How Can Schools Tackle the NEET Crisis? | In Conversation with Shuab Gamote

Kai Vacher (0:00)

What happens when a young person reaches the edge of school and finds that the next step is not a ladder, but a snake?

Welcome to the Educators' Corner. I'm Kai Vacher, and today we are exploring that issue with Shuab Gamote, researcher, policy advisor and co-author with Peter Hyman of two fascinating reports published in the last 12 months. The first one published in November 25, Inside the Mind of a 16-Year-Old, and the second one published more recently, Inside the Mind of a Young NEET. Today, we're going to focus more on the second report, Inside the Mind of a NEET. And for our listeners around the world, if you're wondering what NEET means in this context, it refers to people aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training.

I'm aware that some of our listeners in India will have a different interpretation of that phrase. Okay, drawing on more than 400 conversations with young people across the UK, the report challenges us to move beyond labels and ask harder questions about transition, opportunity, belonging and care. And while the research is based in the UK, its implications are international. Too many young people around the world are finding that the route from school to a secure and purposeful adult life is far less certain than it should be. Hello, Shuab. How is your week shaping up?

Shuab Gamote (1:32)

It's been a busy week. I'm working on a few different projects at the moment. But I think the most interesting and relevant for this is I'm working on a Commission on Boys in Education that's being chaired by Peter Hyman and has a great set of commissioners. And we're currently putting together our Youth Expert Board, which is definitely keeping me busy.

Kai Vacher (1:51)

Really looking forward to seeing how that work unfolds. Now, your report, Inside the Mind of a NEET, it speaks of too many snakes and not enough ladders. And it's actually based on listening to more than 400 people across the UK.

When you were doing this, I think you described it as a deep listening exercise. I really love that. What did you hear that surprised you the most?

Shuab Gamote (2:19)

I think, yeah, so, I mean, on the deep listening point, it's interesting because when I first started doing this kind of project and working on this with Peter, I used the word radical listening as a term, which was kind of in jest because someone used to say radical joy to me. I was like, what's radical about joy? It's just joy. But the point was that people don't feel joy a lot and people don't listen a lot, especially to young people.

But I think the biggest surprise we're going in was that there was not a lack of ambition. Going in to this piece of research a month before we started, I had the gruesome task of going around London and doing street interviews and asking people why they thought one million young people were not in employment, education or training. The vast majority of people's natural instinct and reaction was to blame the young people in some way. They need to work a little bit harder, have a little bit more confidence, just take that first step. But the reality is the majority of these young people do not have that condition. More than 90% of the young people we surveyed internally said that they wanted a job. They saw work as more than just money. They saw it as giving them purpose, giving them routine.

And most of them were working incredibly hard to achieve that goal. So we'll get into this in a little bit more detail I think later on. But in terms of the vast majority of young people who were ready for work at the moment and didn't need a lot of support, those young people were applying to tens of jobs a month and getting no responses and kind of finding themselves in this rejection economy. So I think the biggest surprise for me was how desperately they wanted to work and what they saw as the importance of work without actually having a job before.

Kai Vacher (3:57)

I think that's a really important finding from the report. And I think you're already demonstrating how important it is to radically listen or to deeply listen to young people rather than leap to sweeping judgments. I mean, we've all heard the term snowflake and how it seems that some people are very negative about young people and can write them off into, oh, they're just a bunch of snowflakes. What do you think the adults most often misunderstand about young people described as NEET? I mean, maybe you've answered there in terms of the lack of ambition.