Central to Labour’s plans to overhaul the way young people transfer from secondary education into further education and employment is an ambition to place a new expectation on schools: that they ensure all students have a post-16 destination and that we safely transfer them to their next stage of development within society, avoiding them becoming not in education, employment or training.
This is an issue that certainly needs to be addressed. Every year, the Neet statistic is a sad reminder of the young people we have failed as an education sector, and the figures are staggering. In the period from April to June 2025, just short of a million young people aged 16-24 were Neet in the UK - that’s 12.8 per cent of the whole age group.
This summer, 1,019,005 students completed their GCSEs and although the data is not yet available for summer 2025, if the pattern of 2023-24 continues, around 5.7 per cent of them will not have had a confirmed destination.
That’s 58,000 students who, having spent 12 years in full-time education in one of the highest-funded education systems in the world, have no established future.
GCSEs obsession
In such a bleak educational landscape, perhaps we need to pause and take guidance from the words of Desmond Tutu: “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
Many would say GCSE results give you the answer: we need to get these students over that grade 4 or 5 wall.
There are plenty of institutions achieving remarkable results, countering deprivation and unemployment within their catchment area. But we must ask: are these schools bucking the trend, or is something else going on? And can their success be replicated at scale?
The evidence would suggest not. Despite the Herculean efforts across the country to break down the grade 4/5 wall, the national data for both English literature and maths at GCSE since 2020 reveals a stubbornly consistent pattern.
Grade distribution
If you plot GCSE English literature grades for any of the core exam boards over the past three years, the percentage variance for students achieving each grade is less than 2 per cent. This means that, broadly, the same percentage of students will achieve each grade.
Why is this? The exam boards are dealing with large data sets, assessing different papers with different cohorts each year. A core function of the exam board is maintaining the integrity of the exam paper from year to year and preventing grade inflation.
The larger the data set, the more inclined we are to normalise the pattern, which is why the percentage of young people achieving English language grade 4 or over in England hovers stubbornly around 60-62 per cent.
As the author Hashi Mohamed has pointed out, the problem with looking at social mobility as a percentage ceiling to break through is that the top 20 per cent will always remain; by entering it, you will merely be knocking somebody else off their perch to take that spot.
Inclusive focus
And so it is with schools. Moving your school to above the national average for grade 4 or over in English or maths is a cause for celebration for your school, but likely as not, another school will move to below the national average as a result.
We must never fall into the madness of aspiring for “every school to be above average”, as all we will be doing is chasing the bell curve.
So, what else should we be doing?
The pressure to achieve nominal percentage points can draw focus away from the primary aim of education: to prepare our young people for the next stage of their lives.
If we had to head upriver as Desmond Tutu suggested, what should our system look like?
1. Strong relationships with alternative provisions
First of all, there should be a requirement on all academy trusts to develop strong relationships with special and alternative provision settings, so the golden thread of adapting to special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is woven throughout all curriculum discussions.
Since September, I have been fortunate to work with Springfields Special School, where exemplary practice has ensured that the school is outward looking in building capacity in the wider education system.
As a result, in the past five years, it has worked with 136 schools to train staff in supporting autistic students. It has also worked with local authority admissions teams to expand provision, admitting a cohort of 10 students who, for over two years, had not been placed in any provision as their needs were identified as being too complex. At the time of writing, all 10 students have an attendance rate of over 96 per cent.
2. Better Neet reporting and accountability
Secondly, government should insist on rigorous Neet reporting across both state and private provision - incredibly, private SEND provision is exempt from reporting.
Alongside this would be an expectation on all schools to provide robust, hard-wired links to ensure all students move on to the next stage of their development in education, employment or training.
The model of University Technical College (UTC) provision was ahead of its time here by ensuring that local businesses play an active part in the governance of the very institution that provides their future employees.
UTC Plymouth is a shining example of this in the strong links it has with Babcock engineering and the Royal Marines in Plymouth, and will be a key partner in the delivery of the government’s £4.4 billion ambition for the city.
3. Better pathways
Thirdly, for a truly inclusive education system, we must hold on to our students and create pathways that prevent them from falling out of the system.
This will inevitably require much closer working between schools as well as between multi-academy trusts. All too often, when a student with behavioural needs or SEND transfers from one school to another, the link between the two is broken, ownership passed and all prior responsibility rescinded. This is where they “fall into the river”.
Supporting students at risk of going missing in the system should be viewed as a collective endeavour. Often, students at risk of falling out of mainstream school find themselves in complex crisis situations. Just like crisis rooms in A&E departments, our education system will only save these lives through a united purpose where all stakeholders take responsibility for the rescue.
4. Celebrating inclusion
Finally, schools that are truly and genuinely inclusive should be celebrated - properly celebrated and showcased.
Inclusive education requires hard work and commitment, and it is the responsibility of our sector to seek out and celebrate the areas of extraordinary practice.
What if, at the end of August every year, we focused not on back slapping for achieving percentage points or who was the top of which table, but on a national effort to ensure all our young people secured a future in education, employment or training?
Tom Leverage is CEO of Reach South Academy Trust
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