Youth Employment 2030
Client: The Blagrave Trust
Year published: 2022
The coronavirus pandemic hit the UK hard both economically and socially, and with growing evidence that young people would be among the worst affected, tarnishing their career prospects well into the future.
While it is clear that the opportunities available to young people are going to be severely diminished due to COVID19, what is less clear is how we can best support young people through this crisis and beyond.
We were commissioned by The Blagrave Trust, to support and provide our expertise on a peer-research project. As part of this we recruited a group of 10 young people, aged 16 to 25 years, with mixed ethnicity, mixed age group, mixed gender identity from across England to create a co-creation group.
This co-creation group worked closely with our team to develop a survey for their peers that sought to understand the impact of COVID-19 on young people’s employment and prospects across the country.
The objective was also to find solutions and ways forward to create a better future for this generation.
Over 1,000 young people completed the survey and analysis of all the data we gathered was conducted with guidance and oversight from the co-creation group. Alongside this piece of research, a group of 13 other young people were recruited from across England and trained to become peer researchers by our partners, Leaders Unlocked. This group of peer researchers spoke to 121 young people from a diverse range of lived experiences to delve deeper into the stories behind their experiences and hear more about the solutions they see working to improve employment and prospects for themselves and their peers.
We then supported a group of young people to advocate the recommendations identified in this report.
