The language used in education shapes policy, practice, and perceptions. In this blog series, Edge asks, What's in a Word? and scrutinises the impact of the terminology we commonly employ.
September 2026
As George Orwell recognised in his frequently shared 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, politicians can use language that ‘consists largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness’. This, as Ian Sollom, MP for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire and the Liberal Democrats’ universities and skills spokesperson put it, includes the frequent use of ‘empty rhetoric - clichés, euphemisms, the phrases reached for to avoid a real thought’. If you ask most people what ‘political rhetoric’ means ‘you will probably hear something along the lines of politicians talk and meaning nothing. Empty words.’ When using language, Sollom argues, politicians need to rise to Orwell’s critique. But language does not stay still, and the language of policymaking is not independent of the language of the rest of the country. Tabitha Prince, former team leader, Department for Education, warns that, 'so often a term or expression that makes sense during policy development doesn't have the same interpretation or meaning’ for education providers, learners and their families.'
For the launch of our third series of What’s in a Word? for 2026-27, we return to a key problem: language is never neutral. The words we use shape what is visible, what is obscured, and what solutions are imaginable. One initialism: NEET, is a useful example of what is at stake. As the youth unemployment crisis has ascended the political agenda, the use of NEET (referring to young people aged 16-24 Not in Education, Employment, or Training) as a phrase has become ubiquitous, now even sometimes uncapitalised.
This has clear efficiency benefits, fitting more easily into truncated word limits and attention spans. This process, however, is not neutral. In 2010, Jennifer Coupland, formerly CEO of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE), led a Department for Education policy on NEET. She argues that NEET obscures the realities of the over one million young people it describes by defining them, 'by an activity they are not doing. It masks the multifaceted issues at play, enabling conversations and decisions to happen between individuals who might hold very different ideas about what is being signified. Young people NEET might be so for five days or five years, they might have drug misuse issues, disabilities or caring responsibilities, they might have none of those things, they might have applied for a hundred jobs and be desperate to start work.'
Recent research has interrogated the category and the variability of experiences it contains; the Milburn interim report recognises that ‘NEET is not a homogenous category’. Nor is NEET a category that was simply discovered in the world. It was designed as a policy category to do a particular job, and it has a history. Prior to the 1990s, and following the rampant youth unemployment of the 1970s, young people had been removed from unemployment figures following changes to unemployment benefit entitlement regulation. This led to high rates of unknown or unrecorded destinations and disconnect from support services. This categorisation in the negative gave rise to their initial categorisation as ‘Status Zero’, redesignated as NEET in 1994.
Counting individual instances of NEET encouraged policymakers and researchers to think about the common factors inherent to individuals to explain their failure to engage in education, employment or training. But focusing on individuals can privilege internal factors, and make exclusion appear primarily as a result of individual pathology. As Coupland argues, ‘NEET is a deficit signifier’. This has consequences for the sort of political solutions that can be imagined. As Ruth Levitas put it in 1998, these solutions can be ‘minimalist’ (and comparatively cheap): policy must simply nudge NEET individuals to make the successful transition into belonging in education, employment, or training, while the broader ‘structural inequalities remain largely uninterrogated’. For example, hitherto, the Youth Guarantee and Jobs Guarantee are effectively a series of employer wage subsidies intended to de-risk employing NEET young people, rather than directly confronting wider structural issues. These include: the broader social reasons that are causing poor mental health, a weak social contract in which employers are not fully able to support young people’s entry to the labour market, and a dearth of political interest in and means to coordinate welfare provision.
What’s in a Word was not conceived of as an attempt to define one correct vocabulary for education. For terms such as NEET, the aim is to unsettle concepts that have become apparently fixed, and to make familiar language strange enough that we can examine it again.
What history does a term carry? What distinctions does it make? What does it render visible or invisible? What assumptions accompany it? This responds, we hope, to Sir David Bell’s, Vice Chancellor of the University of Sunderland and former Department of Education Permanent Secretary, call for us to constantly ‘test, and re-test, our assumptions and policies’. And if you have disagreed with the characterisation of NEET in this piece, our hope is that too is part of this process of clarifying and interrogating our word choices. As Bell continued, ‘listening to the countervailing or minority perspective – the one that goes against the grain – is often how we make progress’. We await the recommendations of the imminent final report of the Milburn Review on youth unemployment. It is likely to make recommendations to address the inability of our current support ‘architecture’ to help tackle the problems many young people face in participating constructively in our society. If, as it appears, novel approaches to this persistent policy problem are required, we would do well to interrogate the ways we are structuring our thinking through language.
Written by
Dr Josh Patel, Education and Policy Senior Researcher, Edge Foundation. Josh researches tertiary education, skills and the historical development of education policy. He has authored research on tertiary collaboration, contributed to Edge research on degree apprenticeships and T Levels, and coordinates and written for Edge’s Learning from the Past policy reviews. Josh is the author of Universities and the purpose of higher education: expansion and development in post-war Britain (2026).
Next time: Katherine Solomon from the Bell Foundation considers what inclusion means beyond providing additional support once barriers to participation emerge.