Just over a million people aged 16 to 24 across the UK were not in education, employment or training at the beginning of this year (Office for National Statistics, 2026). Kemi Badenoch, leader of the opposition, has framed part of the problem as a failure of welfare incentives, arguing that when sickness benefits pay more than the minimum wage, a young person lacking confidence may decide that work is not worth the risk. Welfare design can influence participation. But that explanation cannot account for the repeated effort, rejection and institutional fragmentation described by many young people themselves.

What young people are telling us

For the report Inside the Mind of a Young NEET, Shuab Gamote and Peter Hyman listened to more than 400 young people across Britain who had disengaged or were at risk of doing so. More than nine in ten wanted a job and could say exactly what it would give them: money, routine, independence and purpose. Applications went out by the hundred and came back as silence. The young people had a phrase for it: the “rejection economy”. Many had spent several years at home after the pandemic, feeling their ability to step back into the world diminish (Gamote and Hyman, 2026).

These young people want a future. The immediate question is whether the adults around them believe what they are saying and care enough to act. As stalled years accumulate, the belief that trying can make a difference begins to wear away. A young person can continue to hope in private after they have stopped acting because experience has taught them that their actions change very little. Their accounts trace the gradual loss of confidence that follows repeated effort met with frustration. Any serious response must begin with that experience (Gamote and Hyman, 2026).

Futures literacy: the missing capability

For England, the government’s White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, takes the disengagement crisis seriously. It says young people should enter a changing world confident in their ability to shape it. Yet it never explains how they will learn to do that. It proposes no sustained way for pupils to explore possible futures, examine the forces shaping them or connect present choices to longer-term change. Nor does it identify the practical outlets through which young people could exercise that capability: through decisions taken in their schools and communities, through employers or through the policies affecting their lives. Agency is promised as an outcome without the methods, experiences or influence needed to build it (Department for Education, 2026a).

That missing capability is futures literacy: learning to examine how ideas about the future shape what people expect and do in the present. Young people are continually presented with accounts of what technology, climate change and work will mean for their lives, often as though the direction of change were already settled. Futures literacy gives them the means to question the assumptions within those accounts, explore other credible possibilities and judge where they may have influence (Miller, 2007; UNESCO, n.d.).

Education already develops forms of literacy that help young people understand money, media, digital technology and AI. It can also prepare them to engage seriously with the futures taking shape around them. Later, I consider how this could be built into work that schools already undertake.

That omission is especially serious because of what this generation is being asked to face. We are handing young people a climate crisis, economic precarity and technological upheaval they did nothing to cause, then expecting them to carry the repair. Researchers call this transfer of responsibility onto individuals responsibilisation (Peeters, 2019). The environmental psychologist Wouter Poortinga has warned against putting the onus on younger generations to solve a climate crisis they inherited (Poortinga, Demski and Steentjes, 2023). Under the climate policies examined in a major 2021 study, children born in 2020 were projected to experience nearly seven times as many heatwaves over their lifetimes as people born in 1960 (Thiery et al., 2021).

The problem is not simply whether young people can imagine change, but whether they believe they have any recognised way to influence it. In the government’s own national youth research, almost half of young people in England felt that their voice did not matter in decisions across the country, while one in three did not know how to influence decisions in their local area (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2025). Futures literacy cannot supply that influence on its own. It can help young people understand where decisions are made, develop alternatives and enter those decisions with something substantive to say. Institutions must then create credible ways for them to be heard.

How the future shapes action in the present

Futures literacy does not begin here as an untested idea. It is an established field of scholarship and practice, used internationally to help people recognise assumptions, work with uncertainty and consider alternatives (Miller, 2007; UNESCO, n.d.). What remains underdeveloped is the evidence connecting school-based futures-literacy provision to outcomes such as attendance, employment or time spent outside education and work. Research in adjacent fields strengthens the rationale for intervention, while careful piloting can establish what forms of provision work, for whom and under what conditions.

In a randomised trial, helping disadvantaged adolescents develop a plausible future self and connect it to what they did in the present produced improvements in attendance, effort and academic attainment that continued into the following school year (Oyserman, Bybee and Terry, 2006). Across dozens of studies, young people who could connect their present lives to the future tended to show stronger motivation and better educational outcomes, although the relationship was weaker when researchers measured what they actually did rather than what they reported (Andre et al., 2018). These findings do not demonstrate that futures literacy will reduce the number of young people who become NEET. They do show why the connection between a credible future and present action deserves serious educational attention.

English longitudinal research also suggests that a young person’s sense of control is associated with spending less time outside education or work, but that its protective value recedes as disadvantages accumulate. The study followed a nationally representative cohort of 15,770 young people in England from age 14 to 20. Internal locus of control offered some protection against economic inactivity and unemployment, but not against prolonged periods of more than six months spent outside education, employment or training (Ng-Knight and Schoon, 2017). That is not an argument against building agency. It is an argument for building it alongside real opportunities, supportive institutions and routes through which young people can act.

