Education and Employment: Young People

(asked on 27th October 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government how many hours a week a person under the age of 25 must be in (1) education, (2) employment, or (3) training, to lose their classification as someone Not in Education Employment or Training (NEET).


Answered by
Baroness Barran Portrait
Baroness Barran
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
This question was answered on 8th November 2021

NEET (Not in Education Employment or Training) is a statistical measure agreed across government and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and is not formally assessed or used as a condition to establish entitlement for free training for adults.

Anybody who is not participating in any forms of education or training and who is not in employment is considered to be NEET. This includes those not:

- Enrolled on an education course

- Still attending or waiting for term to (re)start

- Doing an apprenticeship

- On a government supported employment or training programme

- Working or studying towards a qualification

- On job-related training or education in the last 4 weeks

- In some form of paid work, including those working part-time

Under Raising the Participation Age, introduced in the Education and Skills Act 2008, 16- and 17-year-olds are under a statutory duty to particate in education or training. Aligned to this, local authorities are under a statutory duty to support 16- and 17-year-olds into education or training, a minimum of at least 280 planned qualification hours per year for those in full-time work or volunteering (20 hours per week) or 540 hours of planned learning for those in full-time education.

Published measures of NEET typically use the Labour Force Survey which is run by the ONS, using their definition of NEET and also aligns to the measure of employment as defined by the International Labour Organisation. This states a person in employment is defined as all those of working age who, during a short reference period, were engaged in any activity to produce goods or provide services for pay or profit. They comprise employed persons "at work", i.e. who worked in a job for at least one hour, and employed persons "not at work" due to temporary absence from a job, or to working-time arrangements (such as shift work, flexitime and compensatory leave for overtime).

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