A generation at a crossroads
Youth unemployment in the United Kingdom has reached its highest level in over a decade. With over 16% of 16- to 24-year-olds now unemployed, and over one million young people classified as Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET), the equivalent of one in eight of that cohort, the scale of the challenge facing both government and its delivery partners is significant and urgent. These numbers are thrown into relief in the international context. The UK’s NEET rate is around double that of Ireland and approximately three times the rate recorded in the Netherlands.
The Government has recognised the urgency the situation requires. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has made youth provision a central pillar of its employment support agenda. The £11.5 billion Youth Guarantee, spanning wage subsidies, apprenticeships and training programmes, signals serious intent. Test and Learn pilots and trailblazers are being used to understand what works in moving young people into work. Meanwhile, the recently published interim report from the Milburn Review was commissioned to investigate the root causes of the rise in NEETs. Looking ahead, future youth employment support programmes after Restart are widely expected to incorporate a greater focus on support tailored to youth.
Against this background, organisations like Maximus have both a responsibility and an opportunity to contribute evidence-based insights to a policy discourse that is still taking shape, and to advocate for approaches that we know, from direct frontline experience, are most likely to make a lasting impact.
What Restart tells us about young people
The Restart Scheme has provided Maximus with a uniquely rich evidence base. Drawing on data and focus group evidence from our delivery in West Yorkshire and East London, we have undertaken a detailed analysis of young people aged 18 to 24 years old who have participated in Restart through our direct provision since 2021.
The most striking finding from our analysis is that young Restart participants perform strongly in entering the labour market, with higher job start rates than on average. Once engaged within the scheme, young people are relatively effective at securing their first position in the workforce.
However, a second key finding follows this initial entry into the workplace. Although young people perform strongly at job entry, the second part of this process is sustainment. Here, we see greater challenges for young people in the workplace.
The pattern is corroborated by our Employment Advisors and widely identified by labour market literature. Access does not appear to be the primary challenge, but instead it is retention. The majority of young people can successfully enter the labour force but often struggle to sustain employment. The challenge lies in what happens after those first critical weeks: when workplace norms are unfamiliar and anxieties can intensify. This moment is when the absence of support could tip the balance between staying with or leaving an employer.
We know from delivery of other programmes the real value of in-work support and strong workplace health provision, and our teams have worked to offer additional support to help address barriers to sustainment in work.
Mental health: a barrier that does not end at the job start
Analysis conducted by Maximus identifies mental health as a defining barrier for young Restart participants. Mental health is not solely a recruitment problem, and these challenges do not dissipate once an individual starts a job. For many young people, the early stages of employment can be a stressful period: navigating unfamiliar workplace expectations, managing new responsibilities and balancing this against their personal lives. Notably, these pressures can be acute for those with unhappy experiences of education, little or no employment history, or undiagnosed neurodiversity.
Our frontline evidence makes clear that a job start without adequate in-work support can be a fragile foundation. It is likely that young people are not leaving jobs because they lack motivation or ambition. They are leaving because of wider issues and challenges, many of which may not have been identified or significant during their job search.
Perhaps the most relevant finding from our research is that barriers to employment are not uniformly experienced across the youth cohort. Disaggregating by gender and ethnicity reveals important differences that a standardised one size fits all approach struggles to address. For gender, the data is clear: almost half of all young women in our cohort reported at least one mental health factor as a barrier to employment, compared to one third for their male counterparts. For ethnicity, the picture is more nuanced, with different communities facing unique challenges that require tailored interventions to address these issues.
How to strengthen youth outcomes
Translating this analysis into action, Maximus’s research sets out an agenda for strengthening youth outcomes. Our teams are already exploring opportunities to innovate and test new interventions and approaches, driven by the feedback of frontline teams and advisers.
It is vital that Employment Advisers are able to identify core barriers early and direct young people to clearly defined support pathways, rather than relying on uniform provision that treats a diverse cohort as a single group. For those at greatest risk of disengagement, a first-steps model of short, low-intensity engagement could be introduced to build confidence and momentum before progressing to more intensive activity.
The model of employment support itself needs to combine mainstream employability assistance with trusted community voices, and responsive, targeted interventions tailored to individual need, ensuring that provision is equitable rather than merely equal and standardised. Innovative approaches, such as the Community Partnership Network Maximus operates, can support this. Critically, structured in-work support should be prioritised where needed with proactive contact in the first six weeks of employment specifically designed to mitigate the instability that the data shows is most likely to derail young people at this stage.
Together, these measures would build on the foundations of the Restart model by ensuring that the ambition of young people to enter the workplace is matched by the support they need to stay there.
