Better educated, more depressed: how young people’s lives have changed in a generation

Findings about the way life has changed for young people in the past 20 years emerge from a unique study comparing results from two of the biggest surveys ever conducted of growing up in Britain. The research, for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, compares results from the National Child Development Study that has followed more than 10,000 children born in single week during 1958 with those for the similar-sized 1970 Cohort Study.

Young people in the earlier ‘cohort’ reached their mid-twenties as Britain struggled to emerge from recession in the early 1980s. By 1995, when those born in 1970 were the same age, the country had come through a second recession, but youth unemployment was declining less rapidly than for older age groups.

Researchers from the Institute of Education at London University and the University of Warwick Institute for Employment Research compared data collected from the two groups of young people between the ages of 16 and 26. They found that:

• Employment for young people altered dramatically in the 12 years separating these two groups. Well over half the young people born in 1958 left school at the minimum age in 1974, mostly moving into jobs and apprenticeships. By 1986, the youth labour market in many parts of the country had collapsed. More 16-year-olds stayed in education, while school leavers faced a mixture of youth training schemes, casual jobs or unemployment. The overall number of 16- to 24-year-olds available for full-time work dropped by more than a third from 6.5 million in 1984 to under 4 million in 1995.
• The proportion of young people who completed their schooling without any qualifications more than halved from 14 per cent of those born in 1958 to 6 per cent of the 1970 cohort. The number gaining degree qualifications increased from 14 per cent of men and 9 per cent of women to 22 per cent and 19 per cent respectively.
• The ‘poverty gap’ in educational attainment for the 1970 cohort was stark: 12 per cent of those from low-income families finished school without qualifications, compared with just 2 per cent from high-income households. Moreover, childhood poverty was even more strongly linked to the chances of becoming unemployed for this group of young adults than for those born in 1958.
• Earnings for young people born in 1970 were, on average, higher in real terms than for those born in 1958, but increases in earnings were not shared evenly. Experience of poverty as a child had an even greater adverse influence on the earnings of young adults born in 1970 than on those of the 1958 cohort.
• Family life for young adults went through rapid change. Whereas 75 per cent of women born in 1958 were married or cohabiting by the age of 26, the proportion of the 1970 cohort living with a partner at that age was down to 63 per cent. The proportion of women who were mothers by age 26 declined even more sharply, from 47 per cent to 32 per cent. However, the proportion of young women who were lone parents in their mid-twenties increased over the 12 years from 4 per cent to 7 per cent.
• There was a marked increase in feelings of depression reported by the young people born in 1970 compared with the older group, especially by young women. When those born in 1958 completed a standard questionnaire about their mental health in 1981, 7 per cent were rated as having a tendency to non-clinical depression. The equivalent figure for the 1970 cohort, interviewed in 1996, was 14 per cent. Analysis suggested that the rise was linked to the younger group having grown up with more experience of unemployment. Young people with university degrees were a third less likely to report symptoms of depression than those without higher education qualifications.

The authors conclude that there are important lessons for today’s policy makers in the comparison between the transition to adult life experienced by the two age groups, 12 years apart. In particular, they argue that socially disadvantaged young people aged 15 to 25 need help and support that goes beyond the ‘New Deal’ training and employment programmes.

Prof. John Bynner, Director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at the Institute of Education and a co-author of the report, said: “These results reinforce the view that the route to full-time employment has become more precarious in the past 25 years. The relatively secure niches in jobs or apprenticeships that still existed for school-leavers in the mid-1970s had given way to a variety of low-prestige training experiences and unemployment by the mid-1980s, leading to a less assured position in the adult labour market.

“Even if many of the young people born in 1958 became unemployed in the subsequent recessions they had basic work experience and skills to help them find another job. Many more of the young people born in 1970 stayed on in education and gained qualifications, but those who left at the minimum age faced a future that was more uncertain and – on the evidence concerning mental health – left them more prone to depression.”

Prof. Peter Elias of the Institute for Employment Research at Warwick, a co-author of the report, said: “The continuing and widening disparity between young people who benefit from the expansion of higher education and those who do not is disturbing. There is no easy policy answer to the growing polarisation we see in the youth labour market, although the ‘New Deal’ and other more recent policies that tackle social and economic disadvantage, such as the ConneXions programme and Educational Maintenance Grants, are a step in the right direction. We need to look afresh at the raft of initiatives since 1997 and refocus attention on the significant number of young people for whom expansion of higher education is not a solution.”