Britain’s youth jobs crisis is now existential. The Dutch know how to fix it

Bram and Niek Koning, two brothers from the Netherlands, are exemplary apprentices in the construction trade.

Their job trainer at Royal BAM Group, the country’s biggest construction company, says the young workers are fast learners. Both enjoy their work and have sky-high ambitions for the future.

“I like to think big,” Niek, 22, says with a grin.

“So maybe I would like to take over the whole company. I started at the bottom and maybe I will climb all the way to be director of BAM.”

It feels surprising that, only a few years ago, both brothers were school dropouts.

At 16, Niek quit education for a year, without a compulsory qualification and without a plan.

“I’m an energetic guy. In school, you need to shut up and listen. I couldn’t be what I wanted to be. And I thought a lot of the things that I was learning were useless,” he says.

“My parents tried the harsh way, they tried the soft way. But I thought I was the man then. I thought, ‘They can say this, but I’ll do what I want.’”

His feelings will be familiar to millions of young people in the UK. But if Niek had been born in today’s Britain, his decision would probably have become a catastrophic turning point in his life.

Leaving school without five pass-grade GCSEs is the biggest indicator of whether a young person will fall through the net and become another statistic in Britain’s worklessness crisis.

More than a million people aged 16 to 24 are not in education, employment or training (Neet), a number that has surged by 35pc since Covid to a 12-year high.

The UK is now an outlier in Europe. Our Neet rate, which was in line with the EU average a decade ago, is now surpassed only by Romania’s.

In a report in May, former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn warned of “a lost generation”. Within five years, nearly one in six young people – some 1.25 million – will be Neet, many destined to a lifetime of lost economic potential. Already, the crisis is costing our economy £125bn a year.

It is an issue that is front and centre for Andy Burnham, who is poised to replace Sir Keir Starmer as prime minister.

In his first major speech since winning the Makerfield by-election, Burnham announced on Monday that he wanted to deliver “a complete rethink of how we support the next generation to succeed”.

Policymakers can see a solution in the Netherlands.

Pat McFadden, the Welfare Secretary who is in the running to be the next chancellor, travelled to Rotterdam last month to visit a technical college, a youth centre and an apprenticeship programme in a country where the Neet rate is the lowest in Europe, at just 4.1pc. This is less than a third of ours.

What he saw could become a blueprint for the UK.

What makes the Netherlands an important touchstone for Britain is that the country has a very similar problem with mental health, says McFadden.

The UK has the highest prevalence of mental health problems in the OECD, at 27.8pc – far higher than the EU average of 20.6pc. It is seen as a key factor driving our Neets crisis. But the Netherlands is a close second, at 27.1pc. The country is relatively similar to the UK economically and culturally. It also experienced the pandemic.

“What’s different is the number of young people in the UK who are not working or pursuing a course,” says McFadden.

Bram and Niek’s experience of the Dutch system shows us why. At every stage, from education to the workplace and the welfare system, Dutch policymaking helps make young people better able to participate in the modern economy.

‘Signed off and written off’

Being absent from school is a massive indicator of whether a young person will become Neet, and truancy has rocketed in the UK.

Since Covid, the number of UK students missing at least 50pc of their school time has nearly tripled.

In the Netherlands, school absenteeism has also surged. But when students stop showing up, the authorities have a much better system in place to get them back.

Bram, who is a year older than Niek, was the first of the brothers to drop out.

“I disappeared for a few months,” he says.

“I worked with a family member on the weekends paving roads and I liked that. I was pretty good at it as well. I just wanted to work.”

But aged 16, he was young, unqualified and lacking direction. “I was mostly at home not really doing anything.”

In the Netherlands, young people are obliged to acquire a minimum level of qualification beyond what they will achieve by 16. The local government was not about to let Bram forget it.

“The leerplichtambtenaar came ringing the bell,” says Bram.

This was a truancy officer. Each municipality in the Netherlands has dedicated officials who track young people who stop going to school.

In Bram’s case, he told the leerplichtambtenaar that he wanted to be earning a living, not stuck in a classroom. She found an arrangement whereby he could work five days as an apprentice in road paving and go to school one evening a week. He has not looked back.

What is particularly remarkable is that this interventionist approach continues not just until a young person finishes school, but until they turn 28.

Ferdi Vrede is a youth outreach worker for the municipality of Utrecht. His job is to approach people between the ages of 18 and 27 who are likely to be Neet.

Vrede and his colleagues have access to two systems. One notifies him of young people who have dropped out of education without a diploma. The other notifies him of people receiving less than €750 (£640) per month in income. Either scenario triggers a red flag for Vrede to follow up.

First he tries by phone, then by letter. If there is no reply after two weeks, he visits their home and keeps trying at different times of day until someone finally opens the door.

Vrede contacts between 200 and 300 young people per year. He is just one member of a team of 12, who divide the neighbourhoods of Utrecht between them.

Around 60pc of the young people he deals with are male. This matches the statistics in the UK, where young men make up 55pc of those who are Neet and 68pc of the increase since the pandemic.

“Since Covid, I have seen more depression and burnouts, that is a very visible difference,” says Vrede.

