Haroon Chowdry & Prof. Mark Mon Williams on whether the new drive for devolution can deliver better life chances for young people.

We are excited about devolution. Mayoral Strategic Authorities offer a real opportunity to support the lives of young people. But success will require public organisations to have aligned priorities, incentives, and accountability. Moving power closer to place creates the opportunity. The details will determine whether devolution succeeds or fails through poor implementation.

Imagine being a young person offered a college place that could change your life, then discovering that the first bus from your town arrives after college starts. You are also struggling with anxiety, and still not getting support for the special educational needs that made school so difficult for you.

You do your best to make college work but these structural problems mean you stop attending. In the statistics, you become a young person who is not in education, employment or training (NEET).

We use Born in Bradford data to get behind the NEET administrative data. We see root causes that will need to be solved by multiple public services working together.

The government are hoping that devolution will help them implement Alan Milburn’s insights and solve the NEET crisis. The logic is sound– the causes of NEET overlap, responsibilities are dispersed, and an intervention in one organisation can fail because of problems elsewhere. It is easier to address these problems locally than nationally. But it will require careful coordination.

Let’s start with the transport problem. A young person’s postcode can determine which post-school options are realistically available. Mayors already have important transport powers, but the precise levers vary between places and modes of travel. Any serious plan to improve education and employment participation is going to require Mayors to consider routes, fares and timetables from a young person’s perspective.

Then let’s consider the anxiety. Integrated Care Boards have a central role in planning and commissioning NHS care, including mental health support. A mayor can improve the journey to college, but that by itself won’t help mental ill health. Health services will need to be part of the plan - but ICBs are outside of the mayor’s control.

We then need to add schools into the mix. Our Connected Bradford analyses show a strong association between school absence and subsequent NEET status, with particularly poor outcomes in young people whose absence increases through secondary school. These patterns provide an opportunity to identify difficulties and offer support earlier. They also make it clear why a strategy that does not include schools will never address the root causes of NEET. However, like ICBs, schools typically lie outside the control of mayors.

The challenge becomes obvious when we follow the money. A school may bear the cost of additional support while some of the eventual benefits appear in an NHS budget or a lower demand for employment services. A transport authority may struggle to justify a route if its funding case does not include keeping young people in education. Each organisation can face pressure to protect its own budget, even when investment would produce great benefits across the system.

Goodwill cannot reliably overcome incentives that pull organisations in different directions. Nor can a mayor meaningfully be held accountable for reducing NEET if essential decisions remain beyond their influence. Devolution needs to change how institutions work together, including their relationships with central government.

A practical starting point would be a shared plan for children and young people across each Mayoral Strategic Authority, developed with councils, ICBs, academy trusts, colleges, employers, and voluntary organisations. Partners should agree the outcomes they will pursue together, including sustained participation in education and work. Progress should be examined across local authorities and organisations, so improvements in the headline figures do not conceal young people being left behind.

A plan of this type needs formal commitments. Each organisation should specify its contribution, the resources it will commit, and who is responsible for delivery. Public reporting and scrutiny should make failures visible, with a clear route for resolving disputes and requiring action. Services should remain accountable for the quality of their provision, while the mayor provides democratic accountability for how the regional system works together.

Funding must support those commitments. Multi-year investment and aligned budgets would make it easier to fund prevention where the costs and benefits fall across different organisations. Mayors also need sufficient powers and analytical capacity to act on what they find.

Connected data is essential to making this work. Our Child of the North report, Connecting data: Intelligent and informed delivery to support every child to succeed set out the case for a national, devolved approach, building on our experience in Connected Bradford. Securely linking information across health, education, transport and other services can help places understand how difficulties accumulate, help target earlier support, and evaluate whether interventions improve lives.

Paul Johnson made the same core argument in a Times article he authored this summer, Devolution drive will only work if mayors are given the right tools. Effective devolution depends on local leaders having access to the data needed to understand their populations and improve their services.

For NEET prevention, this means being able to examine the relationship between school absence, health, and later destinations, alongside local transport access. It needs secure governance, skilled analysts, and public trust. It also requires clarity about who will act on the findings.

Children and young people must help shape these arrangements from the outset. They can explain why an apparently suitable bus route feels unsafe, why a referral pathway is impossible to navigate, or why support at school misses the difficulties they are experiencing. Involving young people indecisions about services, budgets, and measures of success would help ensure that Mayoral plans address the barriers that matter in their lives.

This is a consistent message across our Child of the North reports, and it will underpin the Centre for Young Lives’ forthcoming Young People paper. The paper will explore how we can turn devolution’s promise into practical arrangements that put children and young people at the heart of decisions, with the responsibilities, resources, and capabilities needed to deliver. These questions will also be debated at the Centre for Young Lives’ panel at the Labour Party Conference. We want the discussion to consider what it takes for a mayor, an ICB, and an academy trust to share responsibility for the same young person’s future, and what government must change to make that possible.

For the young person trying to reach college, success is concrete. It means an affordable journey, timely help with anxiety, and an education that meets their needs.

Devolution gives us a chance to bring those things together, but we must design devolution around children and young people from the outset.

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