How Impetus shaped the Youth Guarantee

How a youth charity shaped the government’s promise that every eligible young person should be able to access education, employment or training within a set period of leaving school.

More than one million young people are currently neither learning nor earning, and although this grim statistic has been anticipated for a while, the issue is now everywhere. Whether in government reviews trying to understand causes and solutions, or in the media, debating the increasingly dire picture for young people trying to enter the labour market, “NEET” (young people not in education, employment or training) is a word on everyone’s lips.

And rightly so - youth unemployment and economic inactivity have a profound impact on young people’s lives and on the UK economy. Those who are NEET between the ages of 18-19 are 20% more likely to be unemployed even ten years later. Young people who are NEET are over-represented in substance misuse and criminal and anti-social behaviour, and show a heightened risk of later-life homelessness. The link between being NEET and ill health is also well established. In 2021, young people classed as NEET were almost twice as likely to have a health problem than the overall 16-24 population. And that’s not all. Impetus analysis recently uncovered that a young person who has experienced time NEET costs the public purse around £244,000 over their lifetime, while the NEET surge post-pandemic has cost the Government £27bn in lost GDP.

This suggests something of a “crisis”, and is the language often used by the media to describe the high numbers of young people who are currently NEET. But that term belies the entrenched and chronic nature of the issue. For at least the past twenty years, the numbers of young people who are neither learning nor earning has hovered between 16% - in the wake of the financial crash and subsequent recession – and at its lowest around 9%.

A big part of the Government’s response to this challenge is The Youth Guarantee, designed to ensure all eligible young people have access to education, employment or training within a set period of leaving school. This has led to announcements like the creation of 300,000 new work experience and training placements. But it's taken long time to get to this point - for over a decade, Impetus helped build the evidence, convene the right partners and shape the policy case that made a Youth Guarantee politically viable. Along the way, the idea was backed by two prime ministers. And while the delivery has not always matched the headline, the journey demonstrates what it takes to create lasting system change.

This blog is a case study in how policy change really happens: slowly, collectively and often unevenly. The Youth Guarantee was not the goal when this work began. It emerged through years of evidence-building, coalition leadership, political engagement and adaptation as the context changed.

Here’s how we got there:

Building the evidence on youth unemployment (2017-2019)

Long before the Youth Guarantee was conceived, Impetus was focused on understanding the scale and nature of the problem. By 2017 we had been investing in youth employment charities for seven years, and knew that solving this pernicious and persistent problem would first require understanding it better. Policy work on NEET transitions at the time was revealing, though fragmented, and lacked robust data. We wanted to change this – and our Youth Jobs Gap research series was the answer.

First, we commissioned the National Institute of Economic and Social Research to analyse the government’s newly available Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) dataset. This allowed us, for the first time, to track young people’s journeys via education, employment, and earnings data.

Next came the reports. Our first, Youth Jobs Gap: Establishing the Employment Gap, was published in 2019. It demonstrated, for the first time, that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds (those eligible for free school meals in Year 11) are twice as likely to be NEET as their better-off peers. Meanwhile, our Long-Term NEET Population report deepened our understanding of the "stickiness" of being NEET, finding that 75% of young people who have been NEET for 3 months have in fact been NEET for 12 months. We also uncovered that the differences within regions are often larger than the differences between them.

This work gave Impetus more than data: it built credibility, sharpened our understanding of the problem and strengthened our relationships across government and the youth employment sector. At this stage, we weren’t asking for a Youth Guarantee or any other solutions, the priority was to define the problem properly and build the authority needed to influence what came next.

Covid as a catalyst: Convening the Youth Employment Group (2020)

By 2020, when the Covid pandemic hit, our expertise on youth employment meant we understood the grave implications for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. In economic downturns, those most recently into work are the first out, so we knew the risk of rising NEET rates would be severe.

Because of the groundwork already in place, Impetus could move quickly. Alongside Youth Futures Foundation, Youth Employment UK, the Institute for Employment Studies, the Learning & Work Institute and The King's Trust, we set up the Youth Employment Group (YEG), now a three hundred-strong coalition of youth employment charities. We’re incredibly proud to have played a foundational role in the YEG – it’s one of our great coalition building successes.

