Young people aged 19 to 24 will get more funding to go to college under proposed plans to tackle unemployment.
Alan Milburn, the author of a government-led review, will recommend addressing funding for over-19s to fuel a substantial expansion in further education – although the amount is not yet clear – in the next decade, The i Paper understands.
Sixteen to 18-year-olds study at colleges for free but those aged 19 and over typically pay tuition fees and do not have access to maintenance loans to cover their living costs.
Milburn wants to see over 150,000 additional 18 to 24-year-olds go to college or undertake other further education training over the next 10 years, with the increase concentrated among those aged 19 and over, but it remains to be seen if colleges can sustain the target despite more funding.
He is expected to recommend increasing the Adult Skills Fund, which pays for education and training for adults aged 19 and over, or expanding the 16–19 education budget to cover more older learners, making courses free or more affordable.
Under the further education plans, 16 and 17-year-olds who are “Neets” (not in education, employment or training) or at serious risk of becoming Neets will also be paired with mentors and receive targeted support while regional directories with technical training options will be created.
Milburn told The i Paper: “For too long, technical education has been treated as the poor relation to academic education. The UK is a world leader in higher education and a laggard when it comes to backing further education. If we are to solve the Neets crisis we have to put that right.”
David Hughes, chief executive of the Association of Colleges (AoC), said additional funding to expand college attendance for 19 to 24-year-olds was a “game changer”.
But speaking to the BBC on Sunday, Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden, was unable to confirm if the benefits bill, estimated to rise from £353bn this year to £431bn in 2032, will be lower by the next election.
Milburn’s report on Neets will be published on Tuesday. Its recommendations will be adopted in full minister have said, but some MPs have warned against cutting benefits and could rebel against the Government.
Neet mentors and UCAS-style training portals
Mentorship and targeted support for 16 and 17-year-old Neets or those at risk will be paid for by a new “participation and work-readiness premium”.
The regional online directories, similar to the University and Colleges Admissions Service, will be created to provide easy access to information about available college courses, apprenticeships and other technical routes.
These “access points” in every area would make choosing a technical route “no harder than choosing a university,” a source familiar with the plans said.
Hughes added that many young people, particularly those who fail their English and maths GCSEs, fall behind by a few years – but the funding is not available for them to attend college.
“They need an extra year or two, but the colleges don’t have the funding to do that, so you get this cliff edge at the age of 18 or 19 where the funding just drops away,” he explained.
The funding cliff edge
In his upcoming review, Milburn will say historic underfunding, too much of an academic focus and inattention to regional growth have reduced further education’s technical education footprint.
He will say this is one of the key reasons for England’s elevated Neet rate and partly why the UK lags behind countries that are “cracking this crisis”, a source said.
Nearly one million 16 to 24-year-olds are recorded as Neet, costing £22bn a year in benefits.
Milburn’s planned reforms aim to boost the number of young people completing technical qualifications at levels four and five, which sit above A-levels and are equivalent to the first two years of undergraduate degrees.
Maintenance loans will become available for college students from January 2027 but could be expanded to make more of them eligible.
Young people aged 19 and over going to further education colleges for the first time are funded by an adult education budget, which became the Adult Skills Fund in 2024.
The fund is worth around £1.4bn annually and pays for skills, employability and wellbeing courses for more than one million adults each year. Hughes said it was cut by 70 per cent between 2010 and 2020.
Sixteen to 18-year-olds, as well as students aged 19 and over who began their courses before they turned 19, are funded separately.
Colleges funding boost
In a recommendation previously alluded to by Education Secretary Lucy Powell last week, Milburn will call for the 16 to 19 education budget to increase in funding automatically when more young people sign up for colleges.
He also wants colleges to receive timely funding for students who enroll after a November funding cut-off so no one is “told to wait until the following September”.
The AoC told Milburn’s review that colleges had to enrol 32,000 extra young people this academic year with no additional funding.
Speaking to college leaders at the AoC conference last week, the Education Secretary said she recognised the “lack of a guarantee on funding for every student”.
“I know that many of you do the right thing anyway, taking young people on at your own risk, even losing funding or as a loss leader,” Powell added. “And I admire that so much, but it tells me that something is going badly wrong.”
Plans modelled after Netherlands and Denmark
Hughes said other countries with lower levels of Neets have more young people in their early 20s doing what the UK would think of as a 16 to 19 programme, with funding available until age 24 to give them second, third or even fourth chances.
The reforms aim to narrow the international participation gap. Around 66 per cent of young people in the UK remain in education at 18, compared with roughly 84 per cent in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
By age 24, only 21 per cent of young people in the UK are still in education – less than half the rate in those other countries.
Hughes said: “It’s just not fair that we have spent nearly all of our money on making higher education world class, and hardly any money on making further education world class and thriving.”
Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the proposals “sound very promising” but “will need to be backed up with the funding and staffing required to deliver them”.
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