The Decline of the Saturday Job: Why Youth Opportunity Matters More Than Ever
Posted on:
Youth Matters 2026
The decline of the Saturday job is not a failure of young people — it is a failure of opportunity.
Recent comments by Alan Milburn have reignited a vital national conversation about why so many young people are being labelled as “not work ready”. He is right to challenge the lazy narrative that places blame on young people themselves, while ignoring the steady erosion of the opportunities that once prepared them for work.
What we are witnessing is not a crisis of motivation.
It is a crisis of opportunity.
Unless we respond with action rather than rhetoric, we risk continuing to disengage young people and writing off potential before it has a chance to surface.
What the Saturday Job Really Gave Young People
For generations, weekend and part-time work played a quiet but powerful role in helping young people transition into adulthood and employment.
A Saturday job was never just about earning money.
It helped young people build:
- Confidence
- Routine
- Responsibility
- Communication skills
- Accountability
- Belief
For many, it was the first place they felt trusted outside of school or home. The first time someone depended on them to show up on time. The first experience of teamwork, responsibility, and contribution.
These early experiences formed an informal but critical bridge — from education into employment, from dependency into independence.
That bridge has now largely disappeared.
What’s Changed — and Why It Matters
Today, the entry points into work that previous generations took for granted are no longer widely available.
They have been replaced by:
- Fewer youth-friendly employers
- Rising barriers to entry-level work
- Risk-averse recruitment practices
- Systems that prioritise qualifications over lived capability
The data is stark.
Fewer than one in five 16–17-year-olds were in work at the end of 2024, compared with nearly half at the start of the century. Almost one million young people are now classified as NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training).
When opportunities disappear at this scale, it is not credible to argue that young people are simply “not ready”.
The more honest truth is this:
Work is no longer youth ready.
Blaming young people for a lack of readiness while removing the very pathways that once built readiness only deepens exclusion.
This Is Not a Crisis of Motivation — It’s a Crisis of Opportunity
At Genuine Futures, we work daily with young people who have been labelled as disengaged, unmotivated, or “hard to reach”.
The reality is very different.
Many of the young people we support have experienced:
- Exclusion from education
- Unstable housing or homelessness
- Involvement in the care system
- Contact with the youth justice system
- Long periods of isolation and disconnection
What they have not lacked is potential.
What has been missing is access.
When opportunity disappears early, confidence erodes. When confidence erodes, disengagement follows. Over time, disengagement is misinterpreted as apathy, when in truth it is a rational response to repeated exclusion.
From Disengagement to Engagement: What It Really Looks Like
We don’t just talk about disengagement — we see what happens before and after opportunity is reintroduced.
One of our Youth Voice Ambassadors, Luis, described his experience simply:
“I was left behind. I spent 17 months in my bedroom.”
That is what disengagement actually looks like.
Not laziness.
Not a lack of ambition.
But isolation, loss of purpose, and nowhere to go.
The shift begins when trust and opportunity return.
When someone opens the door.
When expectations are clear but supportive.
When opportunity comes before judgement.
What Boss Your Future Shows Us
Through Boss Your Future, we have seen clear and consistent evidence that when young people are given:
- Real work environments
- Trusted responsibility
- Patient mentoring
- Time to rebuild confidence
They rise to the challenge.
Not because they have been “fixed”.
But because they were never broken.
Across our programmes, young people have:
- Developed punctuality and reliability
- Improved communication and teamwork
- Gained confidence engaging with customers and employers
- Built practical employability and enterprise skills
- Progressed into further training, self-employment, or work
Crucially, these outcomes do not come from lectures about readiness.
They come from doing real work, in real settings, with real expectations — and real support.
Boss Your Future recreates what the Saturday job once offered:
a low-risk, high-trust bridge into work.
Youth-Led Voices and Youth-Led Enterprise
A core part of our approach is ensuring we are not talking about young people — but working with them.
We embed youth-led voices throughout our delivery and develop youth-led enterprises that give young people genuine ownership, responsibility, and purpose.
This is not tokenistic participation.
It is lived experience shaping solutions.
As Sam Smith, Co-Director of Genuine Futures, explains:
“I know what happens when systems give up on young people — because it happened to me. When you open doors early, remove judgement, and offer real opportunity, young people don’t just engage… they thrive.”
Mike Alleyne, Co-Director of Genuine Futures, adds:
“We don’t lower expectations — we remove barriers. When young people are trusted with real responsibility, consistency, and support, they rise to it every time.”
Youth Matters 2026: Action, Not Aspiration
Youth Matters 2026 is about moving beyond statements of concern and into action.
It recognises that:
- Early intervention works
- Opportunity changes behaviour
- Confidence is built through experience
- Work readiness follows access, not the other way around
This is not about lowering standards.
It is about lowering unnecessary barriers.
Young people do not need to be “fixed” before they are trusted.
They need to be trusted so they can grow.
A Seat at the Table — and a Call to Government
We don’t just want to comment from the sidelines.
We want to be involved with government.
Policy cannot be designed about young people without young people in the room. Nor can it ignore the evidence from community-led programmes that are already working.
We want to work alongside local and national government to:
- Co-design practical solutions with young people
- Rebuild entry-level pathways into work and enterprise
- Scale early intervention that prevents crisis, not manages it
This is not about criticism.
It is about collaboration.
Rebuilding Opportunity Together
Young people don’t need more commentary about what they lack.
They need:
- Chances
- Trust
- Belief
- And a first step back in
When those doors open, they walk through them.
And when employers, policymakers, and communities stand alongside young people — rather than judging them from a distance — we don’t just prepare a workforce.
We restore futures.
Because youth doesn’t lack ambition.
It lacks opportunity.
And opportunity is something we can choose to rebuild — together.