Students could be offered two paid 20-week internships and double the teaching hours at colleges under plans to tackle youth unemployment.

Alan Milburn, the author of a government-led review, examined these features of the Dutch education system on a “fact-finding” visit to the country last month, The i Paper has been told.

The former cabinet minister’s report on young people not in education, employment or training – known as “Neets” – will be published next month, with its recommendations adopted by Andy Burnham, this newspaper understands.

Burnham wrote in last week that the Government will “take his recommendations seriously”.

The Work and Pensions Secretary, Pat McFadden, was in Rotterdam earlier this year and vowed to learn from the Netherlands’ approach that gives young people work-study pathways, employer partnerships and apprenticeships.

The Netherlands has one of the lowest Neet rates in the world, at 4.9 per cent among 18- to 24-year-olds. The equivalent figure in the UK is 15.1 per cent.

How Dutch colleges do things differently

Milburn visited ROC Mondriaan, a vocational hospitality college in The Hague, which gave students two 20-week paid internships as part of their courses.

David Hughes, who joined him on the trip and is chief executive of the Association of Colleges, said their hospitality and catering course was four years long, with the third year consisting of the two placements – typically at hotels.

The students, who start their studies at around age 16, finish with a level-four qualification – equivalent to the first year of a bachelor’s degree.

In the UK, colleges would only offer this as a two-year course, Hughes said.

“If you look at the Milburn analysis,” Hughes explained, “He’s saying: ‘There’s lots of young people who just don’t have any work experience – they’re not competent, they don’t believe in themselves, they’re not well-rounded. They’re not attractive to employers, really’.

“This addresses a lot of those issues by keeping young people longer in an education setting, but also giving them that really fantastic work experience.”

Hughes said the pupils had twice as many teaching hours funded by the government and a much broader curriculum that included a foreign language, entrepreneurship and an arts or humanities subject.

In the UK, pupils over 16 get around 15 teaching hours per week , while in most OECD countries they get 25 to 30 hours per week, he added.

The British education system relies more heavily on independent study compared with other countries, which could be one of the factors fuelling the Neets crisis, he suggested.

Hughes said funding has been cut since 2010 but Burnham’s Conservative predecessor Rishi Sunak seemed to recognise there was an issue, having once told him he “can’t believe” how few teaching hours there are.

The lack of hours widens the gap between the richest and poorest children, because wealthier families can fill the gap by paying for tutors and extra-curricular activities, Hughes said.

The barriers to internships that can be fixed

Ben Rowland, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers, whose members deliver apprenticeships, said the UK has lost its “custom” of paid work experience but it can be regained.

“Foundation apprenticeships are the first attempt to try to move towards something like a paid internship model, but they need to be redesigned,” he said. “In particular, they need to be made shorter for them to work.”

Foundation apprenticeships were launched in August 2025 and are a minimum of eight months long, with most usually lasting a year.

Employers, particularly in the hospitality and retail sectors, had pushed for them to be only four months long but the government had insisted on eight, according to a source familiar with the discussions.

A four-month minimum would have brought the UK closer to the Dutch system and been less “daunting” for employers who have been reluctant to make such long financial commitments, the source added.

Rowland said the UK really needs to “look again” at the minimum wage, which has increased but may be “inadvertently harming” young people’s prospects of getting work.

In the Netherlands, interns typically do not have to be paid the statutory minimum wage and employers are given discretion on how much to pay.

In the UK, the minimum wage for apprentices is £8 an hour – the same as for other 16- to 17-year-olds and not much lower than the £10.85 for 18- to 20-year-olds and £12.71 for those aged 21 and over.

In 2019-20, apprentices were paid £3.90 an hour – only about half the £7.70 rate for 21- to 24-year-olds.

The bigger gap between apprentice and staff pay previously helped make up for the additional training costs, whereas some employers now believe they can get better value for money by hiring someone with more experience.

The Government declined to comment.