The ‘Anxious Generation’ comes of age – and the bill is landing
The commission led by Alan Milburn — former Health Secretary, asked by Keir Starmer to investigate why 957,000 young people aged 16 to 24 are not in education, employment or training — has now published its interim report. Its central finding is stark: a rising tide of mental ill-health, anxiety, depression and neurodiversity is the primary reason so many young people have dropped out of working life entirely. The annual cost to the country is £125 billion. The lifetime cost of each individual NEET, the report calculates, is approximately £130,000. On present trends, the number will grow from 957,000 today to 1.25 million within five years. Milburn talked about the number being a million now in his press conference.
The commission rejects, unequivocally, the idea that these youngsters are snowflakes or faking their symptoms. Eighty-four percent of those surveyed said they wanted to find a job or training. Their distress is real — and directly linked to having grown up on social media. Milburn warns that “the system is trapping people in worklessness rather than enabling them into work” and that “we risk writing a whole generation off.” He is right. And the welfare state, he says, was “built for a different era” and must change if we are to avoid what he calls a generational, societal and economic catastrophe.
The numbers behind that language are sobering. Six in ten of the NEETs in the study have never worked — up from four in ten in 2005. That is approaching 600,000 young people with no experience of employment whatsoever. One in four have been signed off with long-term sickness or disability. Forty-three percent say mental health is their primary problem — up from 24% in 2011. Britain’s NEET rate of 12.8% is the highest in the EU except Romania, and three times that of the Netherlands. That is not a marginal shift. That is a transformation of the landscape of young adult life in a little over a decade.
And of every £25 spent on welfare for the young, just £1 is spent on helping them find work.
Confirmation of what many of us feared
To those of us who have been watching what smartphones are doing to children, this report is confirmation of something long suspected. The ridiculous experiment with our children’s mental health — conducted without consent, without regulation and without adequate evidence — is now showing its results.
The scale of the mental health deterioration is documented in the report’s own data. Between 2017 and 2023, the proportion of children and young people in England with a mental disorder rose from 12% to 20%. Rates of common mental disorders among young people rose from 17.5% in 2007 to 25.8% in 2023/24. This is a generational shift that predates Covid-19 — the pandemic accelerated a deterioration already under way. And yet children and young people, who now account for 33.3% of all contacts with mental health services, receive just 11.3% of all mental health spending. That is the structural reason our drama and wellbeing workshops are often the most effective early intervention available in our partner schools: there is almost nothing else.
Milburn’s focus groups are particularly telling. He found that every one of a group of ten 12- and 13-year-olds told researchers they went to bed between midnight and 3 in the morning because they were scrolling on their phone. Every one. “Did their parents ever take their phones away from them?” The answer, a clear: “No.” Schoolgirls in separate focus groups described the alienation of life lived through social media, where interactions could feel less like friendship than contact with “robots” — wanting to log off but fearing exclusion, and facing cyberbullying that followed them home and often escaped adult notice.
He concludes that social media is leading to functional impairment — disrupting sleep patterns, eroding concentration, and ultimately affecting young people’s ability to work and engage with the world. The report also finds that 81% of NEET young people say the curriculum is too focused on exams, and that 62% of young people say social media does more harm than good. These are not the views of a generation that has given up. They are the views of a generation that knows something has gone wrong and cannot see a way out of it.
He is right about the scale of the problem. Where I would push further is on the question of what, exactly, is causing the damage — because it is normally attributed to social media. But that is only part of the story.
The boy problem nobody is talking about enough
Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book The Anxious Generation was the most comprehensive synthesis of the evidence to that point, and it identified something important: smartphones and social media are rewiring both sexes, but through different pathways. For girls, the primary damage comes through social comparison, appearance pressure and cyberbullying — the mechanisms of Instagram and TikTok. For boys, the damage runs through gaming and pornography: social withdrawal, dopamine dysregulation, and the substitution of virtual achievement for real-world accomplishment.
The UK Parliament, like Australia and other countries, has begun to act on the evidence of harm to girls. The conversation about gaming and boys has barely started — and it should, because the evidence is accumulating. Studies across multiple countries show correlations between heavy gaming and social withdrawal, reduced academic engagement, poor sleep and diminished real-world social connection. The World Health Organisation recognised “problematic gaming” as a disorder in 2019. Andrew Przybylski at the Oxford Internet Institute has argued that the causal relationship is not yet fully resolved — and he is right to maintain scientific caution. But Jean Twenge’s data shows that unsupervised real-world socialising among adolescents declined sharply from around 2012, precisely when smartphone adoption took off. The two things are not unconnected.
The World Happiness Report 2024 — a UN report published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford — documents what this looks like in practice. In North America, happiness among young people aged 15 to 24 has fallen so sharply since 2006-10 that the young are now less happy than the old — a reversal that would have seemed unthinkable a generation ago. In Western Europe the same trend is visible, less dramatically but unmistakably. Among children aged 10 to 15 in high-income countries, life satisfaction has declined since 2019, particularly for girls. These are not statistical blips. They are the signature of a generation whose formative years have been shaped by the device in their pocket.
