51³Ô¹ÏÍø

Holly Clarke, PhD student at the Mohn Centre for Children's Health and Wellbeing, recently spoke to young people with lived experience of being not in education, employment or training (NEET). They shared their thoughts on why young people become NEET and how it can affect their health and wellbeing - and together, brought those conversations to life in a short co-produced animation.

For my PhD, I'm asking three questions: what different paths do young people take from education into work, what predicts which path they follow, and how do these paths affect their health later in life. To do this, I use data from a large survey, , which follows the same young people year after year. It tracks whether they're working, studying, or doing neither, at every age from 16 to 24. Followed over time like this, people's paths start to form patterns. Some young people move smoothly from full-time education into stable work. Some follow a more unstable path, moving in and out of short-term jobs. Some end up NEET, meaning they are not in education, employment or training.

To help answer these questions, I ran three workshops, supported by Yusuf Ibrahim and Esta Orchard, with a group of young people aged 16 to 19 with lived experience of being NEET. We worked with the Youth Justice & Prevention Service at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea's Targeted Prevention Team, who work closely with young people in this position. We asked about their experiences, what they felt were the reasons young people become NEET, and how it can affect their health and wellbeing.

The group agreed that becoming NEET is rarely down to one reason. It's usually a build-up of things over time, including problems at school, mental health difficulties, neurodivergence, money worries, and pressures at home. For some, school wasn't always safe or supportive, either. Several talked about bullying that was never addressed, and about a lack of understanding around autism. As described by one individual: "I needed support, they kicked me out."

The group also agreed being out of school and work can take a toll on health. Disrupted sleep, heavy phone use or gaming, and a loss of purpose all came up. As one young person explained, "you lose the spirit to want to work, you lose the spirit to want to do things."

This reflects what's happening nationally too. Research shows that health and work are closely linked; poor health can stop someone from working, and being out of work can be bad for health. Across the UK, around one in eight young people, just under a million, are NEET, and the share of them reporting a health condition that limits their ability to work has risen, from 26% in 2015 to 44% in 2025.

These conversations have helped shape my PhD research. The reasons given for becoming NEET are things I'm looking to test as predictors of the education and employment paths young people follow. I will also test whether some of the things they described, such as disrupted sleep, act as mediators between being NEET and health. Furthermore, the reasons the group gave for becoming NEET were rarely one thing and were usually a combination of factors that had been building for years beforehand. This helped justify why I'm using a trajectory approach.

The workshops also gave me a different perspective. Young people who are NEET are often hard to reach, so it was valuable to have their input inform my research. I've learnt that analysing data alone does not capture the complexity behind individual experiences - hearing directly from young people added important context to the numbers. Combining these conversations with the survey data gives a fuller picture of the challenges young people face.

We are grateful to the Kensington and Chelsea Targeted Prevention Team for making these conversations possible. Together with the group, we turned some of these themes into a short animation. We hope this shows young people's views and helps start wider conversations about being NEET and its relationship with health and wellbeing.