When Rachel Rafter’s 23-year-old son Matt finished college and started applying for jobs, he began to lose confidence. “Matt became despondent, and it really affected his motivation,” says Rachel. “He was going on websites like Indeed and not getting a job, even when Tesco were doing a recruitment drive. Sometimes he wasn’t even getting an acknowledgement back at all. It’s easy these days for young people to lose confidence because they see that they’re one of so many applying for the same job, and there’s all the doom-and-gloom on social media. We were worried about him.”
Rachel, who lives in Bournemouth, is a singer and vocal coach, and her husband is a university lecturer. They tried to help Matt as best they could. “It had been years since I’d had to apply for jobs like that, and things have changed,” she says. How did Matt cope during the year he was unemployed? “He’s into his fitness,” says Rachel, “so he’d make himself go to the gym – but then other times he’d be in his room, and we definitely noticed him become a bit more withdrawn.”
Matt was, for a year, a Neet – Not in Employment, Education or Training. The latest ONS figures suggest that 13 per cent of all young people in the UK are in this category, and the number is rising. Former health secretary Alan Milburn’s independent report on Neets, published in May 2026, has exposed that the rate of youth unemployment has reached a crisis point.
