Teenagers face overwhelming range of problems

Teenagers face overwhelming range of problems

Rochdale has been rated as the third-worst in a ranking of the hardest places to live as a teenager in England.

Young people in many parts of England face an almost insurmountable range of problems in trying to build independent and sustainable adult lives, a report by education specialists Ambitious Minds has revealed.

The report “The Frustration of Aspiration: Being a teenager in England today” highlights the problems which teenagers and young adults face in places including Rochdale, Knowsley and Middlesborough once they leave education.

The report pulls together a number of weighted indicators that measure educational, employment, housing and social factors in every local authority in England, to create a league table that ranks the best and the worst places to grow up.

Teenagers in Knowsley face the biggest obstacles of anywhere in England if they are to successfully build independent lives. Poor educational attainment and high youth unemployment make it difficult for young people to create a stable platform to build on in the years ahead. Rochdale, Halton and Tameside are all in the bottom 20 of the national rankings. Ribble Valley is the North West’s best-performing area, ranked 11th in England.

By bringing together these key variable factors including educational attainment, levels of youth unemployment, and the affordability of housing, into one report, The Frustration of Aspiration gives a stark overview of the inter-connected challenges that young people face in trying to build a decent future for themselves.

Sean McGuire, chief executive of Ambitious Minds said: “Our young people and their families are confronted by a combination of daunting problems, from the sharply rising cost of higher education, to the difficulty of getting onto the housing ladder, to the huge challenge of getting a job and building a career.

“One damaging consequence of these problems has serious implications for all of us – for the first time in living memory, this generation of young people face the prospect of being financially worse off than their parents.

“Helping young adults to achieve their aspirations has been something we have been good at in this country since the end of World War Two. We cannot hope to prosper as a stable society, either economically or socially, if we are unable to create a pathway for young people through education, and then into useful and secure employment.

“The challenge that now faces us is to devise ways in which we assist aspiration and invest in the future of our young people and their hard-pressed families."

Educational attainment is an early determinant of a young person’s life path – especially in the crucial first few years of adulthood – which makes the qualifications earned at the end of secondary education and access to higher education critical factors.

While education sets the direction for young people, it is employment which has the biggest influence on young people being able to fund, and therefore fulfil, their aspiration. Young adults leaving the education system this summer face an incredibly tough job getting their careers started, with levels of youth and graduate unemployment both causes for serious concern.

For those who are able to find relatively stable work, they will still not find it easy to get onto the housing ladder. The housing bubble and the credit crunch-turned-recession have had a massive impact on their ability to become first-time buyers, and such purchases funded without the help of the “bank of mum and dad” have dropped by three-quarters. Further, research has forecast that the rising trend of young people staying at home for longer will continue for the rest of this decade.

The areas of education, employment and housing have been added to by a mix of social indicators which assess the background in which young people are growing up and planning their futures.

By bringing the data together we have created a snapshot of the places where young people face the greatest challenges in building their own sustainable adult lives:

Top 10
1. Kingston upon Thames
2. Kensington and Chelsea
3. South Bucks
4. Windsor and Maidenhead
5. St Albans
6. Warwick
7. Chiltern (Bucks)
8. Wokingham
9. Richmond upon Thames
10. Welwyn Hatfield

Bottom 10
315. Corby
316. Hastings
317. Isle of Wight
318. Waveney (Suffolk)
319. Hartlepool
320. Barnsley
321. Middlesbrough
322. Rochdale
323. Great Yarmouth
324. Knowsley