Inside the Mind of a 16-Year-Old Boy with Shuab Gamote

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0:42Elliott:Hello and welcome to To Be A Boy with me, Jolie Braley. And me, Elliot Ray. Today's guest is Shuaib Gamote, an advocate for young people and a strategic advisor to the NEET Commission, where he helped lead conversations with more than 400 young people who are not in education, employment or training or who are at risk of becoming so. He is also the co-author of Inside the Mind of a 16-year-old, a nationally recognised study exploring Gen Z's attitudes, aspirations and anxieties. I've been particularly interested in Shuaib's work because he sits at the intersection of some of the biggest questions facing young people today.

1:25Elliott:Identity, politics, social media, belonging and the increasingly complex transition into adulthood. Shoaib, welcome to To Be A Boy. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited about this conversation. Your experience is just completely mind-blowing and it's so clear to me that you've dedicated your life to really understanding what is going on for young people and being a voice for young people particularly boys can you tell us what led you to this work why are you so passionate about it yeah sure I mean it's a it's a very random kind of story uh I kind of it starts off during my undergrad I did accounting and finance which everyone's really surprised to hear um thankfully never worked a day in my life not thankfully I always say thankfully and then accountants get on my back um but I never worked a day in accounting I started off kind of my professional life working for my university, Manchester Metropolitan University in the Students' Union.

2:24So I was really interested in kind of like students' voice and then moved into a professional role at the university where I was working on kind of awarding gaps and attainment gaps, kind of both the same meaning, but we use awarding gaps or the industry uses awarding gaps now because it's about what the students awarded rather than what they attain. But I was really looking at, you know, specifically kind of underrepresented groups of students and why they weren't doing as well as other students. So BAME students, disabled students, care leavers, young carers. And yeah, that was kind of where my passion started.

2:58But increasingly, I realised that a lot of these problems don't start at university. They start much earlier in life for a young person. And then did a public policy master's and kind of moved into the space where I am now. Over the past two years, I've had the privilege of speaking to over a thousand young people and trying to kind of make sense of the world that they're living in and make sure their voices are being heard.

3:20Elliott:And you're in Northern, eh? Very, very proud Northern and now living in London, which, very goodly, I do love. But yeah, Mancunian, born and raised in Manchester. So you outnumbered Elliot today? It's all right, it's okay. I believe in myself. And you are a Londoner now, to be fair. I am a Londoner now, but like, you know, I make sure that people, one thing that really annoys me actually is when I go back to Manchester, people can't hear the Mancunian accent that much. And when I'm in London, people don't know where I'm from. So I'm losing my Mancunian accent a little bit. So I'm trying to, I'm going to start watching Coronation, I'm going to start watching Coronation Street again.

4:02Elliott:I could hear it when you first came on, I was almost straight away. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. so um you co-authored inside the mind of a 16 year old i mean that to me is just fascinating i'd love to get inside the mind of a 16 year old so what were the biggest insights from that research and what did it reveal about how young people are thinking and feeling right now it was a really interesting piece of work i did it with my kind of co-author peter hyman who i also wrote inside the mind of a young neat with that recently came out um but that was a really interesting kind of experience we went into it really kind of open-minded we didn't really know kind of the specific project that we were going to go into but a lot of the moral panic around young people at the time was kind of quite harming I thought and Peter Heimer is a former head teacher I'm obviously decently young in this space not a 16 year old but you know close to it and so a lot of the moral panic you know irritated me to an extent but I was also really interested to kind of hear what their life experiences are I think the thing that came across straight away was at the time I was about 10 years older than the young people that we were speaking to so we traveled all the country we spoke to 700 young people in schools um you know I won't I won't list all the cities that we were in but we were in over 15 cities we really kind of tested the train networks in the UK um but one of the things that came up quite quickly and was quite quite personal kind of surprise to me was I'm Gen Z and the young people that we're speaking to are also Gen Z but our life experiences couldn't be kind of more different in a lot of ways I think the generational terms have been quite useful in history but for Gen Z I think lumping together a 28 year old and a 16 year old is probably more useless than it ever has been and that's in part due to kind of rapid technological advancements so if you think about kind of when I was growing up my first phone was when I was 16 I got my first phone on GCSE results day um and it was like the only thing I was thinking about um which led to me doing A-levels that I didn't want to do but that's a very long story I was like I'll do whatever you want mum just give me an iPhone but importantly I kind of grew up in you know organic Facebook where we had desktop in my in my living room I'd scroll for about two minutes and my feed was done comparatively I've got a 16 year old brother at the time and he had a phone when he was like nine and he's on tiktok which like endless scrolling and the majority of the content that he's seeing is nothing to do with his friends what impact does that have on a young person um what impact does that have on their kind of development their views on the world is really interesting so we kind of came across this researcher called kindness gunman an american researcher who's thought about this quite a lot and she divides gen z into three different groups gen z 1.0 which i'm a proud member of gen z 1.5 which is kind of that middle ground and gen z 2.0 which is the younger cohort and we then got into a lot more detail about well what are the life experiences of these young people what political and world turmoil have they been through at different points in their lives what kind of messages are they receiving from the world and how is that impacting their development and importantly um technologically you know ai was for us imagine you know you have imagine growing up in ai in high in high school where people can create pictures of whatever they want.

