How to Bring Post-16 NEET Young People Back to Learning

Every year, thousands of young people reach the end of school and quietly disappear. They are sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, at home, off the register, out of sight. The official word for them is NEET: not in education, employment or training. Behind the label is a teenager who has come to believe that learning is no longer for them. Most are not incapable. They have lost their footing, and too often no one comes to help them find it again.

For a young person with an Education, Health and Care plan, the law says someone must keep trying until they are twenty-five. In Richmond upon Thames and Kingston, that someone is Achieving for Children, which runs children's services across the boroughs. In October 2025 it set out to bring a group of these young people back, not with letters and warnings, but with something simpler: a real teacher, a live lesson, and a subject worth turning up for.

The numbers are small, and that is the point. Of 224 lessons planned, 222 have already been taught, around 190 hours of live teaching to two small groups. Young people who had stopped going to anything are turning up again, week after week, and working towards a qualification that will actually help them.

Internal draft, June 2026. The delivery figures are real, drawn from Purple Ruler's records. The named quotations, the young people's own words and the examination results are marked as placeholders below, to be gathered at the interview with Achieving for Children before this story is shared or published.

It is easy, faced with a list of non-attenders, to see numbers. Achieving for Children chose to see young people. The work was set up by Carol Jennings, whose job is to find these teenagers a route forward. The aim was not to tick a box. It was to give each young person a reason to come back, and the time, measured in years rather than weeks, to take it.

A provision that opened by demanding full attendance would have lost this group in days. So it started gently, asking first for the hardest thing these young people had to give: showing up. That they now do, lesson after lesson, is the quiet result underneath all the others.

The lessons are built around Functional Skills in English and mathematics: the everyday reading, writing and number sense a person needs to hold down a job or win a college place. It is the right choice because it pays off quickly. Progress shows early, confidence grows with it, and at the end there is a qualification an employer recognises.

The lessons are taught live by qualified teachers, in small groups rather than one to one. For a young person who has withdrawn, the live teacher is most of the point. Someone expects them each week, knows their name, and notices when they are not there. That relationship, more than any screen or platform, is what keeps them coming.

Because this work sits with a vocational pathways lead rather than in a timetable, the English and maths are treated as a step towards something. The qualification opens the college course or the apprenticeship, and the careers support carries the young person on from there. That is what makes the duty to twenty-five mean something: not keeping a young person busy, but moving them forward.

In their own words

[To gather at interview: one or two short, anonymous lines from a young person about coming back to learning. No names or identifying detail. The voice should be about how it felt to be reached, not about attendance figures.]

What changes

The first thing that changes is the young person. A teenager who had given up on school is learning again, in a small group, with a teacher who knows them. Across two groups, 222 lessons have reached young people who, a few months ago, were attending nothing.

The next thing is the qualification, the Functional Skills passes in English and maths that turn turning up into something a young person can use. Those results belong in the next version of this story.

[Examination results to confirm at interview: number of Functional Skills entries and passes in English and mathematics, by level. Until Achieving for Children supplies these, this story makes no claim about grades.]

And the lessons cost less than people expect, taught in small groups rather than the one-to-one home tuition a young person like this would otherwise receive, with the added gain that being among peers is part of the recovery, not a saving at its expense.

How far it could go

What works for a handful of young people in two boroughs could work for many more. Achieving for Children runs services across Richmond, Kingston and Windsor and Maidenhead, and a provision proven once can be offered again. It is the move a growing number of trusts and authorities are now making: stop arranging help one young person at a time, and build it once, properly, for everyone who needs it. The clearest example is the White Horse Federation, which built a single inclusion service for its whole trust and found it far more cost-effective than doing it school by school. For a young person waiting at home, it is the difference between being reached and being missed.