Hidden NEETs: The attendance of 16 and 17-year-olds in further education colleges in England

This report comes at a particular time in our national discussion around education. It is written with
this moment in mind.

This discussion focuses on the rising numbers of young people who are not in education, employment,
or training (NEET), with proposals to fix this problem suggesting measures that reverberate all the way
down the age range and throughout our education system.

It is, of course, good that we are focusing on young NEETs. I hear so often from young people about
their desires to get on in the labour market, and the current NEET crisis is felt in communities across
the country. When young people from an area go away to university, only to return to limited
employment opportunities, children notice. When their friends cannot find Saturday jobs, children
notice. Employment is a children’s issue.

But if we are going to focus on NEETs, we have to know who and where they are. Without that, you
cannot begin to address the problem. You cannot know what might work. You cannot assess the
impact of any interventions.

As I considered this problem, I found myself thinking about one of the major concerns of my time as
Children’s Commissioner: educational attendance. I firmly believe that education is the path to a good
future for England’s children, and that everything begins with attendance.

Over the last five years, the way we measure attendance in schools has dramatically improved with
far more transparency and visibility where attendance is too low. This has been a crucial first step,
although progress on actually improving attendance, particularly for severely absent children, has
been far too slow.

However, at the critical point, where children start their transition from education into the world of
work, we lose that visibility. Further Education settings, where most children go when they leave
school, are not required to collect or report attendance data like schools are. The national picture of
attendance for FE is simply not where it should be. And so, I began to worry about one cohort in
particular – what about those children who were on roll, but whose attendance was so low that they
might as well not be? Who would even know about them?

Precisely because the data collection is poor, this cohort is uniquely vulnerable in any proposed
reforms. After all, they will show up in the data as ‘in education’. We could, in theory, achieve ‘NEET
Zero’ and do nothing for this cohort. They would be, for all intents and purposes, ‘Hidden NEETs’, with
all the negative impacts of being NEETs, yet none of the targeted interventions reaching them.

And so, for the second time in two years, I used of my data powers under the Children Act on colleges;
this time to request data from all colleges about their overall attendance levels. I wanted to see if
there were indeed hidden NEETs, and if so, how many there were.

I have found tens of thousands of these children.

Children who, otherwise, would have simply slipped through the cracks, who existing data collections
would not have taken into account, and whose very existence existing systems genuinely do not have
the ability to understand.

Understanding children like this is, in my view, the purpose of the Children’s Commissioner.

This is, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive data set currently available on FE attendance, and
the results are stark.

Half of the children in colleges are persistently absent by the standards that we apply to schools.

I hope that this data collection adds real light to the existing and fast-moving policy debate around
NEETs in England. I hope it acts as a call for us to make sure that we have a full understanding of
children’s lives.

This data shows clearly that attendance recording in FE settings needs to improve, and that the
Department for Education should act as soon as possible to ensure that it does so.

As we are getting ready for a world in which a greater proportion of our young people across the
nation attend an FE setting. We are fixing some of the quirks in FE policy to do so – such as fully funding
college places. These fixes are useful, and overdue, but I believe that the Government must act
urgently on FE attendance. We need to do far more to understand the reality of attendance at college,
and it is mystifying to me that we have not done so already.

I know how much this matters. As Alan Milburn’s recent report has highlighted, further education
colleges are the primary institutional bridge for the most at risk young people. 40.9% of students aged
16 and 17 attend an FE or sixth form college. Young people with lower attainment and less advantaged
socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to enrol in FE colleges at 16.

There is no path to improving their outcomes that does not run squarely through understanding,
standing with, and working together to improve, our FE sector.