7:21You can use it for your homework. And comparatively, you know, a young person in kind of Gen Z 1.5 kind of going through COVID at such important moments in their adolescence and how that changes their view of the world. So I think that was one of the key kind of findings. I can get into more if you want, but I've spoken there for a while.

7:38Elliott:Yeah, COVID, you forget, I forget about COVID. It feels like it was so long ago and you forget about the impact that's had on young people, actually. We talk a lot about social media, don't we, on this podcast and the impact of the internet, but not COVID and what that's done. How do you think COVID has influenced that generation? It's interesting because I think I had a very similar perspective. I didn't really think about it that much. I mean, COVID hit me when I was starting my professional life. So I started kind of working online and that was for about a year. But hearing how young people spoke about COVID was really interesting, like especially with the NEAT project.

8:15neat being young people that are not in employment education or training and how they described it in a lot of detail and they talk about kind of their socialization being taken away it impacting their confidence and their ability to talk to people um i think as soon as you talk to a young person and you start talking about some of the key challenges that they're facing at the moment if you have a deep conversation with them and let them need the conversation covid will always come up and it's really interesting to see how that impacts their relationships their views of the world but importantly their confidence um in our report kind of the inside the mind of a young neat we talk about a confidence deficit and how a lot of young people kind of are lacking confidence in their own abilities or um in their place in the world and i think that's really interesting when we talk about boys in particular wow yeah i was mentoring a young a young guy and he moved from london to newcastle for university and after university he stayed in newcastle and i would talk to him and every day I'll talk to him online or every so often and it'd be in his in his room and his room had his bike behind him and all his clothes and everything like that and he had a shared he had a room in a shared in a shared house but his job was working from home all his friends are in London and he spent like most of his time in his bedroom by himself and he was starting to feel really really lonely and I was like you've got to get another job that allows you to see people and you have to get out the house and you have to make friends because he was just in his room the whole time through COVID and afterwards as well and now he's moved and he's he's doing a lot better now but it just made me think wow like my experience of COVID was crazy with children it was horrible in the house but as a young person with no one around in a shared house pretty much on your own isolating and then afterwards and yeah I don't think we've really grasped like the impact of that and I think we've kind of moved on as a society that was then we forget about that but if you were 15 16 at the time when you're supposed to be living life meeting people I can imagine that has like long lasting effects that we haven't really taken the time to delve into I think 100 % I mean even if I think personally like pre-covid me and post-covid me I think I'm I was a much more outgoing person before and that's kind of what we heard from young people was like they can't really remember having freedom before covid for a lot of them so and there's been studies that have been released about you know young people going out less and feeling more comfortable at home and whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is a kind of a different conversation but I agree in terms of like how the world has changed now and in terms of young people living at home I mean there's a lot of American businessmen that talk about it a lot in terms of trying to force young people back into um into the workplace and and young people sometimes feeling uncomfortable with that um and enjoying their kind of like um space at home but yeah I think it's really interesting one young person it was really interesting just a quick anecdote there was a young person that we were speaking to and and in the report we talk about lost years and Alan Milburn talks about lost years as well um and we call it the bedroom years in our report and in relation to COVID it's really interesting a young person that we were speaking to kind of spent two and a half years after college after high school pardon me doing nothing at home and we were kind of getting into detail about what they were doing on a day-to-day basis and it was pretty much not much, you know, claiming benefits, living at home with their parents.

11:31But the interesting thing that they said, and it was a really good line, was that they spent two years pretending it was still COVID, which I thought was really interesting. And kind of how that kind of comfortableness, being at home and not doing much and kind of letting the world go by you in some ways is something that they were almost used to, which was really interesting, I thought.

11:52Elliott:Wow. I mean, I know, I think I socialised less since COVID. I think I you know I'm really happy getting my pajamas on and putting the tv on so it must be really particularly hard for younger people where socializing can be in some cases way more challenging can't it we were talking to a 19 year old in the last episode and about dating and the complexities of how much easier it is to just go on the internet and have conversations with people online than it is to go on a real date which is messy and awkward and but you need to do that in order to find somebody that you genuinely connect with so you need to go through that to figure out who you are but also to find somebody that you connect with that's really interesting yeah i mean it's like one of my friends was saying recently actually that like a lot of her and her friends will not go on a date like until they've had extensive texts but also phone calls of people beforehand yeah whereas i think before like people would be much more likely to have one interaction and be like why not just go for you know a meal or coffee or a drink and and see where it goes but yeah it's super interesting yeah i think there's so much in terms of like making yourself uncomfortable because i can imagine if you're 16 17 you're at home and you don't want to leave the house like when i was that age i was walking around the high street giving out cvs like going into hmv with your cv printed out on paper and you've got to approach the person behind the till and like try and convince them they should employ you and my first one of my first jobs is a JD sports I got the job because I used to go in every single day talk to the manager make her laugh give her my CV and eventually she was like Elliot just have a job just have a job here like literally that's how I got a job here you come in anyway I was going in every day and just like making jokes at the till for like half an hour and she was just sick of me she gave me a job and you think about the character building stuff right that you had to do to date to get a job to make friends you had to put yourself in uncomfortable situations and that is so good for life because that's what life is all about if you want to you know grow and and be successful in in my view um but i think yeah covid took that opportunity away from young people and i think it can damage your character and really like make you less confident ultimately 100 yeah what you mentioned about jobs there sorry is like is like what young people are facing now in the job market is applying for like 400 roles in a year and getting no response never having any human interactions and then just constantly feeling like a failure where I feel like if they were to have that human you know connection with someone in person it would almost be you know it would it would give them a lot more like kind of positive feedback in some ways and quite frankly the manager would be much more open and honest about why they're not hiring and what that young person might need to do to get better um but like unfortunately it's tough for young people now because the majority of i mean mcdonald's have like a three-stage hiring process that like it's you know my first job was i was 16 when i started working i worked my little two and a half years probably to be honest the most fun i've ever had and working in fallowfield manchester with loads of different students but um the way that i got that job was for a friend and then going into the into the store and just having a chat and they did an on-job evaluation now you have to do like two or three processes online before you even speak to anyone like from mcdonald's which is you know it's tough it's all done by ai isn't it right like my partner runs a digital arts organization they just put a job out that's kind of a starter job and they opened it up and they had like 600 applications within 24 hours and it was like holy shit we need to close this down because I cannot cope with this amount of applications.

