Borrowed From The Hague

Written by Katherine Bradshaw

: Why Westminster’s Latest Idea for Britain's Youth Came from the Netherlands

Nearly a million young people in the UK are neither working nor studying. The Netherlands has almost solved that problem. This month, the UK realised it might be time to change things up and see what can be done to solve this problem.

Photo: Phil Nijhuis

Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden didn’t make his most recent trip to the Netherlands for the bikes and the stroopwafels. He went to The Hague to a youth guidance centre for 16-27-year-olds and to watch how the Dutch do something Britain has spectacularly failed to do: stop young people from falling through the cracks between school and work.

The numbers explain the urgency the UK government is putting on this issue. In the UK, 957,000 16-24-year-olds are currently NEET, not in education, employment or training, a rate of 12.8%, according to the latest ONS figures. In the Netherlands, the equivalent rate among 18-24-year-olds sits at just 4.9%, the lowest in Europe. McFadden’s takeaway from the visit itself: “No young person should be given up on and written off; everyone deserves a path to success.”

What he found in The Hague wasn’t a single one-off policy. The youth centre (Jongerenpunt070) works, giving every young person who walks in a dedicated contact person and a tailored plan for their future. One relationship, followed through, rather than bouncing from agency to agency, or applying to everything through LinkedIn on your own, and as a consequence giving up somewhere along the line due to burnout. It is part of a wider Dutch system built on the same logic: coordination between local government, schools and employers, rather than services operating on their own. More than half of Dutch teenagers have real workplace experience by 19, and 35% follow a technical or vocational pathway, against 22% in the UK. The system doesn’t just catch people who fall; it is built so fewer people fall in the first place.

The UK’s response to the trip was announced shortly after they returned: there will be a £2.5 billion Youth Guarantee, with almost 180 new Youth Hubs opening now, growing the network to over 360 by 2029, with the ambition that every 16-24-year-old lives within an hour’s public transport of one. There is a £3,000 grant for employers who take on an 18-24-year-old off Universal Credit, and £2,000 for small businesses that create apprenticeships. The target is 200,000 new jobs and apprenticeships, and support reaching close to a million young people.

What they have done in The Hague is a genuinely good step forward, an overdue idea and something to be optimistic about. However, it is also worth being honest about what it doesn’t include. Youth Hubs can connect someone to a job that exists; they cannot conjure jobs into existence. On top of this, they do not fix the fact that a university degree and a UK apprenticeship still aren’t seen as remotely equivalent routes, in a way they broadly are in the Netherlands. The Dutch NEET rate isn't just low because of better signposting; it's low because vocational and academic paths are treated as genuinely parallel, from school age onward. Hubs are the safety net, not the answer.

This is a pattern I keep noticing among my own friends, and in my own life moving between both the Dutch and English education systems. Almost everyone I know back home did exactly what they were supposed to: good grades, a degree, in a couple of cases two, and they’re a year or more out of university now, still sending applications as graduate programmes get more competitive, with a growing sense that you should have had an internship before you had even left school. My Dutch friends, by contrast (and I'm speaking here mostly about the university-track experience), are often still studying, but by choice rather than necessity. I am doing a one-year master’s over two years myself, building in work experience along the way, which I can afford to do because tuition here is €2,500 a year rather than what it is in England. Others who have just finished their master’s have already started graduate programmes or well-paid graduate internships, and in a few cases a full-time job. This is possible because of how many higher education routes there are in the Netherlands, from Hotel School, which my mother went to, to accountancy at a technical university, where part of the course is working in the field while you study. There is no one group working harder than the other; it is that the UK still funnels almost everyone down a single university path and quietly assumes a job will be waiting at the other end, in a way the Dutch system simply doesn't.

So, borrowing this system from The Hague may help, but does it fix the root cause? The lack of job opportunities for young people, the lack of graduate programmes, and the general acceptance that a university degree is no longer enough.

Written by Katherine Bradshaw

Katherine Bradshaw
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