My first part-time job involved pushing trolleys at a branch of Sainsbury’s while studying for my A-Levels. I liked earning money, but I also appreciated the little taster of the adult world it offered and the responsibility it required. Admittedly, ensuring a supply of shopping trolleys is not quite on a par with running air traffic control, but there was still a sense that, if you didn’t turn up, you were letting people down: reliability, and a basic level of conscientiousness, were the most important qualities needed for the role. In retrospect, I also benefitted from having less free time, and looking back from a period of life when time is precious, had too much of it.
I now have three teenagers, the very idea of which makes me feel ancient, despite my good looks only improving with age. I’m very keen for them to work as much as possible, a feeling which obviously only grows stronger during the endless six weeks of the summer holiday, when one sees how much spare time teenagers actually have.
It’s not easy, as anyone with children that age will know. The number of teenagers in work has declined by almost 150,000 since 2023, while youth unemployment has peaked to levels last seen in 2011; close to a million people in the 16-24 age bracket are not doing anything. These are the so-called NEETs: not in education, employment or training
Commentators are often tempted to invent complex and counter-intuitive explanations for social phenomena, but in this case the major reason is quite obvious and boring: it’s very expensive to hire them. The Daily Telegraph quoted Alan Milburn, the former health secretary now leading a government review of Britain’s ‘youth worklessness crisis,’ who ‘agreed that higher taxes and Labour’s Employment Rights Act had helped fuel a “climate of difficulty” for employers trying to create entry-level jobs.’
In 2024, in her first budget, Chancellor Rachel Reeves increased the rate that employers must pay in National Insurance for each worker, and also reduced the threshold from £9,100 to £5,000. While this mostly affects older workers, she also increased the minimum wage for 18- to 20-year-olds to £10.85 an hour, a 26 per cent rise, with a similar hike for those in the 16-17 age group. In total, over the past three years, the minimum wage for workers aged 18-20 has gone up by 33 per cent in real terms.
The Telegraph quoted restaurateur Tom Kerridge, who lamented that his business used to employ lots of 16 and 17-year-olds, but it was now too expensive to do so: ‘I always think it’s so hard to get into those first jobs when you’re very young, and I think they’re very beneficial. And we do see that often people come in, just do a couple of hours a week, and then they get the bug.’
Anecdotally I’ve heard similar stories, from employers in the hospitality industry. Successful businesses are bombarded with requests for work from conscientious, high functioning teens, and while they would love to recruit more, they can’t afford the artificially high wages.
I’ve argued before that the less academically inclined should be allowed to enter the workforce at a younger age, but the economy would also benefit from more young academic high-fliers working part-time in their teens. Daisy Christodoulou recently made the point that people who are better at school also tend to be better at practical work; it is also true that if you’re intelligent, diligent and conscientious, you’re likely to end up performing high-skilled and complicated tasks, but you’ll also be better at low-skilled, menial work. The top decile of 14-year-olds, the future straight A-students, could easily perform most unskilled, non-dangerous jobs as well as the average adult.
High-functioning teenagers make very desirable employees, the only section of the workforce with both positive traits but few options. Low wage employers aren’t concerned about skills, because almost everyone is ‘skilled’ enough to do the jobs they require. Instead they care about reliability; they just want someone who will turn up on time and not cause problems. The downside of employing graduates – a signal of reliability - is that they are often only looking for a temporary fix, and are likely to leave soon when something better comes along. Academically gifted teens, who aren’t yet on the career ladder, are better investments.