15:35Elliott:But then when he started looking through it, it was like 80 % of these have been written by AI. I'm not going to put you forward for interview if you can't be bothered to fill in an application form. That was his, you know, he was like, they're all saying the same thing. You're just all saying exactly the same thing. So he just like, you know, he got rid of 80 % of them straight away. And his point was like, well, most people are sifting through applications using AI. They're not because they're a small organization and they wanted to evaluate the people and their actual experiences properly rather than using AI.

16:10Elliott:So everybody's just fighting AI. Exactly. AI employers, AI applications. Yeah. So applicants aren't even thinking about their application because they're just like, AI, write this for me. And then so there's no, it's just failing everybody. It feels like it's not. I mean, for our last report, we brought together employers and young people in a kind of like a really friendly Mexican standoff where we try to share power in a really nice way. But it was a little bit of a standoff. And it was these young people who, to be quite frank, they were they were incredibly work ready, incredibly articulate.

16:49You know, the majority of them had good qualifications and they were talking to kind of high level employers or banks, insuring companies, etc. etc and that ai point came across in that kind of like interaction and then the young people's argument was the fact that for a lot of these larger corporations ai is going to sift through all of these applications anyway yeah and you know ai and then you know if you work if a young person was saying if you work with ai you can kind of try to find the key terms that you need to use in order to get through that next sifting phase but at the same time like i've been through i've been on the recruitment side as well where you're getting ai applications and everyone's using the same prompt and putting the jobs back in so you're obviously getting the exact same lines you know this is my dream company to work for because they've got the values that align with me and yeah it's interesting so how much do you think class has to play on this because what my parents were amazing amazing parents they did so much for me my sister but one thing that they couldn't do which was out of their control was when we finished university they weren't able to introduce us to the world of work really in in a way of here's introductions here's some work experience because you know their own experience is very limited of the workplace and one thing I'm so happy me and my wife can do for our children is when they are ready to go into the workplace we know we can introduce them to a range of people depending on what they want to do you know if they want to be a pilot an engineer whatever it is there's probably a contact somewhere within our network and I think that is through us kind of going up in in the class system but I do worry about this in regards like the working class lower income kids whose parents don't have that network it's so hard to get work experience it's so hard to get any exposure into the world of work whereas if you're from a middle class you know upper class background where your parents can introduce you to some people I guess maybe you can navigate this world a little bit easier because you have some real life experience and contacts like how much did you find class had an impact in your latest kind of neat report so I do definitely think it has an impact one of the young women that we were speaking to for our last kind of um interviews was talking about class in a very detailed way and quite an articulate way and she kind of described you know going to university with um a lot of a lot of young people that she'd kind of never been um around before so a lot of people that were from better backgrounds than her and she always felt kind of a parity of esteem and the first time she didn't feel it was when it came time to apply for jobs and her friends could rely on their parents networks and she couldn't and i feel like you know the rise of ai the tough job market people applying for 600 um you know a role coming out on 600 applications coming out um coming in is impacting young people from little socioeconomic backgrounds much more than it is impacting other young people the tough reality is like a lot of the opportunities in the industry that i work in but similar industries now are coming about through word of mouth i mean I'm a son of a taxi driver and my mum was a housewife I've had seven jobs and apart from McDonald's every single one of those jobs was you know kind of not given to me but you know it was a connection or someone that believed in me and gave me a chance and I feel like that's what that's

20:02Elliott:the real barrier there when it comes to class yeah there are employers that's that seem to you know the big gobby employers saying that young people come into jobs and they're not work ready is that I mean and if you have if you are a parent that can connect your child with people or can give them work experience then it is a different you have the opportunity to figure out how to do work how to be in a job before you go into employment don't you say I suppose people that don't have that opportunity are at even further disadvantage is that something that you you think is a problem and schools should be teaching more, like helping kids to be more work ready?

20:44Yeah, I think it's a really interesting point. And having spoken to so many young people, you kind of realise that there is definitely a spectrum of work readiness. In our report, we kind of have this traffic light system, red and green, and we talk about young people's distance from work. So a red young person wouldn't be ready for an opportunity right now and they're not close to it. This is a young person that's faced significant barriers. So just to give you a little bit more insight, in our report, we focused on speaking to five groups of young people. So young carers, care leavers, young people with neurodivergency, young people from no socioeconomic backgrounds, and young people with low educational attainment.