Futures literacy cannot create jobs that do not exist or repair a route from school to work that the interim report of the Young People and Work review describes as fragmented (Independent Review into Young People and Work, 2026). The causes of disengagement are too extensive for a single educational response. The World Economic Forum’s Intergenerational Foresight work makes the wider principle clear: decisions whose consequences extend beyond electoral and investment horizons need the participation of the people who will live longest with them (World Economic Forum, 2026).

Policy and business therefore need foresight too, with young people taking part in it. Employers have a direct interest because the routes they create, the people they recruit and the capabilities they reward help determine which futures young people can reach. Equipping young people is only one part of the change required. Institutions must also become more willing to share influence and respond to what young people contribute.

Where futures literacy could sit in schools

In practice, futures literacy could be woven into work schools already do in three ways:

The most readily available route is a defined strand within Living in the Wider World, the part of PSHE in which economic wellbeing and careers education are commonly taught (PSHE Association, 2020). It could support schools in meeting their statutory careers duties and implementing the updated Gatsby Benchmarks (Department for Education, 2026b). A recurring activity could ask pupils to map several plausible futures for their lives over the coming decade, trace the forces behind each, distinguish choices within their control from pressures outside it, and identify actions that could make one future more likely. The central question would be: “What futures are open to you, and where do you have influence?”

This would not be free-form prediction. It would require knowledge, evidence and disciplined enquiry. Teachers would need concise training, worked examples and adaptable materials. When a young person can see several possible versions of their life and identify some part they can play in reaching one, the connection between present action and future possibility can begin to return.

The second route is through the EPQ and related independent project qualifications, which already reward sustained, self-directed enquiry and can culminate in an artefact (AQA, 2019). Futures methods can give that process greater structure. Students begin with an issue central to them and their lives, investigate it as a real-world challenge, examine the systems and assumptions sustaining it, and explore how it might develop under different conditions. They then design and test a tangible response with relevant stakeholders. The resulting artefact might be a prototype, campaign, product or intervention, but it emerges from evidence, critical enquiry and iterative feedback rather than unsupported speculation. When these qualifications are next reviewed, this kind of structured futures practice could be incorporated more deliberately.

The third route runs through the fast-growing effort to teach young people about AI. Much AI literacy understandably concentrates on using tools effectively and safely. Futures literacy extends that learning by asking where these technologies might be taking us, whose assumptions are embedded in the futures being presented and what say young people have in shaping the decisions surrounding them. Students can learn to reason rigorously about AI futures that nobody can predict, using the same kinds of scenario and anticipatory methods employed by governments and organisations preparing for uncertainty.

None of these routes requires futures literacy to become a new standalone subject. Each uses structures that already exist. That does not make implementation effortless. Every curriculum priority competes for time and attention, and all three routes would require thoughtful design, teacher preparation and clear standards for quality.

The case for a national pilot

There is now a practical policy opening. The government is developing the revised national curriculum with teachers, curriculum experts, pupils and parents ahead of planned publication in spring 2027. Schools are also implementing updated careers guidance and Gatsby Benchmarks (Department for Education, 2025; Department for Education, 2026b).

A DfE-supported, time-limited pilot across a representative group of secondary schools and colleges could test futures literacy through PSHE and careers education, independent projects and AI-related learning. It could examine effects on pupils’ sense of agency, future orientation, engagement and understanding of where decisions are made. Young people, including those with experience of disengagement, must help design the pilot and judge whether its language and activities feel credible. Employers, teachers, youth workers and community organisations should participate too. Independent evaluation could then inform a later decision about how an entitlement to futures literacy should be secured.

The government has also set out plans to widen the routes available to young people. Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s newly announced technical pathways would give pupils access from age 14 to technical education, work experience and connections with employers. Schools, colleges, employers, mayors and local leaders are expected to shape the routes, with rollout intended to begin in 2028 (Prime Minister’s Office, 2026).

That initiative responds directly to something described in the NEET accounts: a future that appeared to offer only one door. Testing the proposed pathways against several plausible futures for local industries and the wider labour market would help ensure that they remain valuable as conditions change. It would also bring young people into considering the future of work rather than preparing them only for the labour market as it exists today.

I know how difficult this is to put into practice. Curriculum change is slow, and schools are already stretched. I do not propose it lightly. In my own curriculum work, I have built futures literacy into sustained enquiry, independent projects and the study of AI, and seen how seriously young people engage when the future is treated as something they can investigate rather than something adults have already decided for them.

We accept that every child has the right to learn to read. In a century that will ask them to remake their working lives more than once, they also have the right to learn to think seriously about the future. As Loes Damhof and Jitske Gulmans write, “we cannot be hopeful without rethinking our images of the future” (Damhof and Gulmans, 2023, p. 51). Education can give young people the confidence and methods needed to do that. Institutions must give them meaningful opportunities to put those capabilities to use.

The future is not something to fear. It is something to build, together.

#FuturesLiteracy #EducationFutures #FuturesThinking #EducationPolicy #YouthVoice

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