“We also see a lot of people who just don’t know where to go for help. Many parents are trying to help their children but the children don’t want to listen to them.”

Vrede asks each young person what they need, and helps them to choose a suitable educational programme, assists them with job searches, contacts doctors or therapists, sources housing support or helps them address their debts.

“The biggest thing is that we are flexible. If you reach out to us, you can come by tomorrow, there is no waiting list.”

Vrede’s department successfully contacts 90pc of the young people who are flagged in the system. The majority move back into school or work.

Each municipality in the Netherlands has their own approach, but the principles are the same. “What we are doing right now, it works,” says Vrede.

The Dutch approach is a far cry from what McFadden calls the UK’s culture of “just signed off and written off”.

“That is the system that we inherited from the previous government,” he tells The Telegraph.

“There’s a design flaw in our system, which too readily assesses young people and channels them into long-term sickness benefits, where they don’t get any support.”

The Dutch also have a system of Jongerenpunten – hubs where young people can access personalised help – which McFadden is bringing to the UK. Over the next two years, 180 new “youth points” will open, modelled on the Dutch system.

McFadden also reformed the benefits system in April to reduce the amount that those on long-term sickness benefits receive relative to those on unemployment benefits. And he is offering employers a £3,000 hiring bonus to take on young people who have been out of work for six months.

But the UK would do well to take far more from the Dutch playbook.

Turning work into a vocation

The real root of the Netherlands’ low Neet rate lies in its school system.

Mark Levels, a sociologist at Maastricht University, says: “There is an explanation that has very little to do with mental health or Covid, but has to do with the different ways that our countries organise vocational education.”

Broadly speaking, it is less academic students who are most likely to struggle, drop out and become Neet. Educational reforms on how to teach these students in the Netherlands since the 1960s have roughly followed an opposite path to the UK’s.

Since the modern Dutch school system began in 1968, children have been streamed early, at age 12. At the end of primary school, they take a test and their teachers give a qualitative assessment. Based on these, the child is then allocated to one of three streams.

The most academic students will move into VWO, a path to a research university. The middle stream, HAVO, gives students a general education in preparation for study at a university of applied sciences. But the majority of students – including Bram and Niek – move into the VMBO pathway for a vocational education.

Within the VMBO stream, four different tracks prepare students for a corresponding path in post-secondary vocational schools. Employers work closely with educational providers to help construct the curriculum and from 16 students typically combine study with work placements.

Levels says: “We have found a way in the Netherlands to make sure these people get occupationally specific skills that are actually in demand in the labour market.”

Of the Netherlands’ 15 to 19-year-olds, 55pc are enrolled in vocational programmes, compared to just 35pc in the UK.

England once tried to take a comparable approach. After the 1944 Education Act, children began taking an exam at the end of primary school known as the 11-plus. This was supposed to determine which of three secondary educational pathways a child took: grammar school, secondary modern school or technical college.

But the system was implemented badly. Few technical colleges were built and the vast majority of children were streamed into secondary modern schools, which received less funding and offered far fewer opportunities than grammars. The system became widely criticised for hurting social mobility.

“If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f------ grammar school in England,” Anthony Crosland vowed to his wife, shortly after becoming Labour’s education secretary in 1965.

Instead of being reformed, streaming was largely scrapped and was replaced with the state comprehensive system. This means that all teenagers in England move down a more academic pathway.

It seems this is setting many of them up for failure. “We speak to a lot of education experts in Europe and they just keep consistently telling us how harsh the UK system is at 16,” says Julia Diniz, an economist at the Resolution Foundation.

Hannah Kitchen, an education specialist at the OECD, says: “In England, 16 is a tipping point in the system and that is really unique internationally.”

To move on to most pathways – even to vocational options such as T-levels – students must achieve five pass-grade GCSEs.

OECD research shows these exams are more difficult than comparable tests in other countries and they go beyond measuring basic competencies. In 2019, nearly a third (29.8pc) of young people taking GCSE maths in England did not receive a pass mark, yet OECD figures show that only 23.3pc of 15-year-olds in England lack basic mathematical skills.

Young people who fail their GCSEs struggle to retake them, and they get their confidence knocked at a time when they are leaving one educational institution to move to another one, says Kitchen.

“In other countries, you’d have continuity of schooling at that point. It creates a big vulnerability in the system,” she says.

“You have this group of students who potentially get a bit lost and it is quite easy to see how they can slip through the cracks.”

In the UK, 13pc of 17-year-olds are not in education, compared to just 3pc in the Netherlands.

Even those who do achieve the grades then have to navigate a disjointed vocational education system, a process much more complicated than progressing to A-levels or going to university.

In the Netherlands, by contrast, the vocational education system is finely tuned and closely tied to the jobs market.

Representatives from different industries sit on sector committees at the Foundation for Cooperation on Vocational Education, Training and the Labour Market (SBB), which works with schools and companies to make sure that the curriculum is closely aligned with the changing demands of the economy. Hannie Vlug, the chief executive of SBB, says the foundation monitors labour market trends “continuously”.

The system means that young people in the Netherlands stay tied to the education system for much longer than in the UK.