21:21And for some of those young people, they face multiple barriers. And, you know, they've had heartbreaking lives. And that means that they're just not ready for a variety of different reasons to go straight into employment. and what they need is a lot of wraparound support to get them to get them there and then the amber group is a young person that might be facing one barrier so it might be low educational attainment they might not have their gcses you know they um you know might have slight anxiety needing a little bit of support might not understand how the drug market works might need help getting an id really practical things that with a week or two support they could get there but the majority of the young people that we spoke to were green they were ready for work at different levels and they were just waiting for the right opportunity.

22:04In terms of school's relationship with this and I think you guys should definitely talk to Peter Hyman about this he's a former head teacher and kind of started his own school as well but it's interesting that you know we spoke to young people about their experiences and we asked them to kind of describe school in one word obviously these are young people that have faced a lot of barriers the words that they used to describe school were really negative and disastrous traumatic waste of time and we asked them specifically do you think what school prepared you for the world of work and they said absolutely not the vast majority of them in this country we have a system we have an education system for better for worse that there's one pathway and at year eight and we did speak to some preneats as well so these are young people that schools have identified as being at risk of being at the age of 11 or 12 you know um when we spoke to when we spoke to young people they were talking about kind of this pressure that was put onto them from such a young age a year seven year eight being told that success for you is getting good GCSEs and then going to college and then going to university at year eight if you're in the lowest set the school sending you signals and society sending you signals you're being called rude words and apologies for using this word but the word retard came across quite a lot where young people were being told you know by their peers that they are one um young people saying that they felt like you know they felt less than and it was heartbreaking because and one young person described it as slowly bleeding out for four years knowing that they're going to fail because they're just not getting better they're staying in that lower set they're being predicted to fail and at the same time you know they're being told that success is getting good GCSEs and having that pathway.

23:50Comparatively, we went to the Netherlands and we visited them for a few days and they have one of the lowest NEAT rates at 4 % compared to ours at nearly 15%. And at the age of 12, they do an exam and it determines what pathway you take in the school. And it's a vocational pathway, a semi-vocational pathway and an academic pathway. So the students that do better do the academic pathway, the young people that don't do as well do the vocational pathway what was really interesting is when you spoke to these young people about that went through all of these pathways they spoke about parity of esteem they didn't feel less than because they knew that the outcomes that throughout through all of these three pathways would lead to them doing well so we spoke to a young boy who was you know really struggled in school his parents were migrants um you know really struggled with the language um and then did this exam at 12 went through vocational pathway and he was 15 he'd been working for two years part-time started his own little business and you know he started and and it's really interesting because when they take the vocational pathway and when when they go through these pathways i'm saying vocational pathways a lot here but stick with me um but when they're choosing these pathways they're talking about their future a lot right and they're being forced to have these conversations a lot comparatively in the uk all you're thinking about is gcse yeah you know like we don't really have the careers guidance you know and if you're doing a vocational pathway you're not just doing a vocational pathway you can choose to specialize into three different streams you can you know do plumbing and and do more technical based skills you can do kind of the the travel and tourism side of things and work towards being you know working in an airport like it's but importantly they're having a lot of these conversations that a much earlier phase and they're kind of forced to have those conversations and the impact that has on their confidence because they know this is what my future could look like this is what my future could look like if you compare that to a you know a 16 year old in the uk who from the age of 12 has felt like they're going to fail their gcse's who then goes into a job market where there isn't a lot of apprenticeships they can't just walk into being a plumber they can't just walk into you know the pathways are not clear for them and their last year at school the only focus i I'm not blaming teachers at all.

26:03I think they've got an incredibly tough job and completely sympathetic towards them. But the school system incentivizes exam success. So that makes so much sense.

26:15Elliott:It makes so much sense. Do you know what? When I was in school, we were never encouraged to be a plumber or a builder. Plumbers make loads of money. Like my plumber is doing well and you can create your own business. It's such a good, and especially now in the world of AI, like being good with your hands and that it's really really good and it what you're saying there it's such a simple idea that would reform the education system that makes so much sense like why why do we not do it over here i think i think it's interesting i think like obviously that societally they have a you know a much different society than us and and you know nowhere near as many young people go to university there as they do here i think firstly there isn't a parity of esteem there isn't a long-term consistent message just think about how many things you've heard about post-16 pathways t levels a levels you know b techs um there isn't a very clear you know pathway for young people i think if we're going to do it and and this is you know coming from a lot um coming from i grew up on my side my father was a taxi driver i'm really careful about kind of pushing some young people not to go to university because it would usually kind of fall on the young people that are from low social economic backgrounds i want us as a as a country to be in a place where a politician will tell his son to do a vocational pathway as well because it's just as good and that's the place that we need to get out but it takes a long-term vision and it takes political parties agreeing with each other and i think that's what alan's been trying to do with his review and i'm not talking necessarily about him changing the education system but what he's been really trying to do is build a coalition as a country we're going to focus on these areas and try to build something that will still exist in 20 years.

