Introduction

What does social enterprise have to do with the well-being of young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET)? Let us break the question down into smaller parts and ask further questions. What is NEET? How many young people in the UK are NEET? Why does it matter? What is well-being? What does it have to do with being NEET? What is social enterprise? What does social enterprise have to do with it all?

This chapter draws on research from academics, practitioners and policymakers, publicly available data, and my own experience of supporting more than 500 social enterprises over the last six years to measure, report and maximise their social impact. To begin, we need to understand what we mean by ‘NEET’, ‘well-being’ and ‘social enterprise’.

NEET or ‘NEETs’ refer to young people aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training. Among them, there are two distinct subcategories: those who are actively seeking work (known as unemployed young people); and those who have not actively sought work recently and/or are unable to start work imminently (known as economically inactive young people) (ONS, 2016).

The UK government's Office for National Statistics (ONS) has been actively measuring and analysing ‘well-being’ since 2011, although the field of research has been around a lot longer. Well-being is defined as:

Even from this brief introduction, the areas of overlap between unemployment and well-being are already emerging. Professor Richard Layard (2011: 67) crisply makes the case as to ‘why unemployment is such a disaster: it reduces income but it also reduces happiness directly by destroying the self-respect and social relationships created by work’.