John Burn-Murdoch’s analysis in the Financial Times (May 2026) adds a further dimension: birth rates are now falling in two thirds of the world’s 195 countries, and the declines correlate precisely with the rollout of 4G and smartphones. (I had done a short blog on the website!) In-person socialising among young adults has halved in South Korea over twenty years. The online world is not supplementing real human connection. For a generation of young people, it is replacing it.
There is also a growing body of evidence that early and repeated exposure to online pornography is affecting boys’ expectations, attitudes and relationships in ways that are only beginning to be understood. Milburn notes that boys from disadvantaged backgrounds appear particularly vulnerable — a combination of gaming as an escape from difficult home circumstances, reduced parental oversight, and limited alternative enrichment creates a compounding effect that is very hard to reverse once established.
By the time Milburn’s commission acts, the damage has been done
Teachers in schools we work with increasingly report children arriving exhausted after spending much of the night online. Some struggle to stay awake in lessons. Others are coping with poor sleep, poor nutrition and declining concentration.
Dedicated school staff do everything they can to support these children, but the long-term impact on their learning, wellbeing and future opportunities is deeply concerning.
This is my central frustration with the framing of the Milburn report, important as it is. It is looking at the wreckage — the 957,000 young people already outside education and work — and trying to work out how to rebuild the welfare system around them. That is necessary. But the damage was done years earlier, in primary schools and bedrooms and on the journeys to school, when children were handed devices with no guardrails and no alternative.
The Milburn report contains findings that have not received enough attention. Children who are not school-ready at ages four and five are nearly three times as likely to be NEET by sixteen. Three times. And what makes a child school-ready? The social and emotional skills — the capacity to sit with others, to attend, to communicate, to regulate — that arts education builds from the earliest years. Truancy in primary schools currently stands at 16%. Missing just ten days of school in a GCSE year halves the chance of a decent pass. These are not abstract statistics. They are the mechanism by which disadvantage compounds, year by year, into the 957,000.
The report also finds that only 19% of white working-class parents regularly take their children to museums, galleries or theatres, compared to 29% of middle-class parents (less than a third even for them). That gap begins in primary school. CATS is not supplementing cultural opportunity for the children we work with. In many cases, we are the only source of it.
The pandemic accelerated everything. The closure of schools in 2020 and 2021 drove children onto screens at a critical developmental moment, and for many — particularly boys from disadvantaged homes — the habits formed then have proved extraordinarily difficult to break. Anxiety, depression, ADHD, autism: all show rising trends that the evidence increasingly links to the smartphone era, compounded by COVID.
Prevention, not remediation, is where the leverage lies. And prevention means giving children — particularly children in the years before secondary school — something better to do, somewhere better to be, and people worth being with.
What arts education actually offers
This is where CATS comes in — and I want to be direct about why, because it is not a peripheral point.
When a CATS artist works with a class of primary school children on ensemble music, drama or collaborative visual art, something specific happens that no algorithm can replicate and no gaming platform can substitute. Children are in the same physical space, attending to the same thing, responding to each other in real time. They experience being seen and valued by other human beings. They share in the particular satisfaction of making something together that could not exist without all of them.
That is precisely what heavy gaming displaces. Not just screen time in the abstract, but real-world social connection, embodied experience, shared achievement — the building blocks of the resilience and social confidence that employment, relationships and adult life require. The arts do not just enrich children’s lives. According to the evidence now stacking up, they replace something that is actively being taken from them.
Research published in the British Journal of Psychology this month found that musically trained children show measurably faster responses and fewer attention lapses than their peers — even when matched for age, background, and time spent on video games. The researchers at McMaster University were careful to note that the effects are modest. But the direction of the evidence is consistent: the arts build the very capacities that screens are eroding.
The sooner CATS can extend its work into secondary schools as well as primary ones, the better. And if the government were serious about prevention rather than cure, it would put the arts back into the curriculum as a non-negotiable part of every child’s education — not a luxury to be cut when budgets are tight, but a protected investment in the mental health and social development of the next generation. The government’s own Curriculum and Assessment Review, published in November 2025, found that the arts have been systematically squeezed out of state schools by a decade of exam-focused accountability measures. The Francis Report recommends reversing that. The Milburn Report shows what happens when we don’t.
Am I wishing for pigs to fly? Perhaps. But the Milburn report, the Ofcom data, the World Happiness Report, and the voices of young people themselves are all pointing in the same direction. The evidence is no longer ambiguous. The question is whether anyone in power is listening — and whether they are willing to act before another generation pays the price.
Cotswolds Arts Through Schools delivers professional arts education to over 12,000 children across 69 primary schools in rural Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire. To find out more about our work, please visit cotswoldsartsthroughschools.com
