To ask the Minister for Employment and Learning to detail how his Department tracks young people who are not in education, employment or training; and for an update on the development of a system to track these individuals’ progress.

My Department’s Client Management System is used, as far as possible, to track young people who have left school.

Any young person who leaves education or training without a positive destination recorded in the school leaver data is case-loaded by the careers service. The Careers Service actively supports all 16 and 17 year olds who do not progress into training, education or employment on leaving school.

The electronic transfer of year 10 pupil data from the Department of Education to my Department took place, for the first time, in October 2012 and continues with the transfer for the current year 10 pupils scheduled to take place in December 2015.

A research report, commissioned in 2012 by my Department, into improved tracking of young people who are not in education, employment or training recommended that:

in the short term, the Department's Client Management System (CMS) should be enhanced, assuming costs are not excessive, to enable it to function as a rudimentary tracking system for young people; and,

in the medium term, (next two to three years) a new tracking system should be established in Northern Ireland drawing on the National Client Caseload Information System (NCCIS) in England.

Since then my Department has led on the introduction of the Learning Records Service’s Unique Learner Number across education and training sectors in Northern Ireland. This helps to identify those not engaged in education, employment and training and, from September 2015, all learners aged 14 plus in schools across Northern Ireland will be allocated a Unique Learner Number in Year 11.

In addition, emerging information from a number of data sources, including the 2011 census, has been used to provide more robust information on the characteristics of those in the NEET category.

Estimates of the number of those in the NEET category are published regularly by the Department of Finance and Personnel in the Quarterly Supplement to the Labour Force Survey.