Theme 1: Project 2 - The Crisis for Contemporary Youth: Young People, Opportunities and Civic Values

Project Lead

Team Members

Germ Janmaat
Pauline Leonard
Bryony Hoskins
Michela Franceschelli
Rachel Wilde

Description

The aim of this project is to explore the transformation of opportunities for young people in the UK and the implications this has for civic values as they make the transition to adulthood. The transition from youth to adulthood typically involves key milestones such as: completing education; moving out of the family home; entering the job market; and starting a family. In the past, these milestones often occurred when young people were in their early to mid-twenties. However recent research suggests that these milestones are being postponed, or perhaps even missed altogether.

Young people have been amongst the hardest hit by the current economic crisis.

Analysing the emerging patterns and their implications is particularly important in the current context. Various indicators suggest that young people have been amongst the hardest hit by the current economic crisis, and that opportunities for young people, relative to those of their parent’s generation, appear worse than they have been for many decades. For example, youth unemployment is at a record high, and at the end of 2012 around 21 per cent of 16 to 24 year olds in the UK were out of work, compared with a national average of 7.7 per cent. However, the challenges that young people experience may not be temporary or crisis driven; they may also be part of longer-term changes in social and economic structures. The high cost of housing, for example, predates the current economic crisis, and the proportion of young people living with their parents has been increasing since 1997.

Within the different elements of transitions that shape young people’s experiences, the project will focus on changes in two main areas: opportunities and civic values. More specifically, the project has two key aims:

To explore the employment, educational and housing opportunities of young people making the transition to adulthood,
and
To understand whether, and eventually how, changes in these opportunities may affect young people’s civic engagement and civic values

This is a mixed-method project that will draw on existing data (such as the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study (CELS), as well as generating new qualitative and quantitative data.

The quantitative data collection will involve running a further wave of the CELS survey of civic learning, behaviours, and attitudes among young people in England. This data will be used to trace the evolution opportunities and values among young people who were reaching adulthood at the time of the onset of the financial crisis in 2007 and who have been trying to engage with the labour market in the subsequent period of rapidly changing opportunities for young people. To find out more about CELS, see below.

The qualitative strand of the project will conduct focus groups and in-depth interviews with young people across the UK, to find out how the current climate is affecting their values, opportunities, and aspirations, and to explore how these experiences and attitudes vary across regions and between different social sub-groups.

Young people have been amongst the hardest hit by the current economic crisis.

What the project did

Young people were amongst the hardest hit by the 2008 economic crisis and ensuing recession. On various measures, opportunities for young people, relative to those of their parents’ generation, appear worse than they have been for many decades. This mixed-method project investigated changes in youth opportunities in key areas, such as education, employment and housing, and their effects on young peoples’ civic attitudes and behaviours, including on perceptions of fairness, trust in others and government, tolerance and civic participation. The project made use of a variety of existing datasets to analyse youth transitions and inter-generational changes in opportunities, including PIAAC and the UK Labour Force Survey (for skills and employment); BHPS and Understanding Society (for housing tenure); and British Social Attitudes Survey, British Election Study and World Values Survey (for data on social and political attitudes and civic participation). The Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study (CELS-CIT) survey data was also used to trace the development of learning and civic values and attitudes amongst young people, with Wave 6 commissioned by LLAKES in 2014 to track those who were reaching adulthood at the time of the onset of the financial crisis in 2007 and who are entering the labour market in the subsequent period of rapidly changing opportunities for young people. The project also undertook interviews with over one hundred young people aged 18-26.

Findings

The patterns of intergenerational changes in opportunities vary significantly across the different life domains of education, employment, housing and welfare, with the clearest evidence of intergenerational declines in the spheres of housing and welfare.
Despite the often-challenging circumstances that contemporary youth are facing, we found that young people in England continued to express optimism about their future, which was linked to a widespread belief that if you work hard, you can overcome all obstacles. The prevalence of this belief suggests that neoliberal discourses have become deeply-embedded in youth narratives. For some, however, optimism also functioned as a coping strategy to deal with the very real constraints and obstacles that they faced
We also examined more broadly how youth attitudes towards minorities (such as immigrants) have changed over time. Using trend data, we found that young people in Britain have become more tolerant of homosexuality and racial and ethnic minorities since the 1980s. However, we also found that prejudice has not disappeared from youth attitudes altogether; for a sizeable minority of youth, it has merely shifted its focus to immigration.
By contrast, we found that educational interventions may help to boost youth political engagement. Drawing on the longitudinal data from Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study (CELS), we found that school-based activities (such as school councils and mock elections) have an independent effect on youth political engagement that lasts even after the students have left the confines of the school.

