New York, NY — Special educational needs, skills and youth unemployment are usually treated as three separate policy problems. New research from the Community Impact Policy Institute finds they are three stages of the same journey, and that the journey breaks at the points where one system hands a young person to the next.
The report, Bolted on or built in? Bridging Britain’s School-to-Work Gap for Young People with Additional Needs, follows that journey from the first years of primary school to the first job. It finds that need is too often misread as low ability because schools are measured on a narrow band of English and maths results, that early warning signs such as falling attendance are seen but not acted on, that support is added to classrooms that otherwise stay the same, and that the route from school into work is fragmented across institutions that plan, fund and measure their work separately.
The report is authored by Victoria Aarons, Deputy Director, and Ania Mendrek, Senior Fellow, of the Community Impact Institute, and is part of the Institute’s Spotlight: Breaking Britain’s Barriers research series examining the causes of economic inactivity and what can reconnect people to opportunity.
The scale of the challenge is considerable. More than 1.8 million pupils in England, over one in five, are now identified as having special educational needs, and around 540,000 hold an Education, Health and Care plan. In 2024/25, 29.6% of disabled young people were not in education, employment or training, compared with 8.7% of their non-disabled peers, and 981,000 young people aged 16 to 24 were NEET in the spring of 2026.
The research draws on successful and innovative programmes in communities across the UK. It combines this with national data from the Department for Education, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Milburn review of young people and work, alongside the wider academic literature and interviews with staff and parents at The New School and Big Picture Learning. It finds that health visitors see the first signs of developmental need at age two, yet that information rarely reaches the classroom at four because health and education records share no common identifier. It also finds that many young people acquire or disclose a disability or health condition after leaving school, so that routes which depend on a statutory plan, such as supported internships, miss a large part of the people they are designed to serve. In response, the report sets out seven recommendations to strengthen this transition and ensure that support is built in from the outset rather than bolted on as an afterthought.
Among those programmes is ELITE Supported Employment, a Welsh charity that has been part of Fedcap since March 2025, which the report features as a case study of what built-in support looks like at the point where education ends and work begins. ELITE places people in a real job first and then trains and supports them in it, with that support continuing once they are in post. In the Engage to Change programme, in which ELITE was one of two delivery agencies, 41% of more than 1,000 participants moved into paid employment, according to an independent evaluation by Cardiff University, against an estimated employment rate for people with learning disabilities of below 5%.
The report makes seven recommendations, each asking for support to be built into the system from the start rather than added afterwards. It calls for a short whole-child profile of every pupil at reception and again before secondary transfer, and for the two-year health review to be carried into that first profile so that no teacher starts from nothing. It asks that early signs trigger support without waiting for a diagnosis, and that pastoral, health and specialist provision be treated as core to how a school works rather than as an addition to it. At the move into work, it recommends funding the support that keeps a young person in a job and not only the support that gets them into one, and extending supported internships beyond those who hold an Education, Health and Care plan. Finally, it asks strategic authorities to plan skills, growth and funding together so that the routes from school into work form one continuous line. None of these requires a new system. Each asks the existing one to hold on to a young person rather than pass them along.
The full report is part of Spotlight: Breaking Britain’s Barriers, the Fedcap Community Impact Institute’s research-in-real-time examination of economic inactivity across the United Kingdom.
Visit Spotlight: Breaking Britain’s Barriers here. Be part of the conversation at #BreakingBritainsBarriers.
