By Professor Mark Mon- Williams
In response to an article by Daisy Christodoulou in The Guardian, Professor Mark Mon-Williams, NIHR ARC Yorkshire and Humber Data, Visualisation and AI Co-Lead and Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Born in Bradford, reflects on what the evidence tells us about identifying children at risk of becoming NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training), and why earlier, coordinated action is needed across education, health and social care.
A shorter version of this response was published by The Guardian as a letter on 17th August 2026. The article below expands on those arguments and sets out the evidence and broader context in full.
A recent article by Daisy Christodoulou in The Guardian questioned whether teachers should be expected to identify children who may be at risk of becoming NEET later in life.
Read the full response of Professor Mark Mon-Williams below:
Daisy Christodoulou’s defence of teachers is commendable, but her argument against Alan Milburn’s proposals is specious. She suggests that asking teachers to identify children at risk of becoming NEET is rather like asking dentists to solve reading, unemployment or poverty.
The comparison is more useful than she realises. If a dentist saw a cancerous lesion, we would expect them to act rather than say their job was simply to fill teeth. And dentists do have a role in education. Our Child of the North work shows that tooth decay causes pain, disrupts sleep, affects speech and school readiness, and keeps children out of school. The most brilliant teacher will struggle to teach a child with excruciating toothache.
This is Milburn’s point. He is not asking Reception teachers to fix teeth or predict unemployment 12 years later. He is asking the rest of the system to act on what teachers already know about the children in front of them.
A warning signal is not a prediction. Risk is not destiny. We know because we conducted the research at the centre of this debate. We used connected datasets within Bradford to follow children from Reception into late adolescence. Teachers completed the statutory Early Years Foundation Stage Profile when the children entered school (aged 4 years). Twelve years later, we could see that children who had not reached a Good Level of Development had a much greater probability of being categorised as NEET.
Nobody suggested creating a register of five-year-old “future unemployed people”. That would be scientifically illiterate and ethically indefensible. The useful finding is that teachers are already identifying children whose circumstances increase the probability of later difficulty. Too often, we record the warning and do nothing with it.
Christodoulou’s answer is to identify children who cannot read and teach them to read. We believe passionately in the importance of literacy, and much of the association with later NEET status operated through academic attainment. But children are not reading scores with legs.
The Early Years Foundation Stage Profile also captures communication, social and emotional development, physical development and problem solving. Our paper explicitly warns against “training to test”. The evidence we captured is that teachers are detecting broader developmental and environmental needs requiring a wider response.
Imagine a girl (Tracey) arriving at school struggling to communicate, write, join playground games, and regulate her emotions. Poverty, poor housing or an unrecognised neurodivergence may sit behind some of those difficulties. A good teacher sees this. But the teacher cannot diagnose autism, treat anxiety, fix housing, or provide occupational therapy. Nor should she be expected to.
This is why claiming that Milburn is placing another burden on teachers gets things backwards. A whole-system response is not about making teachers responsible for everything. It is about making sure teachers are no longer left responsible for everything. If a teacher identifies a communication problem, there should be somewhere to go. If anxiety starts driving absence, help should arrive before the child disappears from education. If health, social care and school each hold part of a troubling picture, those fragments should be brought together before crisis hits.
Moreover, education cannot be reduced to a handful of traditional subjects. Literacy and numeracy are foundational, but good teaching has always meant understanding children: recognising strengths and difficulties and creating environments in which different children can flourish, especially in a changing world where AI will rewrite the future. Inclusive schools already do this every day.
Schools cannot eliminate poverty, repair the housing market, or create jobs. Christodoulou is right about that. But it is a false choice to suggest that we must either build a productive economy or support a struggling five-year-old. We need to do both. The tragedy of NEET is that government acts at the end of the story when we attach an administrative label and ask how to “re-engage” a young person. Our research shows that, for many, the warning signs were visible many years earlier.
This does not mean Tracey’s future was predetermined. Every warning signal is an opportunity to change the probabilities. Our Child of the North campaign with the Centre for Young Lives has made one consistent argument: children’s lives do not respect the organisational boundaries of Whitehall departments. Health, education, housing, social care and economic policy converge in the life of a child.
Milburn’s proposal recognises this reality. Teachers are already telling us which children are struggling. They do not need another spreadsheet. They need the rest of the system to listen and act. Building a country that works for all children and young people is not the job of teachers alone. It is the job of everyone.
Teachers and dentists included.
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