The YEG’s strength came from shared ownership and collective expertise, and it became the platform through which hundreds of organisations could shape their crisis response. We worked with the Institute for Employment Studies to model rising NEET levels and estimate job losses, to identify the scale of intervention required, and shape the YEG’s “1000 Opportunities Campaign”. This drew attention to the fact that government would need to create a thousand additional opportunities every day to return NEET rates to pre-pandemic levels. The framing worked because it deliberately echoed the way the Covid’s impact was being tracked, placing youth employment into the same urgent public conversation while remaining economically grounded and politically actionable.

The campaign called for an ‘Opportunity Guarantee’ which the then Prime Minister Boris Johnson publicly committed to delivering.

From crisis response to a Youth Guarantee (2021 – 2023)

Following this win, the YEG began to argue for and help to define the delivery of programmes such as Kickstart and the Youth Offer, including Youth Hubs. Evaluations of these programmes in recent years have shown positive effects on helping cushion the immediate economic blows of Covid on young people. These programmes did not amount to a full guarantee, but even so, PM Johnson’s commitment was significant. It brought the concept of a Youth Guarantee into the political mainstream and showed that it was a serious, viable policy idea.

Once the immediate impact of the pandemic diminished, youth employment dropped down the political agenda. And with NEET rates stubbornly high, where there had once been energy in the face of an acute crisis, lethargy took hold. Impetus and our YEG partners realised it was time to adapt and we refreshed our strategy to ensure there was a quality employment, education or training pathway for all young people, in particular the most marginalised. We began to:

1. Set the agenda by raising the profile of labour market issues facing young people
2. Provide tools with practical guidance on issues and how to tackle them
3. Drive change in policy and activity by working with employers, local and national governments, civic society and young people.

This also required a change in tactics, shifting engagement towards the Labour Party, then in opposition, and influencing political thinking through different platforms. Around this time, the rising cost of living and implications of Brexit were becoming clearer, and so the YEG made the decision to pivot away from a crisis response, to long-term economic case-building. We recognised that alongside the social case for bringing NEET rates down, we needed a sensible and high-impact economic one.

From emergency response to long-term economic case (2023)

This meant we needed to show policymakers that a ‘guarantee’ for young people could be realistically implemented, so in 2023, Impetus led the development of the Young Person's Guarantee.

It called for support to under-25s to access employment, training or education within four months of leaving employment or formal education.

The YEG commissioned economic modelling, led by the Youth Futures Foundation, which found that if we were to reduce numbers of NEET young people to those seen in the Netherlands, the lowest of the OECD countries, we could generate around £69 billion in GDP – a figure that has risen to £86bn three years later. Firmly positioning reducing NEET rates as central to growth, central to productivity and central to economic recovery.

Drawing insights from the best-evidenced examples across Europe, we recommended five key policies necessary for the promised guarantee to become a reality:

1. Proactively supporting young people in education who are at high risk of NEET.
2. Re-committing to Youth Hubs and extending their services to all economically inactive young people.
3. Establishing a new joint ministerial brief between the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education.
4. Piloting a targeted placement scheme for young people who are long-term NEET.
5. Strengthening and broadening the range of Level 2 and Level 3 pathways available to young people.  

We proved the proposals listed in the Young Person’s Guarantee were popular with members of the UK public, with polling by YouGov that showed 81% of UK adults supported the idea that young people should receive support from the government to start work, training or education within four months of becoming unemployed or leaving education, with a majority believing the government needed to do more to get young people into work at that time.

