Youth matters. Students don’t

Youth Matters: Your National Youth Strategy covers young people aged 10 to 21, and up to 25 for those with special educational needs and disabilities.

It’s backed by a State of the Nation report, a research project, analysis from the Children’s Commissioner, and various annexes and summaries.

The strategy itself sets out five “outcome areas” – physical, mental and digital wellbeing; community connection, cohesion and belonging; skills and opportunities for life and work; safety and security; and youth voice.

It promises to address declining youth services, improve mental health support, create more “third spaces” for young people, and ensure young people’s voices are heard in decision-making.

There’s a Youth Advisory Group, a set of Youth Collaborators, and much talk of co-production.

I’ve spent longer than I’d like going through all six evidence documents, trying to understand what they say about university students. The strategy covers young people up to 21 – up to 25 with SEND – so might expect higher education to feature reasonably prominently. Of course it doesn’t.

The sum total

The State of the Nation report contains a small section called “Further and Higher Education” which captures school-age children’s anxieties about university costs. A 15-year-old girl offers this:

I think that the government should reduce the cost of higher education facilities to make degrees more accessible for everyone including those who are more economically disadvantaged. The cost of university is extremely high and has recently been increasing which makes it harder for those with difficult backgrounds to achieve degrees.

A 16-year-old boy wants “university education funded by the government” because “high costs makes it difficult or impossible for people not born into wealth” and calls for “better quality university/apprenticeship opportunities in the North.”

There’s a care-experienced young person from Cambridge noting the inadequacy of maintenance loans:

Even if- I’m care-experienced, so I don’t have parents, I get the maximum amount of maintenance loan. Even that’s not big enough to, kind of, support myself, but then also I’m going to have bigger loans once I graduate. Which is going to financially disadvantage me compared to my peers in the future.

And someone from Blackpool worrying about fitting in at a Russell Group university:

This is one of my big worries with hoping to get into a Russell Group uni. I’m not going to be anything like the people are there. […] I’m going to be scrimping and saving every penny that my parents are giving me and that I’ve been saving since I was a young child. […] There’s not enough economic support for young people, especially not from universities.

The report observes that many young people felt university is too expensive for them because they believe that student loans are not enough to live on during university, that the student debt will be too much, and that:

…prestigious universities often encourage students to attend expensive summer camps to boost their chances of admission.

It also notes that the problem, whether it is real or perceived, has the same result – it makes people think that university is not for them – and that:

…even for those who do go to university, there are still problems, for example, the belief that universities are for a certain type of person, based on the economic inequity between students.

There’s also a finding that schools are perceived to push university as the only option, which young people see as problematic because it may not suit everyone. Some doubt that academic success guarantees financial stability anyway.

The report references regional disparities in degree attainment – free school meal students from East Ham are more than three times more likely to have a degree by age 22 than those in Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West – and the Children’s Commissioner’s analysis similarly notes the need to address regional variations in higher education opportunities. A Brook study is cited finding that 48 per cent of university-aged young people didn’t feel school prepared them for sex or relationships at university.

One observation gestures towards actual university students’ experiences. The report notes that university students felt they had limited options to stay in their university town after graduation due to lack of job opportunities, making them less likely to get involved in their community. Young people said it should be acceptable to want to stay local rather than feeling obliged to move to London after finishing education. Where this insight came from is unclear – there’s no indication it emerged from any systematic engagement with university students.

One useful observation appears in the main research report, where Youth Collaborators were explaining why older young people feel less able to access mental health support:

With age, young people move away from educational structures like schools – which tend to have in-built mental health support – and either leave education or proceed to college/university, where students often need to re-apply for the same mental health support they received at school.

It’s a real insight about transition and support discontinuity – but it’s a passing comment from collaborators, not a research finding, and nobody appears to have followed it up.

And that’s it. Every reference to higher education across six documents, and almost all of it is school-age children’s perceptions of what university might be like, almost all of which isn’t followed up, and there’s pretty much nothing from actual university students.

Who they didn’t ask

The Children’s Commissioner’s “Big Ambition” analysis, which fed into the strategy, explicitly excludes university students – the methodology states it covers responses from children aged 10 to 17, or 18-year-olds attending school or college. Eighteen-year-olds at university? Out. Anyone aged 19-21? Doesn’t exist.

The keyword list for education, skills and personal development doesn’t even include “university” or “higher education” as search terms.

