Nearly half of long-term jobless teenagers have special needs, government data shows – NATIONAL NEWS

New research indicates that a substantial proportion of young people who fall into prolonged unemployment have been diagnosed with conditions such as autism or ADHD.

The study, carried out by the Department for Education, followed a group of pupils who were 16 at the start of the 2015-16 academic year, tracking their status until they reached 21.

Among this cohort, roughly 43,000 young people were classified as “persistently NEET,” meaning they spent at least four of those years not in employment, education, or training.

Of that group, 43 per cent had a recognised special educational need, compared with just one in ten among those who remained continuously engaged in work, study, or training after finishing school. More than half of the persistently NEET group had also been eligible for free school meals, a marker of household benefit dependency, and fewer than a quarter had passed GCSEs in English and maths.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has signalled that reforming education, including expanding access to vocational routes like bricklaying, will be central to his strategy for reducing the welfare bill and cutting youth unemployment.

Education Secretary Lucy Powell said the findings highlighted how disadvantage and poor outcomes reinforce one another, noting that strong qualifications remain, in her words, “the single biggest protective factor” against becoming NEET. She added that many disadvantaged pupils and those with special educational needs are still not achieving that outcome, and said she was committed to ensuring all children leave compulsory education as well-qualified as possible.

The number of pupils identified with special educational needs has climbed sharply in recent years, now exceeding 1.8 million nationally. A report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies last year linked much of this rise to increasing diagnoses of ADHD and autism spectrum conditions.

Separately, a report released this week by the Centre for Social Justice identified school absence as a critical driver of the pipeline from education into long-term unemployment. The think tank estimated that around 100,000 persistently absent school leavers are heading toward joining the more than one million young people expected to be NEET by 2029, a trend it calculated could cost the public purse £24 billion over those individuals’ lifetimes, through lost tax revenue, increased benefit spending, and pressure on public services.

The CSJ’s data also showed severe absence, defined as missing at least half of school time, reached a record high for an autumn term in 2025-26, with 151,279 pupils affected, up 2.5 per cent on the previous year and 195 per cent higher than in 2018-19. Broader persistent absence, covering pupils missing a tenth or more of school, also worsened, rising to 1,293,073 pupils, or 18.1 per cent of the total pupil population.

CSJ policy director Joe Shalam said the sector had hoped the absence crisis would ease once pandemic disruption faded, but that the latest figures show the problem continuing to deepen, warning that time away from the classroom is severely damaging young people’s prospects.

Former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn is currently heading a government-commissioned review examining how to bring nearly a million young NEET individuals back into employment.