When political will aligned with the evidence (2024)

If these policies look familiar, it’s because they are. Ahead of the election in July 2024, in their manifesto the Labour Party committed to delivering a "Youth Guarantee" ensuring access to training, an apprenticeship, or support to find work for 18–21-year-olds. Since then, it has become a central pillar of the government’s Opportunity and Economic Growth missions. Whether through Keir Starmer pledging to "eradicate inactivity and unemployment for our young people" in his first speech as Prime Minister at Labour Party Conference, or the Chancellor making the Jobs Guarantee a central pillar of her most recent budget. As of March 2026, the government has pledged roughly £3 billion towards this agenda. Crucially, almost all the policy recommendations by Impetus have now been delivered, including joint DfE–DWP ministerial briefs – with the Skills Minister now sitting across both departments – an expansion of Youth Hubs, a targeted placement scheme for young people who are long-term NEET, and stronger Level 2 and Level 3 pathways.

The work is not finished (2025-present)

And our work continues. Last year, we launched the second phase of our Youth Jobs Gap research series, supported by the Ares Foundation. Our first series of reports had found that while half the gap between young people and their more advantaged peers could be explained through qualification level, half could not.

Covid had decimated the infrastructure previously used to understand NEET rates, with the Labour Force Survey facing serious quality concerns due to falling sample sizes. So, we set out to uncover ourselves which other factors, including socioeconomic disadvantage, qualification level, ethnic background, geographical location or having special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), make young people more likely to be NEET. This work culminated last May, with the launch of Youth Jobs Gap 10: Exploring Compound Disadvantage, which synthesised years of evidence into the clearest picture yet of how overlapping barriers shape employment outcomes. Strikingly, we found these characteristics interacted and compounded in unique ways, to disproportionately harm certain groups of young people.

And just two weeks ago, we published the latest report in the series: Closing the Youth Jobs Gap. In a break from the previous ones, rather than providing an analysis of the research, our latest report recommends fourteen policy solutions. Developed using a combination of LEO data, on-the-ground knowledge drawn from our portfolio partners and a series of expert roundtables, we set out a roadmap for how government can reduce NEET rates specifically for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and finally close the Youth Jobs Gap.

This work has supported the government’s attempts to both deliver its Opportunity and Economic Growth missions and understand causes and solutions.

What this tells us about system change

Key government departments including the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) now see Impetus as a trusted partner. Our place in the equation has shifted from an outsider striving to influence policy, to an insider actively helping to shape how policy can tackle youth unemployment.

So, in the 16 years it took us to get here, what have we learnt?

1. Collaboration is key: As a founding co-chair of the Youth Employment Group we can draw on the expertise, connections and resources a huge range of esteemed organisations. Our work is only successful because of collective leadership, shared ownership and long-term partnership. Crucially, Impetus is a cog, not the whole machine.
2. Policy change takes patience and sustained focus: the attention we now see on the issue of NEET rates reflects years of detailed, technical and difficult behind-the-scenes work to build our knowledge and expertise, with very little outside recognition. It required sustained influence beyond the big showy announcements, which were few and far between.
3. Sometimes, you need a bit of luck: Influencing is not a perfect science, and you work with what you have. There are any number of variables which could have changed the course of our work: the pandemic, the election, the political will of the government of the day to name a few. To succeed at influencing, this is something we’ve come to terms with.

Of course, for Impetus, the story of the Youth Guarantee is not a victory lap. It can’t be. As Alan Milburn recently explained, so many more young people are becoming detached from education and employment altogether that we are at risk of a lost generation. Across the last decade, many European Union countries have reduced their NEET rate, while Britain’s has consistently grown. By 2025, only Romania recorded a higher youth NEET rate, and now there are over one million NEET young people for the first time since 2013.

Instead, it is an example of how change happens: through persistence, partnership, building credibility and a willingness to adapt. Coalitions matter. Evidence matters. Delivery matters. And political timing matters too.

We’re proud to have been an organisation that’s shown over such a long period that we’re capable of not only identifying the problem, but building the coalitions, the case and the delivery model needed to address it. And that’s what we’ll keep doing, until all young people get the education, qualifications, and opportunities they need for a fulfilling life.

¹ Securing a place for young people in the nation’s economic recovery, Final recommendations from the Youth Employment Group

² Johnson: Young people to get ‘opportunity guarantee’