In his first speech as Prime Minister outside Downing Street, Andy Burnham set out a clear ambition: to help more young people into work by changing the education system and giving them more support, including more mental health support. It’s a welcome commitment, and one that speaks directly to something we see every day at Mind Of My Own.
Burnham was blunt about why this matters. He said young people, particularly those now in their twenties, have been “quite seriously let down” because the right support wasn’t there for them when it should have been. Not because the need wasn’t real, but because it wasn’t met early enough. By the time many young people were struggling with their mental health, disengaging from education, or falling out of the workforce altogether, the moment to intervene well had already passed.
That framing matters. This isn’t a story about young people lacking ambition or resilience. It’s a story about systems that responded too late, or not at all.
What’s actually being proposed?
Burnham’s comments came alongside confirmation that his government backs the Milburn Review, whose action plan on youth labour market inactivity is due to be published in September. The broader direction of travel includes closer links between education and employment, more technical and vocational routes into work, and mental health support built into that journey rather than bolted on as an afterthought – support “provided in work” as part of a young person’s path into opportunity, not something separate from it.
Employment support is also expected to be devolved further to regional and local level, on the theory that support designed closer to where young people actually live and study will reach them more effectively than a one-size-fits-all national scheme.
What this means going forward
If this is delivered well, it should mean earlier identification of the young people who are struggling, more joined-up support between schools, colleges, health services and employers, and less reliance on crisis intervention once someone has already disengaged. It’s a shift from reacting to problems to preventing them.
But policy intentions and lived reality don’t always match. Reform on this scale depends on professionals actually knowing what young people need, early, in their own words, not assumed on their behalf. Support arrives on time only when the people designing and delivering it are actually listening.
Where does this connect to do what we do?
This is exactly the gap Mind Of My Own exists to close. Our apps give children and young people a direct, structured way to say how they’re feeling, what they need, and what’s going wrong, before it escalates into crisis. That’s the “early enough” piece of Burnham’s comments in practice: professionals hearing directly from a young person that something isn’t working, rather than finding out only once a placement has broken down, a young person has left education, or a mental health issue has become a full-blown crisis.
Our Safety Link feature lets a child flag that they feel unsafe or unhappy in the moment, not weeks later in a review meeting. Our reporting tools let services see patterns across the young people they support, so professionals and commissioners can spot where support is missing before it becomes a bigger problem. All of it is built on the principle behind Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: that young people have the right to be heard on decisions that affect them.
If the government is serious about young people no longer being let down, and about mental health and employment support arriving early rather than late, then listening to young people has to be part of the infrastructure, not an add-on. That’s the work we’re already doing, and Burnham’s comments are a reminder of why it matters.