27:55Because that system's been like that for a very long time. And the reason it has parity of esteem is because parents know my neighbor did this vocational pathway 20 years ago. He's a plumber now. He's doing great for himself. Where T-levels don't even exist anymore. And it will be phased out. And it was only Rishi Sunak that unveiled them. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. you're listening to a podcast which means you're probably multitasking maybe even scrolling home

28:24Elliott:listings on redfin saving homes without expecting to get them but redfin isn't just built for endless browsing it's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close twice as many deals when you find the one you've got a real shot at getting it get started at redfin.com own the dream tomorrow morning is knocking stock your fridge now how about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink or a sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe or a white chocolate mocha whichever you choose delicious coffee awaits find starbucks frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries so this is alan milburn's neats commission where um we've now found out that there are a million young people who are not in education employment or training so that's got it's been all over I've heard it all over the media all over the press and politicians seem to be really wrestling with what we do about this and there's lots of blame and lots of shouting um and it feels to me like everybody's just in panic about it like there's the there seems to be not enough call like like these are some of the solutions that we can implement and move forward if you were in charge and i'd love you to be in charge by the way after this conversation what would you what would be the first thing that you would do what i would say is like the one thing that i would want is for us to take you know to put much more focus on the issues that impact young people and what was really interesting like when we first started this piece of work i went around the streets of london i told random people on the streets to start about one million young people not being employment educational training and it was really interesting that young or old they were pointing the finger towards a young person rather than the system failures and i think we just need to create a system where young people are at the top of the political agenda and i think things will follow after them but i mean the one thing that i would like to see if i was in charge is a consistent approach let's not politicize this issue let's get behind it as a country and see it as like the national crisis that it is but it should be at the top of the political agenda I think we have a lot of parents listening and I feel like we just want our children to be able to grow up and exist in the world and like do okay, you know, and be able to have a job and whatever relationship they want and buy a house and just live.

30:46and I feel like maybe our generation of parents now we feel like that's harder for our children to achieve than maybe our parents and our grandparents did for us because there's so many more barriers in the way now than there were like you know for me I'm 43 so when it came to me buying a house I managed to kind of get in before the house prices exploded massively whereas for a young person now to to buy a house is is so difficult especially when so many are unemployed um the cost of living is sky high like if you're not established now it's so hard to create a a life in a world that is fulfilling and I think I agree with you so much we need to put young people at the top because not just for the young people but for the generations above that care about the young people as well like it's really stressful to know for our children it's going to be really difficult for them to to find their way and that impacts on everyone 100 i mean we've got a lot of problems that we don't even talk about a lot in this country at the moment because it's not facing us right now but we've got an aging population and we need this generation that are coming up to be more productive than ever more hopeful than ever more creative than ever and that takes real investment but yeah on that point elliot like there's an element of like financial nihilism like i don't really think about owning a home many times soon i can't even picture it like and this idea of like saving for a house is is not really i don't really i don't know i don't really think about it and a lot of you when we've been speaking to young people this kind of financial nihilism comes up a lot which is basically what's the point of thinking about the future when you're being sent all these signals that you'll never own a home you're never going to really earn a decent wage there's a cost of living crisis and what a lot of young people are just reverting back to is let me just enjoy the moment let me buy that blueberry ice matcha you know let me go on that holiday you know let me enjoy today let me enjoy this week forget you know because and it's a fair point right like if you're you know if you're earning you know average graduate job role in London is about 35 ,000 pounds you know and you're paying you know not to be quite personal but I'm paying a thousand pounds for a room you know a month it's insane and across the country a lot of different young people are facing similar problems where for them independence is like all they can just about afford not living with their parents is just about what they can afford and yeah it's really sad i want to talk about education because

33:17Elliott:i am so worried and i know lots of parents are about boys underperforming in schools and you know a lot about this you're a commissioner for the boys education commission that's chaired by peter hyman who we've just talked about where do you think we're going wrong where why is the education system not working for boys? I think it's a multifaceted issue and it is really concerning because you know when you talk about kind of young people like young men in particular and young boys kind of place in the world a lot of those conversations do back do stem back to education their experiences in school but also the education that they received there.

33:58I worked at Manchester Metropolitan University which is a very large university 40 ,000 students and 50 % of those students are first generation and within those 50 % are first generation so their parents didn't go to university a lot of those are young men and the young men were significantly less likely to say that they felt a sense of belonging on campus and and the impact that that has on a young person when they don't feel that they belong at university or school or college is that they're much less likely to get their most out of it they're much less likely to get involved in society they're much less likely to ask for help and to ask for support.

34:34This commission that Peter's chairing I think is going to be an incredibly interesting exercise. We've literally got our launch meeting today, which is really exciting. And it's got an incredible, like, I won't list all the names, but it's got some genuinely incredible people on it. And we're going to be trying to explore kind of the education system from very early years all the way to higher education and to propose solutions necessary to ensure that we're delivering for young boys. At the moment, I can't really pinpoint exactly where it was going wrong. All I do know is that it definitely is going wrong somewhere.