Impact

We produced a policy briefing on the findings from the 2014 CELS survey and a launch of the results was organised in the Houses of Parliament in 2015. LLAKES has organised two international conferences on research on young people and the crisis in 2015 and 2016 and intergenerational equity was a major theme of LLAKES’ major international conference in May 2018. Andy Green presented oral evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on Social Mobility in 2015 with further written submissions based on LLAKES research contributed by Alison Fuller and Lorna Unwin. Their evidence is widely cited in the final report from the Committee, and can claim to have been influential on the findings of the Committee. Oral evidence (Keating) was also submitted to to House of Lords Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement. LLAKES’ work is cited 18 times in the final reports from these commissions as well as in a variety of other public policy documents from the Intergenerational Commission and other bodies. Janmaat wrote a blog in The Conversation based on the article about trends in attitudes towards immigrants, which was read widely and was republished in The Independent. Andy Green’s book on the Crisis for Young People was covered in articles in The Times, THE, The Guardian, Telegraph, The Sun and Mail-on-Line, as well as in 13 other local and on-line media outlets. Radio Interviews were broadcast on: BBC Radio 4 The World Tonight and BBC Radio 4 Today Programme. The book and the associated LAKES report on ‘The Case for an All-Age Graduate Tax’ also led to a submission to Treasury Select Committee Student Loans Inquiry and a request from the Liberal Democratic Party Office for a modelling of the future revenues from the tax which we have now commissioned from NIESR.

Selected publications

Journal articles

Green, A. Pensiero, N. Franceschelli, M. and Henseke, G. (2017) ‘Education and the Changing Structure of Opportunities for Young People in England,’ Journal of Asian Education Review, 1(1), 7-30.

Keating, A. and Janmaat, J.G. (2016) Education through citizenship at school: Do school activities have a lasting impact on youth political engagement? Parliamentary Affairs, 69(2), 409-429.

Franceschelli, M. and Keating, A. (2018) ‘Imagining the Future in the Neoliberal Era: Young People’s Optimism and their Faith in Hard Work.’Young.

Janmaat, G., & Keating, A. (2017). ‘Are Today’s Youth More Tolerant? Trends in Tolerance among Young People in Britain.’ Ethnicities.

Keating, A. and Melis, G. (2017) Social Media and Youth Political Engagement: Preaching to the Converted or Providing a New Voice for Youth? British Journal of Politics and International Relations.

Liu, Y., Green, A. and Pensiero, N. (2016) ‘Expansion of Higher Education and Inequality of Opportunities: A Cross-national Analysis.’ Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, (3).

Book Chapters

Green, A. and Pensiero, N. (2016) ‘Comparative Perspectives: Education and Training System Effects on Youth Transitions and Opportunities’ in Schoon, I. and Bynner, J, (eds), Young People and the Great Recession: Preparing for an Uncertain Future, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Books

Andy Green (2017) The Crisis for Young People: Generational Inequalities in Education, Work, Housing and Welfare, Palgrave Pivot.

Reports and Other

Keating, A., Green, A., and Janmaat, G. (2015). Young Adults and Politics Today: Disengaged and Disaffected or Engaged and Enraged? The Latest Findings from the Citizenship Education Longitudinal Study (CELS). LLAKES Policy Briefing, UCL Institute of Education.

Green, A. and Mason, G (2017) . ‘The Case for an All-Age Graduate Tax in England.’ LLAKES Research Paper 61.

Green, A. and Mason, G., (2017) ‘Higher Education Funding is in Crisis. An All-Age Graduate Tax Offers Solutions both for Public Finances and for Improving Quality between Generations.’ Research Fortnight, 19.11.2017.

Janmaat, J.G. (2016). ‘Why Higher Levels of Education Don’t Necessarily Mean Higher Levels of Tolerance’, The Independent, 21 December 2016.