Response to ‘Young people and work: interim report’

There has been significant commentary and media reporting on the interim findings from the independent review into young people and employment today.

The report, led by Alan Milburn, highlights a system that is too often fragmented across education, health, welfare and employment, and sets out the need for more joined up services, earlier intervention, more personalised support, stronger transitions into work, and better engagement with employers. The system it describes is one that needs to work more around the individual, rather than expecting the individual to fit the system.

As a charity working in this space, this is not new information. We have been saying it for years. We did not wait for a national review to identify the gaps. We built a practical solution in response to them.

In simple terms, the report describes a system that works around the individual, rather than expecting the individual to fit the system. That shift is important, but it is not new. Hamelin’s Ability Works programme, launched in 2024, was designed around these principles from the start.

Ability Works is a free employment training programme for autistic adults and people with learning disabilities. It exists because the gaps now formally set out in the report have been visible for years in real lives, not just statistics.

The programme already delivers what the review is pointing towards, including personalised one to one mentoring for every participant, structured employability training such as CV and interview preparation, and real world work experience in a supported environment.

Importantly, this is not classroom based or theoretical. It is practical, lived experience based support that builds confidence through doing, not just learning.

The barriers set out in the report have been clear long before they appeared in national policy debate.

Autistic people and people with learning disabilities consistently tell us the same things: recruitment processes are unclear or inaccessible, work experience opportunities are limited or tokenistic, and assumptions about capability too often restrict opportunity. This is not abstract insight. It comes directly from lived experience.

Ability Works was developed in response to these realities, not as a pilot or an experiment, but as a practical solution to a known and persistent gap.

A key shift in the national conversation, now reflected in the Milburn report, is the recognition that barriers to employment are not about lack of ambition or ability.

At Hamelin, we see daily evidence of the strengths autistic people and people with learning disabilities bring to the workplace, including reliability, creativity, problem solving, attention to detail and fresh ways of thinking. The challenge has never been capability. It has been access, understanding and design.

The publication of the Milburn interim report describes what Hamelin has already been doing for some time. We saw the issue coming, and we built a response - a practical, person centred, strengths based programme that combines training, experience, qualifications and employer engagement into a single pathway.

As the national debate develops, the focus should not only be on identifying solutions, but on scaling what already works. Because here at Hamelin, the solution is already in motion.