The employment support landscape is in one of its most significant periods of reform in recent years. Restart is making its final referrals this June and the new programme. Connect to Work is live and scaling across England and Wales. The Youth Guarantee is in trailblazers across eight mayoral areas with a national rollout underway.
After years of advocating for more locally led, flexible employment support with stronger links between health, skills and work, the sector is seeing many of those arguments reflected in policy.
That investment creates a genuine opportunity, and alongside it a useful design question: as the new programmes mature, what does the sector learn about the cohort that is hardest to reach, and how do we build provision that reaches further upstream than referral?
Reading past the statistics
The Office for National Statistics reported in February 2026 that 957,000 young people aged 16 to 24 were not in employment, education or training in October to December 2025. Youth unemployment has reached 16.2 per cent, exceeding the pandemic peak of 15.2 per cent recorded in September 2020.
According to the House of Commons Library, 57 per cent of those 957,000 young people are economically inactive. They are not unemployed in the technical sense. They are not registered for Universal Credit, not engaging with Jobcentre Plus, not presenting themselves for any kind of support.
Understanding this group, and what it takes to reach them, is one of the more important questions the sector can work on as the new programmes bed in.
What the current programmes are designed for
It is worth being precise about this, because clarity on programme scope helps identify where complementary provision adds most value.
Both of the main programmes are well designed for the people they reach. Connect to Work supports up to 100,000 people a year at peak through Individual Placement and Support, delivered via local authority clusters — a genuinely welcome level of local responsiveness.
The Youth Guarantee’s Jobs Guarantee element, expanded in March 2026 to cover 18 to 24 year olds, will reach around 55,000 young people over three years.
As most people in the field know, both share one feature by design: they engage young people who are already in contact with the formal system. Connect to Work is built around disabled people and those with health conditions; the Jobs Guarantee around those who have been on Universal Credit and actively seeking work for 18 months or more.
That is entirely appropriate for the populations they serve. It also means the 57 per cent of NEET young people who are economically inactive — not on Universal Credit, not actively seeking support — sit outside the reach of either programme.
Together these represent a serious commitment to employment support. The gap is not a failure of that commitment; it is the part that no referral-based programme is designed to reach.
The upstream opportunity
The young people furthest from employment have often formed a prior view about whether engaging with any kind of support is worth their time. That is not the same as lacking motivation.
For many of them it is a reasonable inference from experience: that the options available to people like them are limited, and that the system is unlikely to change that. Getting in front of that view, before it becomes settled, is where the sector has an opportunity to do something genuinely different.
What tends to work with this cohort is an encounter with possibility that feels relevant to the individual’s specific situation rather than to young people in general. The young person needs to be able to see themselves in the outcome before they will invest in the process.
That requires provision that is personalised, available at the point of need, and oriented around what the individual wants rather than what they are required to complete.
This is not a criticism of referral-based provision. It is a description of what needs to sit alongside it, at an earlier point in the journey, for the people who are not yet ready to be referred anywhere.
Where digital support fits
The government’s Get Britain Working white paper describes a future in which AI-enabled, personalised employment support is available to people whenever they need it. DWP has described this as a Jobcentre in your pocket and has set a delivery timeline of 2027-28, with market engagement for AI and technology solutions already underway. The direction is right and the investment signals are encouraging.
The design opportunity the sector can contribute to is ensuring that the tools being built are as useful for people who are not yet in the system as for those who are. A tool designed around case management serves a different function from one designed to reach a young person who has not yet decided that engaging with anything is worthwhile.
The sector’s experience of working with the hardest-to-reach cohort is directly relevant to how that second category of tool gets designed.
Create Your Own Future: an approach already in practice
At Saffron Interactive we have been working on exactly this problem. Create Your Own Future is an AI-powered employability platform built specifically for providers working with young people who are furthest from employment, including those who are NEET, have learning disabilities or difficulties, face barriers around mental health or housing, or whose first language is not English.
The platform is designed around a simple principle: that building agency and confidence has to come before job search, and that the way to build both is through a conversation that feels genuinely relevant to the individual.
A young person using Create Your Own Future interacts with an AI coach through voice or text, in a format that is deliberately familiar, similar to WhatsApp, with accessibility features built in and translations available.
The conversations are grounded in neuroscientific principles and built on Career Construction Theory and the GROW model, well-evidenced frameworks for developing career resilience and adaptability rather than simply directing people towards the nearest available vacancy.
Skills assessments are matched against over 1,570 job profiles, and the Occupational Maps from Skills England are integrated so that individuals can explore career pathways, understand salary and progression structures, and see which qualifications available through the Adult Skills Fund are relevant to where they want to go.
Once a young person can see a route that feels real to them, the platform moves into action. Guided goal plans, called Playbooks, are recommended by the AI coach based on what the individual has said they want to achieve. Progress is tracked, and behavioural nudges keep people moving towards their goals using the GROW model.
For advisers and work coaches, the platform transforms the support they are able to offer. Eligibility conversations and initial diagnostics are handled automatically by the AI, reducing administrative burden by up to 70 per cent.
Advisers receive a real-time summary of each person’s progress, the jobs and training they have shown interest in, and an AI sentiment analysis of their conversations. Rather than spending the first part of every session gathering background information, advisers come into the human interaction already knowing what matters to that individual and where to focus.
The platform can also work as a standalone service for more independent users, making it scalable across a caseload of any size. 90 per cent of participants discovered a career or development pathway they had not previously considered.
If you would like to see the platform in practice or talk through what it could look like within your provision, we would welcome the conversation. Get in touch with our team today!
