What Britain can Learn from its Neighbours on Youth Employment
Nearly one million young people aged 15 to 24 in the United Kingdom are not in education, employment or training. The Milburn Review lays out the diagnosis with uncomfortable clarity: Britain has not just failed to solve this problem — it has watched other countries solve it while slipping toward the bottom of the European league table. By 2025, only Romania recorded a higher NEET rate among EU member states.
When Alan Milburn presented his interim review to the Work and Pensions Select Committee in May, I was invited to follow him with evidence on what the Department for Work and Pensions can learn from other countries. The OECD exists precisely for this: to support governments in learning from one another rather than reinventing the wheel. By adopting the OECD Youth Recommendation in 2022, the UK made a formal commitment to creating better opportunities for young people. That commitment will be evaluated in 2027. The question is what Britain chooses to do with the time it has.
The Finnish mirage
When policymakers discuss comprehensive support for young people, they invariably reach for Finland's Ohjaamo network. These one-stop shops bring together employment, social and health services under one roof, offering a coherent entry point into a system that would otherwise send young people from door to door. The model is genuinely impressive — I have visited one in Oulu and seen what full integration looks like in practice.
But the Ohjaamo can easily become a comfort blanket for policymakers who want to point to a solution without grappling with the dysfunction it is designed to patch. Quality varies considerably — in some regions, "integration" amounts to little more than an employment adviser and a benefit adviser sharing a building two days a week. From the OECD's vantage point, even a well-run one-stop shop is a palliative, not a cure: it eases navigation of a fragmented system but does nothing to dismantle the fragmentation itself.
From the OECD's vantage point, even a well-run one-stop shop is a palliative, not a cure: it eases navigation of a fragmented system but does nothing to dismantle the fragmentation itself. If the UK imports the label without the structural reform, it risks adding another layer to the very problem Milburn identifies as the root cause: a system too fragmented to reach the young people who need it most.
Germany, Austria and the Netherlands: prevention, not rescue
The countries with the lowest NEET rates built systems in which youth detachment is structurally harder to fall into. Germany and Austria maintain vocational pathways genuinely valued by employers and carrying no social stigma. The Milburn Review notes that significantly fewer young British people are in vocational education than in Germany, the Netherlands or Denmark: 22 per cent compared to 35 per cent. That is not a cultural difference. It is a policy choice — and one that can be reversed.
The Netherlands offers a complementary lesson: a strong part-time work culture let young people accumulate experience without the all-or-nothing stakes of British entry-level hiring. Work experience is not an afterthought bolted onto the end of education — it is woven into it. By the time young people leave, the transition has already begun.
Acting early: the Danish and Swedish approach
At the heart of the European Youth Guarantee is a deceptively simple principle: intervene fast. Research is unambiguous that prolonged detachment dramatically reduces re-entry odds — four months is roughly the threshold beyond which scarring effects compound. Denmark and Sweden do not wait for young people to arrive in crisis. They create incentives to register with public employment services before graduation, coupling registration with personalised activation. Both have maintained a permanent youth guarantee architecture for decades. The UK, by contrast, has repeatedly launched emergency programmes in response to recessions and abolished them when the political moment passed. Across the OECD, the pattern is clear: durable outcomes require durable institutions.
The mental health integration problem
Perhaps the hardest challenge — and one many OECD countries still struggle with — is mental health. The Milburn Review notes that one in five NEETs cite depression, mental illness and nervous disorders as their main limiting condition; the true prevalence is probably much higher. Research on Denmark indicates that standalone mental health interventions do not reliably generate better employment outcomes. What is needed is genuine integration of employment and mental health support. The Individual Placement and Support model, which embeds employment specialists within clinical teams, has a strong international evidence base and should be the benchmark for any serious reform. Cost is a real constraint — which is why the OECD will later this year convene a webinar series on lower-cost approaches achieving comparable integration. But the standard IPS sets should not be negotiated away. It should be the ambition against which all alternatives are measured.
Building the architecture, not just the programmes
What the evidence from across OECD member countries teaches is that sustained results require sustained systems, clear accountability, and institutions with the authority to join the dots between education, health, welfare and employment. Britain now has the diagnosis. What it still lacks is the architecture to act on it. The OECD has worked with governments facing precisely this challenge, and the tools, the comparative evidence, and the peer learning networks are there to be used. The window before the 2027 evaluation is not long. The cost of not acting — in wasted potential, in long-term welfare dependency, in a generation written off before it has begun — is one the UK cannot afford to keep paying.
Veerle Miranda is a senior policy analyst at the OECD, where she leads on youth employment and social policies at the Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs. She was also the driving force behind the OECD recommendation on Creating Better Opportunities for Young People.