35:10In our last kind of inside the mind of a 16-year-old, we spoke to some young boys in Bristol and we kind of separated the two groups together. The way that they spoke about education was really interesting. they spoke about feeling like you know it wasn't really fit for purpose for them that they felt like there were different animals in a zoo that wasn't meant to contain them and you know in that report you find really like really like a lot of great kind of um uh anecdotes or or sayings and phrases that young people use to describe school not being fit for purpose but one of the things that they that they really interestingly pointed towards and and i want to be careful about this because it is a delicate topic but a lot of young boys feeling like they're being blamed for the mistakes of men in the past so a lot of young boys were very quick to point at the fact that young girls are getting a lot more support into certain industries and they can see that young women are doing better and when you're talking about employment a lot more employers are coming in to speak to young women now to speaking to young boys i think that's a good

36:11Elliott:answer and i have spoken on this podcast but i've got a 12 year old and a 10 year old boy and I was in my kitchen with my 12 year old who was still he was last year primary school at the time and it came on the radio the channel 4 report about uh boys thinking that feminism has gone too far and uh that boys think that they are now victims of sexism and he listened we were just making some food and he said oh I agree with that what they've just said you know boys are experiencing sexism more than girls um and i was like oh that's interesting okay let's talk about it what what do you mean and he said well whenever there's a problem at school the girls will cry sexism and so they're immediately believed and the boys aren't believed the girls the teachers are much nicer to the girls than they are to the boys you know he's speaking very much 10 year old language he felt that it was unfair that boys were being treated unfairly at school compared to girls and I couldn't disagree with it because that's his experience I couldn't say you're wrong you know I could say to him but the you know there are the reason why feminism exists you know explains some of the a bit of the historical context but I was like well that's really interesting that you feel like that you should talk to the teachers about it if you if that's your experience um and I do think we've made great strides for girls we've really moved the conversation on we're doing amazing things for girls and young women and yet it seems things have got worse for boys that we've become more limiting uh they're put in that man box they're told there's there's more things that they can't do than can do it feels to me with the conversations that we're having with them um and of course that's going to affect their experience of the world isn't it and school 100 yeah i mean it's like i think it's just a bit of a misunderstanding right i mean when we first started that project andrew tate was what was talked about quite a lot this is taking you back a few years but one of the things that we talked about in the report and one of the chapters of the report is andrew tate is dead and the reason we use that term obviously he's not literally dead but one of the young people said you know use the term dead meaning obsolete and and not kind of relevant anymore but when you're talking to young boys about kind of sexism and you use and you have the andrew tate assembly which a lot of young people have and said it was and we asked them what was the Andrew Tate assembly and they were told don't listen to Andrew Tate and they were like probably never listen to Andrew Tate but when they have that misunderstanding and there's a lack of nuance and understanding about what young people are consuming online and their online curriculum because it is it's definitely a curriculum and you don't understand the nuances like well Andrew Tate might have been a first mover and he might have been the first big name and said the most crass stuff and said things um the loudest But a lot of young boys are seeking voices that, you know, that kind of speak to their experiences, whether it be in school or outside of school.

39:09And a lot of young boys are also seeking self-improvement and they want to be the best versions of themselves because they feel like potentially school is not giving them the opportunity to be the best versions of themselves. And they're finding different spaces and different voices in different areas. Can we talk about where you said that so a lot of the boys feel like employers are going into schools to talk to girls. I'm assuming that's because in those industries, women are underrepresented in STEM industries. So the employers are going in to encourage more women to study and apply for those jobs.

39:41Is it that we're also not getting employers where men are underrepresented in those industries going into the schools and saying, hey, boys, you can apply for these jobs in caregiving? caregiving, teaching, nursing, whatever, you know, whatever. Is that the gap? Is there a gap there? I think so. I think there's also just, in general, a massive lack of people going into schools to talk to them about different careers and opportunities. And it's usually the charities that are focused on specific issues like getting women into STEM, for example, or getting black and ethnic minority students into certain industries.

40:16By the way, we heard the same thing about BAME students and how they're being given all the opportunities in certain schools as well. So It wasn't just a gender thing. I think in general, when we're talking about work experience, there's not a lot of work experience opportunities in school. And when we're talking about work, there's not a lot of interaction between employers and young people. So 100 % there is that misalignment there. And that's for a variety of different reasons. Institutions not kind of having that ready and built into their interaction with the local schools. And it's also, I think, an element of schools are so focused on kind of the exam factory and trying to um get their young people kind of the best grades possible and this is tricky because there can be a tendency to say oh like we've we've gone too far on that so we're going to stop doing that and then start doing everything now for white working class boys which of course we should do more for white working class boys but we can't then stop doing stuff for girls and black boys and asian boys too and you know a lot of the reform rhetoric is forget that let's just do stuff for white working class boys and girls like for example they've introduced screening for black men for prostate cancer because black men are twice more likely than all other men to get prostate cancer in their lives one in four black men will get prostate cancer and this guy from reform zf yusuf or whatever his name is was like we should stop doing this blah blah blah and it's like mate like what are you talking about that's a real problem we should also screen other men too and make sure everyone's issues are addressed but i do feel like we're here we're going to go the extreme other way ignore the issues that young girls ethnic minorities face and kind of pretend that's not happening and put all the focus elsewhere when actually we can do all of this stuff we can help everybody it's not a zero-sum game it's not a competition but the political dialogue especially from reform right now is is is divisive and it is it is worrying about where this goes if they get into power i know you may be not be able to say too much about that no i'm more than yeah no more than happy to like i think you know these charlatans at reform or whatever kind of far-right party they benefit when we don't have honest conversations i feel like the things that you mentioned there earlier we've had those debates over the course of the last two decades we've had the conversations about why it's important for young women to be in these industries and we've had the conversations about you know the struggles that black and ethnic minority people have faced it's important that we continue to have those conversations with young people and continue to make them aware of why you know why certain things are being pushed i mean the prostate cancer kind of stats that you just gave as a perfect example that's the reason it's happening and we need to talk about that as just as much as you know oh they just care about black men and they don't care about white people getting prostate cancer Of course we do.