The main research report’s methodology explains that the national survey was disseminated through schools and partner networks – universities don’t get a mention. The annexes do note that focus group recruitment used local youth organisations, schools, scout groups, and universities among other channels – so universities were technically listed as a possibility.

But there’s nothing to suggest this produced any university student participants, and none of the quotes or findings reflect their experiences.

The seven “Hack” events were held in Blackpool, Bristol, Birmingham, Gateshead, Manchester, Ipswich, and Sheffield – all cities with universities, most with multiple institutions – but again, there’s nothing to suggest any university students took part. The quotes throughout are overwhelmingly from school-age young people, with “school/college/university” appearing only as a single combined survey option for day-to-day worries.

The young person’s summary – presumably designed to be accessible to the strategy’s actual target audience – contains zero references to university or higher education. “College” appears once, in a quote about bus fares. School is the assumed setting throughout.

The strategy itself

If the evidence base largely ignores university students, maybe the policy response corrects for that? It does not.

The word “university” appears precisely once in the entire strategy document. It comes in the careers guidance section, listing pathways young people might be guided towards:

apprenticeships, technical routes, direct employment, and university.” Students are a destination, not a population.

The formula throughout is schools and colleges. Mental Health Support Teams will be rolled out in schools and colleges by the end of 2029. The new enrichment framework is for schools and colleges. The belonging framework to help young people feel included will be provided to schools and colleges. When the strategy talks about embedding relationships, sex and health education content, it’s in schools and colleges. Partnership working with local organisations? Schools and other education settings.

The trusted adults chapter focuses on youth workers, sports coaches, volunteer mentors, pastoral support workers, faith leaders and outdoor educators. The youth voice chapter is similar – the strategy will lower the voting age to 16, establish Youth Councils across England, create a Youth Policy Network, and fund #iwill ambassadors. Young people will be empowered to influence local funding decisions and hold government to account through annual national hearings. Nada on students.

Logic games

If I was being naive, I’d say that strategy’s own framing points directly at higher education, and then swerves around it. The documents emphasise that challenges are interconnected and that transitions are difficult periods requiring support – but ignore the school-to-university transition entirely.

They identify mental health support disappearing when young people leave school – the Youth Collaborators even flagged the problem of having to re-apply for support at university – and then don’t investigate what university provision looks like.

They highlight cost of living pressures and housing insecurity – while missing a population experiencing these most acutely. They celebrate youth clubs and trusted adults as vital infrastructure – apparently unaware that universities and their students’ unions providing it on ever-reducing budgets for the couple of million young people studying at English universities.

The “youth voice” outcome area is especially jarring. The strategy bangs on about young people feeling unheard, wanting meaningful participation in decisions, needing accessible spaces to engage – all while apparently not thinking to consult students’ unions, NUS, or any of the extensive student voice infrastructure that already exists in higher education.

Departmental silos again

If I was being less naive, the explanation is simple enough – as usual, just like in MHCLG,  DHSC,  DBT and every other department, DCMS thinks university students are DfE’s problem, who in turn thinks students are universities’ problem. The strategy sits in DCMS, which handles youth services, while higher education policy lives in the Department for Education. So despite the 10-21 age range, evidence gathering stops at the departmental boundary.

The strategy finds that young people worry about school, college, and university as a combined category – but only gathered evidence about school. It notes that mental health support becomes harder to access after school – but didn’t ask what university services look like. It celebrates youth workers as “some of the only adults in our life who listen to us” – while ignoring the thousands of university and students’ union staff, advisers, and SU officers doing equivalent work in higher education.

The strategy’s own evidence notes that university students shared concerns about limited options to stay in their university town after graduation – suggesting someone, somewhere, spoke to some university students at some point. But the observation floats free, unconnected to any systematic engagement, and unexplained by the methodology.

All of which might, just, on a good day, be OK if DfE had shown any interest in students at all recently. It hasn’t. As I type, the Higher education mental health implementation taskforce website hasn’t been updated since February.

Its Feb minutes say that several members noted that the Taskforce has “significantly accelerated positive change”, and then 2 bullets down says that “more work is needed on implementation, accountability and delivery to ensure providers engage in a meaningful way.”

It goes on to record that “work with DHSC and the NHS is crucial to ensure that HE students are recognised as a unique demographic by the NHS”. Then we got this shower.

As ever, the youth strategy treats “education” as meaning schools, “youth services” as something separate from what universities provide, and students as someone else’s problem. Again.