Developing skills pathways through community enrichment for disadvantaged children

Why we need a radical overhaul of our approach to the UK skills gap

What is the UK skills gap?

The recent announcement of the Government’s Youth Guarantee, ensuring all 18 to 21 year olds in England have access to employment, education and training opportunities, is the latest approach to an entrenched problem in the UK. That is, how we address the combined challenges of the UK skills gap and the growing number of young people living in disadvantage.

Only 13% of degree apprentices are from neighbourhoods in the bottom fifth of deprivation, while 27% come from the most advantaged and the numbers of skills shortage vacancies doubled between 2017 and 2022.

In terms of the ‘skills gaps’ raised by employers, soft skills, such as team working, oral communication and customer handling, are reported just as frequently as gaps in ‘job specific and technical skills’. But young people in England typically have worse socio-emotional skills at the end of lower secondary school (age 15/16) than the OECD average, and inequalities in these skills are also greater in England than any other country.

This has typically been challenged through combinations of support that include help to prepare for work, gaining work experience, improving workplace skills and in-work support to develop ‘job skills’. This can be effective for some but what it doesn’t do is address the multiple challenges that a growing number of disadvantaged children and young people are experiencing across the UK.  To counter this, we need preventative interventions at a much earlier stage in young people’s development to enable skills development which prevents the accumulation of disadvantage faced and barriers to opportunities.

Put simply, we need to change the way that we address the skills gap.

The disadvantage gap is a growing chasm

In 2024/25, 4.5 million children in the UK (31%) are living in poverty, a figure that has been rising in recent years. A large majority of these (72%) live in working families. In the UK, disadvantaged children start school behind their more advantaged peers, and the gap in performance widens as they progress through the education system.

Currently, 987,000 young people aged 16–24 are estimated to be neither in education, employment, or training, with evidence showing that adverse childhood experiences can more than double the risk of having no educational qualifications, increase the risk of mental health issues, unemployment and poverty in adulthood, and result in a lack of confidence and motivation to enter employment.

We need to level the playing field in soft skills development and we need to do it as early as possible. If we are serious about skills formation then we need to properly invest in disadvantaged children because skills inequalities between disadvantaged and advantaged children and across geographical regions in the UK is a growing problem.

In the absence of an economic or political revolution that overthrows neoliberal capitalism (always the preferred choice), we need a radical overhaul of the way that we understand skills development. We cannot keep ploughing all our time and resource into a growing number of young adults not in employment and education and hope for a different result when we are not addressing the root cause of the problem. This is where childhood enrichment must become a key part of the skills story.

Building the psychosocial infrastructure for skills through enrichment

An important aspect of disadvantaged childhood is the lack of extra-curricular enrichment opportunities and experiences that advantaged peers regularly experience. As such, and through no fault of their own, disadvantaged children lose the chance to develop the key soft skills that are the basis for being able to flourish in education and employment. This includes, confidence, self belief, an aspiration to progress and a sense that they matter and that they belong.

Research identifies a strategy of ‘concerted cultivation’ among more advantaged families where parents encourage their children to interact with institutions and enrol them in enrichment activities from a young age. This has various impacts on those children who are considered ‘advantaged’, including greater social capital, skills and social networks and a greater understanding of the norms and institutions that shape social interaction in a community. It also impacts sense of belonging, which is one of the most important determinants of whether a child decides to enter, continue or abandon a pursuit.

We know that enrichment activities are important in developing soft skills and social skills as well as being associated with a range of other positive outcomes (e.g. achievement, attendance at school). Enrichment activities boost young people’s confidence to interact socially with others; extend their social networks; and provide them with new skills and abilities.

However, children from the poorest households are much less likely to take part in all types of extra-curricular activities that they see many of their more advantaged peers routinely benefit from. This lack of opportunities and experiences has a significant impact on how they understand themselves, how they value themselves and how they think about their futures.

An early intervention paradigm for UK skills

We know that many major economic and social problems can be traced to low levels of skills in the population and that if society waits too long to compensate, it is economically inefficient to invest in the skills of the disadvantaged. But that is exactly what standard practice looks like in the UK in 2025.

Investing in disadvantaged young children is a rare public policy initiative that promotes fairness and social justice and at the same time most effectively promotes productivity in the economy and in society at large. Early interventions, well before working age and before disadvantaged young people have drifted into being categorised as NEETs, have much higher returns than later stage interventions, such as working age apprenticeships and public job training. But in the UK we overinvest in remedial skill investments at older ages and woefully underinvest in the early years.

This has to change. It is the right thing to do, it is the cost-effective thing to do and it is the most pragmatic way to create the skills that our future workforce need. So how do we do it?

We need local skills investment funds and programmes to think outside the box and target the building of skills through developing and extending third sector initiatives that successfully facilitate access to enrichment activities for disadvantaged children.

Going forward we need to target financial support to children from low income households, to be spent on enrichment activities that are meaningful to them. Successful initiatives that work directly with schools to allow young people to ‘trial’ activities, and provide heavily subsidised fees, should be identified and rolled out across the country.

Together with a group of schools, community groups, businesses and culture, sport, leisure and heritage providers in Worthing,  we set up a community scheme to deliberately privilege the most disadvantaged pupils by providing them with high-quality cultural, sporting, and community experiences that they would not otherwise access. Every trip and opportunity was designed to extend their horizons, build social and cultural capital, and strengthen their sense of belonging. In doing so the project helped the pupils involved to build confidence and agency. Pupils repeatedly describe feeling special, important, and braver, with trips making them feel like they matter and giving them the courage to talk to new people, express themselves more openly, and take part in new experiences. The sense of being chosen and invested in reinforced self-worth.

Across all enrichment activities, children valued the chance to connect with peers beyond their usual friendship groups and classes. They report forming new friendships, building stronger bonds with staff, and sharing experiences with family afterwards, extending the benefit into the home environment. For some it allowed them to negotiate the trauma of having nothing to share with their peers.

The experiences of children living in disadvantage can be transformed by access to these enrichment opportunities and experiences. These are more than fun things to do. They have the potential to change the way children understand themselves and their futures. The memories made are the currency of cultural capital that young people can draw on to connect and belong with peers and family, to feel like they matter and to challenge the fallout of the systemic exclusion that they experience.

And it is these fundamental changes in the way that disadvantaged children and young people see themselves and their futures that creates the cultural capital to navigate their way through economically-induced constellations of inequality and disadvantage to possibly, just possibly  take advantage of later stage skills initiatives.