Unemployment: Young People

(asked on 7th March 2016) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what data her Department collects on the location of young people classified as not in education, employment or training.


Answered by
 Portrait
Nick Boles
This question was answered on 15th March 2016

The Department for Education and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills jointly publish a statistical first release (SFR) titled “NEET statistics quarterly brief” which has estimates of young people aged 16-24 not in education, employment or training (NEET) in England.

Published figures are broken down by individual age for 16, 17 and 18 year olds and by the following age groups: 16-17, 16-18, 19-24, 18-24 and 16-24 year olds. The 19-24, 18-24 and 16-24 figures are also published by region. Figures are published each quarter based on data from the Labour Force Survey (LFS).

The department publishes its definitive annual estimates of 16-18 year olds NEET every June in the SFR “Participation in education, training and employment”. These figures are more accurate than the LFS estimates because they are based on a combination of administrative data and survey data from the LFS, but are only compiled annually and are not disaggregated below national level.

These two SFRs can be found on GOV.UK at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-neet

The department also publishes management information showing the number and proportion of 16-18 year olds NEET in each local authority in England based on data collected by local authorities through their Client Caseload Information Systems (CCIS). These are published annually, showing estimates of average NEET over the November to January period each year. The coverage and methodology differs from the official national estimates for England published in the department’s SFRs, so the figures are not directly comparable. On aggregate, the local authority figures tend to be lower than those in the SFRs because they only include young people whose activity is known to their local authority and do not count young people who are taking a gap year or are in custody as NEET, and the accuracy and completeness depends on the quality of each local authority’s data collection system.

NEET figures by local authority can be found on GOV.UK at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/neet-data-by-local-authority-2012-16-to-18-year-olds-not-in-education-employment-or-training

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