My son is 25 and a NEET. Not by choice but he is struggling to get anything beyond the odd day of casual work.
He underperformed at school; if you talked to him you would think him one of the brightest people you'd ever met but nevertheless an expensive education only left him with two Ds and an E at A level. I have recently discovered that he couldn't actually handwrite properly and he's been working on that. I think that he might be mildly autistic but he's never been diagnosed.
His schooling was disrupted by our move abroad when he was 12. He went then to a British International School and unfortunately found himself as part of the first cohort to take the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme, rather than GCSEs. It was not terrifically successful for anyone and certainly not for my son, though he did scrape a pass.
At his choice he then went to another school to do A levels. This period coincided with a marked deterioration in my husband's health and I took my eye off the ball. Son went through a bad patch, mixed with the wrong crowd, and generally didn't put his back into his work. His A level results were entirely justified.
On leaving school he did a year of basic accountancy training at evening classes but gave it up. At the same time he got a job in some sort of financial services start up but it folded. After messing about for a while he finally decided to try teaching English as a foreign language. He did a training course and then lived in Europe for a year but couldn't earn enough to keep himself and finally returned after a year, much skinnier.
His father died a few months later and son and I returned to the UK at the end of 2016. I found a reasonable job with little difficulty but he has found nothing. He has been rejected for real work, voluntary work, access courses, foundation degrees - you name it, he hasn't been able to get it.
He's not horrible. A bit shy, a bit diffident. Horribly depressed and dejected, of course. He speaks with a posh accent which might put some people off but surely not everyone. He leads a pretty blameless life nowadays.
One thing which has surfaced recently was that a websearch of his name plus our town leads to an article about a violent criminal of the same name. Not my son of course but it appears that at least one college rejected him because they thought it was him. They purported to reconsider once the mistake was pointed out to them but rejected him again.
One final point - he is apparently unable to claim Universal Credit (all that's available in our area) because I earn (just) too much. Which also seems to mean that he cannot access any governmental help to get out of this hole.
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