Over a million young people are locked out of work. Here's what we're doing about it.
Some numbers, first.
The latest 2026 figures show 1,012,000 young people aged 16 to 24 in the UK are not in education, employment, or training - that's 13.5% of that age group. It's the first time that number has passed a million since 2013.
Break it down further and it gets starker:
400,000 of those NEETs are unemployed - up 18.3% year on year
613,000 are economically inactive - the highest level recorded since 2001
The unemployment rate for young people not in full-time education is 16.2%, with inactivity at 21.4%, the highest since ONS quarterly records began in 1992
Behind every one of those numbers is someone who left school, college, or university expecting the next step to be obvious, and found it wasn't there.
Why this is happening isn't a mystery
Employers want experience. Graduates and school leavers don't have any, because nobody's given them the chance to get it. It's a closed loop - and the young people stuck in it aren't lacking ambition or effort, they're lacking a door in.
That's the gap we built imPACT to close.
What imPACT does
imPACT is a youth employability programme run out of Cariocca Enterprises here in Manchester. We place 18–25 year olds from Greater Manchester into internships with local businesses — real work, with real organisations, designed to give people exactly the experience employers say they're missing.
We work directly with local businesses to create placements that are genuinely useful on both sides: the business gets a motivated, capable intern, and the intern walks away with skills, a reference, and — often — a foot in the door to paid work.
What's next
Over the coming weeks we'll be sharing stories from people who've come through the programme - what they did, where they've ended up, and what it actually felt like day to day. If you're one of the million-plus young people wondering whether there's a way through, that's a better answer than anything we can tell you in the abstract.