In the Netherlands, 86pc of 18-year-olds are still in some kind of school programme compared to just 66pc in the UK. By 24, it is 44pc compared to 21pc.

Many of them, like Niek and Bram, are combining study with work. This means that even those who are on a vocational path are able to stay under the wings of an institution until they are in their 20s, just as a more academic student attending university would.

By contrast, those completing a technical education in the UK often qualify when they are much younger. “If you have to deal with adult life at quite a young age, this can be quite challenging,” says Sonja Bekker, a professor at Utrecht University.

In the Netherlands, there is a recurring debate over whether 12 is too young to stream. “A lot of research shows that if you did it later, it would increase the equality of opportunity for people from disadvantaged social backgrounds,” says Levels, the sociologist.

But the system has far more flexibility than England’s ever did and students can progress to other tracks when they have finished their courses. Crucially, the vocational streams lead to good jobs.

“There is a nationwide consensus that we should not do any major reforms any time soon,” says Levels.

It is a system that may appeal to Burnham, who has made clear that he wants to make a dramatic shift to vocational training over academic qualifications.

“The days of a school system configured entirely around the university route will be brought to an end,” he said on Monday.

He promised to build an education system “based on parity between academic and technical” skills to give young people “a clear path into a reindustrialised Britain”.

Employers play their part

Part of the contrast between the Dutch and UK Neet rates can be explained by a cultural difference.

“When I turned 12, I was pushed by my parents immediately to find a job. It was the same for all of my friends,” says Luuk de Valk, 25.

His first paid employment was working eight hours a week on a tulip farm. “My job was peeling the bulbs, removing the roots. But I was fired after three months.”

Official figures show that 63pc of 15 and 16-year-olds in the Netherlands have some kind of job. At 17, participation climbs to 75pc.

“It’s quite odd if you do not have a side job,” says Bekker. From an early age, they are developing skills and networks.

After the tulip farm, de Valk worked at a cleaning company, a phone company, a supermarket, and then started gardening.

For de Valk, his side job became a path to his current role. He went through the HAVO stream and studied economics at a university of applied sciences, but did not particularly enjoy it. So he worked full-time as a gardener, until one of his clients invited him to apply for a job as a mortgage adviser at the company where he now works.

Companies in the Netherlands have a financial incentive to hire young people because the country has a staggered youth minimum wage.

Younger workers in the UK also have lower minimum wages, but the gap is much smaller and shrinking. In the Netherlands, a 16-year-old is 63pc cheaper to employ than a 21-year-old. In the UK, the gap is only 37pc. This is partly because Labour made a manifesto pledge to narrow the gap and has made a series of steep increases for the young.

But it is not just about the money. Businesses in the Netherlands also play a much bigger role in preparing young people for the jobs market.

There is a strong link between workplaces and the education system. “Employers almost see it as their duty to provide that learning space for young people,” says Kitchen. It is a tradition that extends back to the Dutch medieval guilds.

Madeline Nightingale, a research leader at Rand, a US think tank, says: “You have to get employers on board and I think that’s part of what’s missing in the response in the UK at the moment.”

Many individual companies put huge effort into tailoring their apprenticeship schemes for the changing needs of young people.

Bram and Niek are two of 270 apprentices on the vocational training programme at BAM. The company offers 60 different specialities and pays their apprentices a full-time salary, despite the fact that they spend one day per week at school.

But for some time even BAM struggled with low retention. Leonoor van Baarda, who runs the vocational training programme, says: “The problem that we had was that we had too few students and many of them were leaving within the first year.

“Students here also have problems. Maybe they start work and they don’t like it, they withdraw.”

So Van Baarda set up an ecosystem of mentors.

At BAM, each construction site has one or two apprentices, who are overseen directly by an on-the-job trainer. At a construction site south-east of Amsterdam, Bram and Niek’s on-the-job trainer Marco Vrolijk is teaching them the skills they need for the project.

But for every 30 apprentices, Van Baarda has also assigned a mentor.

Ramon Smit is one such coach. Every day, he will receive 10 or 12 calls from his cohort. Often, he will drive more than 300km in a day to visit them.

“They have all kinds of problems – dating problems, school problems, problems with their parents – and we talk about everything. That is the main point of what I do,” says Smit.

“If you have a student who is 16 and says, ‘No, I don’t want to work here,’ I’ll say, ‘You’re 16, how was the World Cup match, how is your girlfriend doing?’”

Within BAM, “social work” is taken away from the company’s trainers, so they can focus on developing their young workers’ skills, while Smit is “like a father for the students”, says Van Baarda.

Since Van Baarda set up the mentor system, BAM’s apprenticeship retention rate has more than doubled from 30pc to 72pc.

“When I have something, I can go to Ramon and he will listen,” says Bram. “It doesn’t have to be work-related at all, he will be there for me.”

The system is not cheap. But for BAM, the apprentices are worth it. “We want them, we need them. If we look at our strategic workforce planning, we need to educate apprentices,” says Van Baarda.

“Our society is ageing. If we don’t do something ourselves, we will be lost.”

For young Britons struggling through the worklessness crisis, they can only hope the Koning brothers’ experience offers a blueprint the UK will follow.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]