, tired of being assessed, referred, paused, categorised and dropped, tired of being treated as a problem before they have been recognised as a person.
That word matters: recognised.
Recognition is something that has kept cropping up during my time at DWP because underneath it sits a question about aspiration.
Aspiration is relational
We say young people need aspiration. Families need aspiration. Communities need aspiration.
There is truth in that, but used carelessly the word becomes a way of locating the problem inside the person with the least power. They have not wanted enough. Tried enough. Dreamed enough. Presented themselves well enough. Built the network. Found the confidence. Opened the next step.
This fails to engage the other side of that equation: the system itself and our aspiration on their behalf. Have we wanted enough for them? Have we tried enough? Dreamed enough? Presented our offer well enough? Identified their network? Built up their confidence? Signposted their next step?
But this also makes aspiration a problem of motivation.
I think it is relational.
People learn what is possible because it is other people who hold open a future for them before they can hold it open for themselves.
A child learns aspiration when someone notices a gift before it is polished. A teenager learns it when their awkwardness is not mistaken for a lack of promise. A young person learns it when a moment of failure does not mean abandonment. A family learns it when care doesn’t only show up at the point of crisis. A community learns it when it contains places people can grow into, not only places they are trying to escape.
That is why this report should be arresting for my brothers and sisters in Christ.
Because, at our best, this is exactly the kind of people we are meant to be.
What the Church can see
The Church is not an employment service. It is not a school, CAMHS, a council youth service or a substitute for a properly functioning welfare state. It must not become an easy alibi for public disinvestment, as though the answer to broken systems is simply for the voluntary sector to do more with less.
But the Church is a body.
And bodies notice when parts are cut off.
The Church is a household.
And households know when someone is missing from the table.
The Church is a people formed around the conviction that every person bears a dignity that is given, not earned. A young person’s worth does not arrive with confidence, qualifications, employability or polish. It is already there, and Christian community exists to recognise it, honour it and help it grow.
The Church is intergenerational. That is not a lifestyle preference. It is part of its witness. Babies, children, teenagers, students, single adults, parents, aunties, uncles, grandparents, widows, people in work, people out of work, people with too much to do, people wondering what they are for now. In a society increasingly sorted by age, income, anxiety and algorithm, the Church is one of the few remaining places where a young person might be known by adults who are not paid to know them.
That matters.
It matters that someone notices the 14-year-old who has stopped coming.
It matters that someone can say, “You’re good with children. Have you ever thought about early years?”
It matters that someone can say, “Come and help me set up the sound desk.”
It matters that someone can say, “I know a builder who might let you shadow and build up some experience.”
It matters that someone can say, “Your anxiety is real, but it is not the whole truth about you.”
It matters that someone can sit with a parent who is exhausted by school meetings, assessment delays, forms, thresholds and acronyms.
It matters that a church can be a place where confidence is rebuilt in almost invisible increments: stacking chairs, serving coffee, leading prayer, helping with kids work, joining the worship team, supporting someone else to learn English, making lunch, visiting someone lonely, learning to arrive on time, learning to be relied upon, learning that contribution is possible before employment is secured.
These are mustard-seed things.
Mustard seeds and systems
Jesus compared the kingdom of God to a mustard seed: tiny when it is planted, but growing into something with branches large enough for birds to perch in its shade.
The point is not that smallness is holy in itself. The point is that we often misunderstand how the kingdom grows. It begins in hiddenness, soil, patience and place, and becomes shelter.
We tend to think scale means centralisation, visibility and a model that can be rolled out nationally. Sometimes those things do work out well. Machinery and institutions have value. Funding and accountability are definitely important. Fixing data and the underlying national plumbing on which good services rely are non-negotiable.
But one of the strongest things in this work is the insistence that it cannot be solved by any one institution acting alone. Government, employers, schools, health services, welfare systems, charities, communities, families and faith groups all have a part to play.
And it is incomprehensible to me that the Church would hear this diagnosis and not immediately ask what our part is.
Not because we’re angling to replace the state or claim the ability to sort out the labour market. It’s because the story we have to tell has everything to do with participation, belonging, hope, and a kingdom that grows differently.
