From Youth Guarantee to Neighbourhood Opportunity: What If We Joined the Dots?
Something interesting may be happening in public policy.
Across employment, health, skills, devolution and public service reform, we are beginning to see a common idea emerge:
Place matters.
The government’s Youth Guarantee aims to ensure young people can access further learning, help into employment or an apprenticeship. Importantly, some of its development is already happening through local trailblazer areas that test different approaches and learn what works.
At almost the same time, another significant experiment is taking shape in health.
The new Neighbourhood Health Framework sets out an ambition to organise health and care much more closely around local communities, bringing the NHS, local authorities and wider partners together while shifting greater emphasis towards prevention and support closer to home. NHS England has also explicitly said that, beyond some national foundations, it does not intend to prescribe a single neighbourhood approach because local areas know their communities best.
These may appear to be separate policy agendas. I wonder whether we should see them differently. Perhaps they are pieces of the same puzzle. Because a young person’s prospects are rarely determined by employment services alone. Their opportunities are shaped by education, health, housing, transport, family circumstances, employers, social networks and, perhaps most importantly, the place in which they grow up.
So rather than asking simply:
How do we reduce the number of young people who are NEET?
Perhaps we could ask a more ambitious and hopeful question:
How do we create neighbourhoods in which every young person has the opportunity to build a good life?
Beyond getting someone into a job
The Youth Guarantee represents an important commitment. Ensuring that young people can access learning, employment support or apprenticeships matters. But there is an opportunity to go further. Success should surely mean more than moving somebody from one statistical category into another.
We should be interested in whether a young person can:
- Find meaningful work.
- Develop skills and progress
- Access decent housing
- Maintain good physical and mental health
- Build relationships and networks
- Contribute to their community
- Imagine a secure future.
That changes the conversation. NEET becomes less a problem to be solved by an employment programme and more an indicator of whether a local ecosystem of opportunity is working.
What Neighbourhood Health might teach us?
This is where the emerging neighbourhood approach becomes particularly interesting. The Neighbourhood Health Framework recognises that health cannot be delivered effectively through isolated organisations. It calls for collaboration between health services, local government and wider partners and seeks to strengthen prevention and locally responsive approaches.
Why stop at health? Imagine applying a similar organising principle to youth opportunity.
Not another service.
Not another programme.
Not necessarily another building.
Instead, imagine a neighbourhood where schools, colleges, employers, health services, housing organisations, voluntary groups, councils, families and young people themselves share responsibility for creating opportunity.
The Youth Guarantee could then become more than a guarantee of access to a programme. It could become part of a much bigger neighbourhood guarantee of opportunity.
People live in places, not systems
This takes me back to the principles behind Total Place.
The enduring insight is remarkably simple:
People live in places, not systems.
A teenager does not experience an education problem at 9am, a housing problem at 11am and a mental health problem at 2pm.
They experience one life.
Our opportunity is to make public services increasingly capable of seeing that whole life too. The encouraging thing is that several pieces of the architecture may already be appearing. The Youth Guarantee brings employment, skills and opportunity. Neighbourhood Health brings prevention, integration and locally shaped health and care. Devolution creates greater scope for decisions to be taken closer to places.
Community organisations bring relationships, knowledge and assets that institutions cannot manufacture.
Perhaps the next step is not another strategy. Perhaps it is joining these pieces together.
From consultation to shared power
There is, however, an important distinction between delivering services in communities and allowing communities to help shape them.
If neighbourhood working is going to fulfil its potential, residents and young people themselves need meaningful influence over priorities and resources.
That does not mean government stepping away.
Quite the opposite.
Government has an enormously important role in creating the conditions for local success.
It can
provide resources.
remove barriers.
establish long-term outcomes.
enable organisations to pool funding.
support evaluation and spread what works.
And, crucially, it can create space for places to do things differently.
Three opportunities
- Create long-term place-based opportunity funds
Bring together funding across employment, skills, health, housing and youth services and give places enough time to produce meaningful change. - Build a neighbourhood approach to youth opportunity
Use the learning emerging from Neighbourhood Health and the Youth Guarantee trailblazers to explore how services, employers and community assets could work together around young people rather than around institutional boundaries. - Give young people and communities meaningful decision-making power
Move beyond asking people what they think. Give residents, young people and community organisations genuine opportunities to shape priorities, investment and delivery.
A hopeful possibility
Perhaps we are closer to this than we think.
Neighbourhood Health, the Youth Guarantee, devolution and place-based public service reform could remain separate initiatives.
But they could also signal something much more significant.
They could become the foundations of a different relationship between government and communities.
One where Whitehall establishes ambition and provides resources, but places have greater freedom to determine how those ambitions are achieved.
One where success is measured not simply by how many young people leave a NEET statistic, but by whether they gain genuine opportunity, security and hope.
And one where communities are not merely where public services are delivered.
They are partners in shaping the future.
Perhaps the question is no longer whether place-based working is a good idea. The more exciting question is:
How far are we prepared to take it?