43:08Of course we care about every single injustice. But that's another point. I mean, you know, one of the other things that we found inside the mind of a 16 year old is the lack of conversations that are happening in school about really tough issues. And if you think about school as the last kind of space where young people are almost forced to talk to people that they disagree with and have conversations, it's so important that we're teaching young people to learn to disagree with each other. and I feel like the council culture and a lot of the things that are happening in the world has meant that teachers feel less comfortable having those difficult conversations in school.

43:42Elliott:Yeah, I wonder if parents have made that harder as well because they're not comfortable with certain conversations happening in schools. It's parents, it's kids having phones and being able to record, you know, like what a teacher says, it's tough. Yeah, take us into the mind of a 16-year-old boy because of all the work that you've done you've interviewed so many young people what what would you say are the biggest challenges that they're experiencing what would you say they they feel about themselves what do you what do you think they feel about adults like parents and people of the previous generation at the moment like just give us a like summary of what it's like to be a 16 year old boy I think to a degree I think it's you know that feeling of feeling misunderstood and when you see a lot of the moral panic because those headlines and then at the same time these young men are being told that institutions don't understand them and parents don't understand them and previous generations don't understand them it kind of aligns i think it's a tough time to be a young boy um i think it's always tough to go through kind of adolescence i think a lot of boys being given so many mixed messages online and in person kind of if i mean peter talks about this quite a lot but we've got three different curriculums if you think about it like that so you've got the school curriculum which is kind of teaching young people that being vulnerable is okay and and it doesn't mean that you're weak you've got online messages of people telling them that you know you need to be you need to be kind of a powerful male and you need to be this and you need to be that it's just so loud for them it's so loud to be a young boy right now their environment that they're growing up in is so tough there's so many kind of different pressures that are being put onto them there's so much uncertainty in their lives right now there's there's a lack of clear pathways not just with work but kind of independence and where you live and your relationships are more tough than ever before um and to top that all off you've got a a kind of social media landscape but also a societal landscape that has meant that they have a lot less confidence in themselves and their own ability and that's why they're seeking out self-improvement and that's why they're seeking out kind of mentors because there's a lack of trusted a lot of relationships in their lives at the moment i think across the board um so it's really interesting i've not answered that no you know i get it like and it does feel to me from what you've said and i've sensed this from previous conversations that building the confidence of young men is so key making sure they feel valued and that they they have something that is theirs something that they are good at that you're like you're really good at that exactly yeah so building their confidence in certain things you can if you spot a passion something that they enjoy making sure you constantly reinforce that seems like a simple thing we can do yeah 100 it's about moving away from that deficit-based model and moving to that strength based model and we talk about in the report we talk about so many of these young boys have incredible talents and incredible passions that the school system or whoever their adult are the adult is in their life doesn't really know about or understand and it doesn't make them feel seen and when you kind of couple that up with a massive lack of third spaces which we haven't really talked about but you know there's not a lot of youth clubs for young people now there's not a lot of places for them to experiment when you couple it up with that you find a lot of young boys not feeling seen and not feeling special in any way and especially if they're not good at the academics it's quite easy to fall into that void of you know it's no surprise that a lot of young boys are going to their gym and kind of gym maxing it's because something that's something that they control right like i put the effort in and my body will get better yeah whereas other things where i might put effort in there's no guarantee that you know i'm going to succeed from that so i think you know they're not necessarily seeking control and i think that word can be used quite negatively but they're just seeking stability um and yeah i think it's really interesting youth clubs comes up all the time doesn't it it's so massive such seems like such a deficit serve i mean i mean youth club provisions have decreased since 2010 and the austerity years so much i think we went from like thousands to now hundreds the really sad thing about it is like a lot of young people talk about i mean one of the more surprising things on my last report was that young people kind of really and this might be a little bit naive of me to say but knife crime came up as quite a big topic and then feeling unsafe you know came across as quite a big topic in areas that you wouldn't expect it to be an issue um and then when you're talking about them feeling safe kind of walking the streets and and then you've got you know adults saying young people are spending more time than ever at home and online well the reason they're spending so much time at home is because there's not a lot of youth clubs there's not a lot of third spaces and they don't feel safe on the streets so it's no surprise so i'm having these conversations about a social media ban which by the way i became radicalized inside the mind of a 16 year old it needs to happen and it's a dramatic failing that it hasn't happened already but when you when you're talking about a ban yes let's ban it let's ban social media but at the same time you need to give them give young people a lot more spaces to be able to connect in real in real life to make friends in real life because you know when we asked young people about if social media should be banned overwhelmingly they said no because that's where they find community that's why they find friends and passions and yeah that's where they connect yeah we're literally thinking about summer holidays for our 10 year old because she hasn't got a phone and she won't have a phone a little while but we're like we need to keep her busy then so what we're gonna do because you can't just sit around the house bugging me all day so she's got to do something so like we're looking at all the clubs and play dates and just trying to plan activities because back in the day when we were younger we just play outside but they don't do that as much even though we're trying to start getting her in to