The Young People and Work Report Got Confidence Right. Here's What's Still Missing.

The Government's interim report on young people and work is, in important ways, a welcome piece of work. For anyone who has spent time delivering employment support to people who are genuinely struggling — not people who need a CV tweaked, but people who have lost their footing entirely — the report's central finding is long overdue: confidence, mental wellbeing, and social readiness are barriers to employment of equal importance to skills gaps.

We have known this at Digital Gum since 2014. It is the entire basis of our model. The report validates it in policy language, which matters for commissioning. But reading it carefully, there is still a significant gap between what the report diagnoses and what the solutions being proposed actually address.

What the Report Gets Right

Confidence is the missing layer.

Most employability provision focuses on what people know, not what they believe about themselves. A CV workshop is useful if someone already believes they are employable. For someone who has been out of work for 18 months, it is paper-thin. The report acknowledges this directly, and it is an important acknowledgement.

The disappearance of informal work experience is a serious problem.

Saturday jobs, casual work, and the low-stakes environments where a previous generation learned to show up, work alongside people they hadn't chosen, take feedback, and manage setbacks — these have largely disappeared. Young adults are entering adulthood without the social muscle memory that work requires. No amount of skills training replaces this.

Formalised recruitment is a barrier, not a filter.

The report notes that highly formal application processes — competency frameworks, AI-led screening, multi-stage interviews — are discouraging young people before they've had a chance to demonstrate their capability. For someone with anxiety and no prior work experience, a five-page application form is an insurmountable obstacle.

The cohort hardest to reach sits between youth services and adult provision.

Young adults aged 19-24 who are NEET fall into a gap the report acknowledges but does not fully resolve: too old for school-based support, too young and too under-confident for standard adult employment programmes. This is the group we work with most.

What the Proposed Solutions Still Get Wrong

Online provision is still being treated as equivalent to in-person.

Much of the proposed delivery is online or hybrid. For the cohort the report is most concerned about — young adults with high anxiety, low confidence, and limited experience of professional environments — online provision does not work. We know this because we ran it. Completion rates are lower. Confidence scores at programme end are lower. Employment rates at six months are lower. A commissioner choosing an online programme because it is cheaper is not saving money; they are spending money on worse outcomes.

Completion rates are still being used as the primary success metric.

If a programme is measured by how many people finish it, the incentive is to make it easy enough that people do not drop out — not challenging enough that it actually changes something. The hard work of rebuilding confidence requires showing up when you do not want to. You cannot make that comfortable, and you should not try.

The scale ambition is in tension with the model that works.

The report calls for systemic, scalable responses. Confidence is not built at scale. It is built in small groups, over time, in physical spaces, by people who know each other. The model that works — maximum 12 participants, in person, twice weekly, with real external stakeholders — does not look compelling in a policy paper that needs to demonstrate reach. It does, however, produce employment outcomes.

What Effective Provision for This Cohort Actually Looks Like

We have been delivering it for 10 years in North Devon, so this is not theoretical.

It is in person.

The physical presence of other people — peers in the same situation who are succeeding — is the core mechanism. There is no online equivalent.

It is small.

Maximum 12 participants. Not because resources are limited, but because confidence is built through genuine relationship, and genuine relationship does not form in a group of 30.

It has real external accountability.

Participants work on something that matters to someone outside the training room. At Digital Gum, that is a local charity who needs a real piece of work delivered. The pressure is genuine, the stakes are low, and the experience of succeeding under those conditions is the most powerful confidence-building mechanism available.

It measures the right things.

Not completion rates. Employment at six months. Whether people are still in work at twelve months. Those are the numbers that tell you whether a programme worked.

What This Means for Commissioners

If you are responding to the Young People and Work report, the questions to ask any provider are:

• Do you deliver in person, or do you offer an online option?

• What is your maximum cohort size, and why?

• What are your employment outcomes at six months, not at programme end?

• Can you show me a real outcomes report, including cohorts that did not perform well?

• Do you work specifically with the 19-24 NEET cohort, or group them with older adults?

The provision that gets commissioned in the next 12 to 18 months will shape a generation's experience of support. It is worth commissioning carefully.

If you want to talk about what confidence-first provision looks like in practice, email hello@wearedigitalgum.com