Vicky Spratt

So we spent the last four months kind of really going around the country.

We've been to 20 different cities.

spoken to over 400 young people doing like a deep listening exercise getting behind their kind of motivations for work do they actually want to work you know what's missing and I think the report really kind of illuminates that

So in the first report, we spoke to kind of like 16 and 17 year olds.

And at that point in their lives, all of them were in education.

So all of the young people that we spoke to were in sixth form in college.

And quite naturally, school is usually quite an optimistic environment where teachers are trying to tell the young people that they're working with that their future is going to be bright.

They can go to university.

They can live good lives.

However, when we asked them about stuff like housing, when we asked them what their really kind of

depressed about at the moment or what's making them feel like this country's going in the wrong direction, they would list things like cost of living crisis.

A lot of young people believe they'll never own a home in their lifetime.

At the age of 16, because of all the kind of signals that they've been sent throughout their lives, whether it be kind of headlines or conversations in school, in politics, in A-levels or in economics, those conversations were leading them to believe that financially,

And kind of prosperity-wise, they wouldn't live the same kind of lives as their parents.

I think it's a mixture of both.

In our last report, we talked about kind of the moral panic around young people.

And we talked about, you know, the labeling of snowflake, et cetera, and all the nonsense that kind of the average headline shows you about Gen Z. What we actually found is like, in my opinion, this is one of the most resilient generations that's ever been.

They face so many different crises over a short period of time.

And there's an interesting way of thinking about it.

There's this researcher and psychologist called Kyla Scanlon, and we talked about her in Inside the Mind of a 16-year-old.