Wales has the UK’s worst NEET rate — and prevention is the hardest thing to prove

In April, the Welsh Government published its annual estimate of young people not in education, employment or training. The headline was bleak: in the year ending December 2025, 17.0% of 16 to 24-year-olds in Wales were NEET — around 56,800 young people, up 18,500 in a single year. It is the highest rate of the UK’s four nations, and Wales was the only nation where the rate rose: England fell to 13.3%, Scotland to 12.1%, and Northern Ireland held at 8.8%.

Across the UK as a whole, the ONS put the figure at 957,000 young people (12.8%) at the end of 2025. Wales isn’t just above that average — it is pulling away from it.

The organisations fixing this can rarely prove it

Here is the uncomfortable truth for every youth club, mentoring project, sports foundation and community organisation working with young people on the edge of the statistics: prevention is invisible in the data. When a 16-year-old stays in college because a youth worker spent months rebuilding their confidence, no national dataset records it. The young person simply never appears in the NEET figures — which is the whole point, and also the whole problem.

Funders increasingly ask for evidence of outcomes. But you cannot photograph a thing that didn’t happen. So organisations doing the most important early work — the unglamorous, relational, weekly work — end up with the weakest-looking evidence, while the crisis-end services that pick young people up after they become NEET have clear before-and-after numbers.

What prevention evidence actually looks like

You can’t measure the absence of an outcome, but you can measure the journey away from the risk. Three things stand up to funder scrutiny:

• Distance travelled. Ask the same question, the same way, at the start and end of your work — confidence, aspiration, feeling ready for work or learning. The shift between the two numbers is your evidence of change, and it belongs to the young person’s own voice, not your opinion of them.
• Engagement, logged as it happens. Sessions delivered, hours of youth work, one-to-ones, accompanied college visits. Logged the same day, it becomes a costed record of investment in each young person — the “dose” behind the change.
• Recognised £ values. When your hours and activities are costed against recognised social value measures, “we ran a youth club” becomes “we delivered £X of evidenced social value this quarter” — language commissioners and funders already use.

None of this needs a research team. It needs the recording to be so light-touch that busy youth workers actually do it — a QR code on the wall, a 90-second form, a dashboard that adds it up.

Why this matters right now in Wales

A rising NEET rate means the money will move. Welsh Government, local authorities and trusts will fund prevention — but after a decade of tightening budgets, they will fund the organisations who can show their work, in numbers, with the young person’s own reported change attached. The gap between organisations that record and organisations that remember is about to become a funding gap.

If you work with young people in Wales, the single most useful thing you can do this term is start recording distance travelled and logging your delivery as it happens. Not for us — for your next funding bid.

Sources: Welsh Government, Young people not in education, employment or training (NEET), annual release, 29 April 2026 (year ending December 2025); ONS, Young people not in education, employment or training (NEET), UK, February 2026 (October–December 2025).