The Kingdom of Heaven grows when something is planted.
What does that planting look like? It looks like the steady work of what churches are always up to: A person encouraged. A family supported. A young person introduced to an employer. A teenager trusted with responsibility. A child prayed for by name. A parent given rest. A youth worker showing up reliably time after time. A congregation receiving young people as active parts of their community now, not as a risk to manage or a future asset to retain.
One of the report’s sharpest diagnoses is that Britain lacks a participation system. The Church is not going to build that system on its own. But in countless ordinary, local and often unremarked ways, churches are already practising participation rather than merely talking about it.
Churches are communities where participation is not reserved for the already confident. They’re communities where contribution is not only for the already employable. They’re communities where people aren’t left alone to translate their wounds into acceptable institutional language before anyone helps them. They’re communities where the question is not only “what can you do?” but “who are you becoming, and how do we walk with you?”
None of this is sentimental, and it will be difficult even when the national figure is brought down to the scale of a local church community. Some young people will not respond neatly. Some situations will be more complicated than a local church can hold. Safeguarding must never be improvised. Churches will need humility, training, partnership and proper boundaries. They will need to actively collaborate with schools, colleges, councils, youth services, employers, mental health services and local charities.
But the alternative is worse.
The alternative is that churches read the headlines, lament the state of the nation, perhaps pray in general terms for young people, content themselves with their existing kids and youth work, only to then carry on as though the crisis is somewhere else.
It is not somewhere else.
It is in our boroughs, towns, estates, schools, colleges, families and pews. It is in the young person who has slipped through the cracks of society’s institutions. The cousin who cannot get an interview despite hundreds of applications. The child whose anxiety is turning into a refusal to go to school. The parent who is losing hope. The teenager who has never met an adult in work who could imagine a path for them. The young adult who is not in education, not in work, not claiming support, and not visible to any system at all.
What churches might do
Start by reading the report. Not as policy homework, but as an act of attention.
Then ask better questions.
Who are the young people already connected to us who are drifting? Who haven’t we seen recently? Which families are carrying anxiety about school, work, disability, mental health or the future? Which young people in our congregation have never had a serious conversation with an adult about vocation, work, gifts and adulthood?
Then gather the adults who are already part of the answer.
Which employers are already in our churches? Which teachers, social workers, youth workers, work coaches, nurses, counsellors, business owners and public servants are already engaging with pieces of this societal need?
What would happen if we all read the report, then got into a room with our young people, listened carefully, prayed, and acted?
So begin small and concrete.
What responsibilities could we give young people now? What work experience could we broker? What mentoring could we offer without making it strange? What would it mean to know the local college? What would it mean to ask the council what they are seeing? What would it mean to partner with organisations already doing this well, rather than inventing something because our church prefers its own logo?
And see the transition into adult life for what it is: a discipleship issue.
Discipleship is not less than prayer, worship, Scripture and holiness. But it is more than private piety. It is learning to live truthfully before God and neighbour. It is learning how to carry responsibility without being crushed by it. It is discovering gifts and offering them in love. It is becoming the kind of person who can participate in the life of the world.
Young people do not need churches that simply tell them to be more successful.
They need churches that tell them they are beloved before they succeed.
They need churches that tell them their life is gift before it is output.
They need churches that tell them work can be good without making work into salvation.
They need churches that understand rest without blessing disengagement.
They need churches that honour disability without closing down possibility.
They need churches that can tell the truth about what is stacked against them without telling them they are powerless.
They need churches that can keep hope alive long enough for them to believe they are not beyond it.
Branches for shade
The mustard seed comes to life when planted.
Not admired. Not preached about. Planted.
In soil. In place. In relationships. In the patient, mundane faithfulness of people who decide that the young people near them are not someone else’s responsibility.
The branches do not appear overnight. Shade takes time.
But somewhere the seed has to go into the ground.
And if the Church cannot hear a call in more than one million young lives waiting outside the ordinary routes into participation, confidence and contribution, then we are missing something very important about the role of the Church.
Not because the Church exists to replace the state or fix the labour market.
But because the Church exists to bear witness to the kingdom.
And the kingdom has branches.
And the branches are for shade.