Catch22 recently attended the ERSA Youth Employment Conference in which the Resolution Foundation discussed the links between youth employment and poor mental health. Policy and Communications Manager at Catch22, Emma Lyddon, discussed this area of increasing awareness in a written interview with Louise Murphy, Senior Economist at the Resolution Foundation. They discuss how the employability policy and research sector can fuel change on behalf of young people.
Many people are aware of the challenges young people are facing with their mental health. What challenges are most prevalent and how do they link to unemployment and economic inactivity in young people?
When it comes to young people’s mental health, the numbers affected alone should be enough to sit up and pay attention. In 2021-2022, more than one in three young people aged 18-24 reported symptoms that indicated they were experiencing a ‘common mental disorder’ such as depression, anxiety or bipolar disorder. That is significantly higher than in 2000, when that figure stood at less than a quarter. Mental health problems are first and foremost personally distressing, but they also have a detrimental impact on employment outcomes, costing greatly to individuals, employers and the state. Unsurprisingly, young people with mental health problems are more likely to be out of work than their healthy peers: between 2018-2022, 21% of 18-24-year-olds with mental health problems were workless, compared to 13% of those without. No wonder, then, that as the share of young people struggling with their mental health has risen over the last decade, so too has the number who are out of work due to ill health. In 2013, that figure stood at 93,000; today, it has more than doubled to 190,000. As a result, in 2023, one in twenty young people (excluding full-time students) were economically inactive due to ill health.
What barriers do young people face when looking for work and how does this link to mental health?
It is young people with both poor mental health and low levels of qualifications who are most disadvantaged when looking for work: young people who are non-graduates and have mental health problems are more likely than their healthy or degree-educated peers to be workless or in low hourly pay. Indeed, when we look at the skill levels of those young people who are not working because of health reasons, the picture is striking: 79% of 18-24-year-olds who are workless due to ill health have qualifications at GCSE level or below, compared to a third of all people in that age group.
We have seen the impact of Covid-19 across a wide number of socioeconomic inequities in the UK. How has Covid-19 impacted the links between mental ill health and unemployment/economic inactivity in young people?
The Covid-19 pandemic certainly led to a sharp rise in mental health problems across the whole population – and this was particularly the case for young people compared to older age groups. But the trends we observe in young people’s mental health, and the links between mental health and the labour market, are not just a Covid-19 phenomenon: the uptick in the share of 18-24-year-olds with mental health problems – and the share who are workless due to ill health – clearly pre-dated 2020.
Catch22 co-chairs the Quality of Work Subgroup alongside Youth Employment UK; in your experience, what can employment and/or further education do to improve attainment within the labour market for those with mental health challenges?
Employers and education providers can certainly do more to support young people with mental health problems. For example, schools and FE colleges need more investment to allow them to support those young people at the sharpest end of the mental health crisis, and to help children and young people successfully re-sit key exams while still in compulsory education. Employers must do more to enable young people in work to sustain employment and thrive. This means treating mental health problems in the workplace with as much seriousness as they did back pain in the 1990s and early 2000s: after all, stress, depression and anxiety overtook musculoskeletal disorders as the leading cause of work-related illness in 2016. Here, it is informative to look back at ‘manual handling’ regulations that were introduced in the 1990s obliging employers to undertake a risk assessment and take mitigating action when the risk is high. This analogy suggests that employers should be required by law to ensure their managers are mental health-trained: we propose that retail and hospitality – where 36% of 18-24-year-olds currently work, and where one-third of these young workers report mental health problems – be the sectors that lead the way.
How can the employability sector support an out-of-work young person with mental health problems to access sustainable employment?
The employability sector should focus in particular on providing more support and guidance to young people who do not go to university. The transition from childhood into adulthood can be hard for anyone, but this period is particularly unnerving for young people not on the higher education (HE) track who currently receive far less guidance from their school or college about what comes next, compared to those who are university-bound. And as our focus groups with young people made clear, those with mental health problems are particularly hard hit by the uncertainty this lack of guidance engenders.
Rather than just placing people into ‘any old job’ to meet targets and initially yet unsustainably bring down unemployment rates, Catch22 want to see JCP support people into dependable careers. This means considering whether the jobs people are supported into are of interest to them or whether it matches their skills, passions, and ambitions. Read more about Catch22’s stance surrounding young people, economic inactivity and JobCentre Plus.