Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government what estimate they have made of the number of young people aged 16 to 18 who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) in each of the core cities in England.

Anybody who is not in education or training and not in employment is considered to be NEET. Consequently, a person identified as NEET will always be either unemployed or economically inactive. The number of young people aged 16 to 18 NEET is therefore hard to measure, due to needing multiple data sources spanning education and the labour market.

The department’s most robust estimate of those aged 16 to 18 NEET in England combines departmental administrative data and the labour force survey, and is published in the national statistics release ‘Participation in education, training and employment age 16 to 18’. Latest data to the end of 2021 can be found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/participation-in-education-and-training-and-employment/2021. The next update of this release which includes estimates of those NEET to the end of 2022 will be published by July 2023.

The table below shows NEET numbers and rates; rates should also be considered due to the changes in overall population numbers:

In addition to these national statistics, the department has also published more timely NEET estimates from the labour force survey (LFS), with data to the end of 2022 being published on 2 March 2023. As this is survey data, associated confidence intervals (CIs)[1] should be used alongside the estimates, and these statistics should be used to see the latest trends in NEET rates. Caution should be used if considering in-year changes. The following table gives these estimates:

Neither of the above sources provide robust estimates of NEET at city level, due to the methodologies or restrictions in sample sizes. However, as part of the raising participation age legislation, local authorities are tracking young people’s participation in education and training up to age 17. This information[2] is published annually at the following link: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/participation-in-education-training-and-neet-age-16-to-17-by-local-authority/2021-22. Below is a summary table which shows, to the end of 2022, the number of 16 to 17 year olds in each of the local authorities aligning with the core cities in England, and the number of those known to be NEET or who’s activity is not known.

For further information on the sources above and methodological differences between them, please see the ‘Other NEET sources’ section at: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/neet-statistics-annual-brief.

[1] Surveys, such as the LFS, provide estimates of population characteristics rather than exact measures. In principle, many random samples could be drawn, and each would give different results, since each sample would be made up of different people, who would give different answers to the questions asked. The spread of these results is the sampling variability, which generally reduces with increasing sample size. For example, with a 95% confidence interval, it is expected that in 95% of the survey samples, the resulting confidence interval will contain the true value that would be obtained by surveying the whole population.

[2] Some caution should be taken if using these figures due to the estimates being based on management information and there being considerable variation at local authority level in how well 16 and 17 year olds are tracked and hence not known proportions can impact on the estimates of the proportion NEET.