Today, the UK reached an unignorable milestone: the number of young people not earning or learning has topped one million.

Young people who are ‘NEET’ (Not in Education, Employment or Training) are on the rise. Today’s review by former cabinet minister Alan Milburn will make clear that this number has been rising over several years. 

The causes are complex and deep-rooted. Employers have argued that higher National Insurance rates and the increased minimum wage have made it harder for them to hire people, especially younger people with less experience. The creative industries are not immune to this pressure.

The industry talks a good game on how human creativity cannot be outsourced to an algorithm. Yet the truth remains that entry-level roles are being decimated. According to the latest IPA Census, the number of employees aged 25 or under fell by 19.2% last year. Staff numbers in that demographic fell from 3,632 to 2,936.

Declining employment opportunities are a challenge across industries. Early estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggest the number of job openings fell by 28,000, or 3.9%, to 705,000 between February and April, its lowest level since April 2021.

Anxiety surrounding this ‘lost generation’ of young people is rising. The middle-class dinner party conversation of choice has become why parents should be advising their children to get a trade; after all, you can never get a good plumber at short notice. 

Of course, parental anxiety is nothing new. But when it comes to ditching traditional academic routes and embracing a trade, the unspoken truth is that this advice is always for other people’s children, never their own. The traditional hot-house routes of education are still thriving, regardless of the uncomfortable truth that many of these paths are rooted in the past.

Today’s report marks another reason to stop ignoring this fundamental fault line in business and society. For the creative industries where cultural fluency is creative currency, the cost of being disconnected from young people’s lived experience is particularly acute. This is a problem the industry simply can’t afford to ignore.

With this in mind, we asked industry leaders, should the creative industries be doing more to create space for the next generation of talent?

The creative industries have a real opportunity here, and it starts with leaders choosing to create time and space, not just fill it. That means actively pulling emerging talent into the room, not waiting for them to earn their way in. As the pace of work escalates, slowing down is one of the most powerful investments we can make. In an age where AI is increasingly in the room, human mentorship matters more than ever. Creative judgment isn't handed down. It builds over time to empower young creators to explore, experiment, and yes, make mistakes.

If we don’t create space for the next generation of talent, we’ll create a future leadership gap. We’ve heard a million times how AI is changing our industry by automating processes that used to be manual and repetitive. But the young talent were responsible for these tasks, and learning key skills like judgement and critical thinking along the way; skills vital for career progression. Experience is built by observation; how a decision is made, how a strategy is formed. If these opportunities are no longer there, we have to actively create them by embedding learning and exposure into junior roles.

The creative industries talk a lot about collaboration and bringing different perspectives into the work, but it’s not always reflected in how consistently emerging talent is involved in shaping ideas from the start. In experiential, that matters even more because the best work is built in real time, through people working together and challenging each other’s thinking. When new talent is genuinely part of that process, it changes the energy of the work - it becomes more original and often more reflective of the audiences it’s trying to engage. There are programmes and initiatives emerging across the industry, but there’s still more to do to make that kind of collaboration the norm rather than the exception.