go into the park by herself and whatnot um but yeah they've got it's got the time's got to be filled with something else there's got to be something else to do you can't just be at home watching tv all day and i think that's the challenge for for us all for society the government parents as well to think about how do we help young people to stay busy and connected i think what we were saying there about purpose is so interesting you know like if you're if you're young for any person you need to have a focus and a hobby and something that can grow that you're good at that you enjoy I think that's like basic in life like we sleep we eat we need human connection we need purpose we need to be able to do something that we care about that can grow that we can see becoming a thing whether that's a paid opportunity or a hobby but it can get bigger for me I was like big into music bass guitar producing music growing up and that was something that I had that was mine and I think without that I don't know if I would have become the person I became because that was what anchored me when I was alone it gave me comfort it was something I could dedicate my time to I could grow my talent in I could learn I could get geeky about and it's just so key and I think if we're not giving young people those opportunities to to experiment and to learn and explore something that they care about what is life and so we can't be surprised then when they are you know doing other things that aren't good for them but it is for us to think about how can we provide that for them yeah i agree i agree yeah now my 12 year olds got into biking and it's been a lifesaver like it means he goes outside whereas before that i was exactly what you said sure but it was like he uh didn't want to go outside because it was dangerous he felt he was too scared to go outside there were gangs around here he was scared of them i'm in york by the way so not a place where you would happen but there were literally kids 19 18 between the age of 16 and 19 year old kids in the gang that walk around with four balaclavas all the kids around here and so he was too scared to go out um so he's on computer games the whole time i didn't know what to do with him i was heartbreaking tell you to go out so you know you're constantly exhausting as a parent you're like okay i'll take you to trampoline park okay you know it's expensive as well yeah he's he plays rugby so that was one thing but he's found biking and he's got a little crew and they all go biking now and that's completely saved all of us really and genuinely heartbreaking like same thing like i was at a a chicken shop chicken chip shop one late one night after work and there was this boy that came in and he was quite boisterous and he came in he was like boss man you know i need and he's ordering for his family and he's about 11 and then he's it's time for him to walk out and these two boys came in earlier to get a can of coke and he said oh those boys are going to rob me i know then they always kind of like stick around here and i was like he's being paranoid i went outside and there was these three boys yeah on a bike and i had to walk him home because he was scared he was literally shaking bless him to walk home but it's again no surprise that those young boys were out there now and these kids were also young 16 they looked like babies themselves but when you've got a lack of use provisions a lot of lack of social workers it's no surprise that these issues have kind of you know skyrocketed over the past five or six years because we're now paying for the lack of youth clubs that were around 10 years ago and again instead of blaming you know the lack of funding we're blaming young people for being you know hooligans but at the same time like it is like genuinely heartbreaking to see kind of the damaging impact that it has on on generations yeah i have two questions for you um before we sadly leave you um first one is you know i'm thinking about parents i know that have neurodiverse children or parents i know that have children where they say they're just not academic like it's just not for them school just isn't for them at all and I loved what you said about having different routes that kids can go down so if they're not academic having a vocational route that they can go down and that doesn't exist in our system at the moment do you know of anything that those parents can do when they're thinking the system this system is not working for my child but I don't want them to end up in a situation where they're out of work when they're older I want them to have a vocation of some sort when they're younger do you know of anything that they can do now I think that I think the main piece of advice that I give to any parent in that situation is unfortunately where kind of the schooling system fails like you need to put you know a lot more time and effort in trying to help your young son or daughter find what they're good at and what their passion is and help them develop confidence through that whether that be like Elliot how you mentioned whether that be kind of in the future whether that leads to them kind of making money through that passion or not I think it does develop a lot of the skills that you're going to lead later in life increasingly employees we talk about kind of educational attainment but increasingly employees are not just looking at that and there are a lot of great employees that don't just look at that and and Jolie and Elliot you'll know you'll know in your own experiences as well soft skills are going to be more important than ever before um and helping your um your son or thought or get those skills I think is incredibly important um but I wish I could point towards like a scheme or a project that would you know would give all the answers but at the moment it doesn't seem like there is some hopefully I mean the government will make changes and and we'll try to kind of find different parity of esteem pathways for young people but at the moment I think it's lacking I mean what gives me hope is that the government are talking about this they do seem to care and they do seem to want to make this a lot yeah a lot and Alan's the best like Genuinely, I'm not just saying this because he commissioned us to write this report.

55:34But if you watch his last press conference, and I know this might be everyone's cup of tea, but he's been really clear about building an argument. The reason it's been on the press so much is because he's been really pushing this argument. And at the moment, different political parties are all uninterested in this topic. So I really hope we can keep this momentum going and carry on making this argument. Now, we don't just forget about it in two years because the number goes down to 950 ,000. And we're like, oh, thank God, it's no longer a million. and then four years later is 4 million you know i mean like so let's just you know keep the keep

56:03Elliott:the pressure on and and everyone can do that yeah brilliant thank you and what do you what gives you hope about this generation their hope you know like imagine that they the majority of the young people that we spoke to said they think they're going to have better lives than their parents despite everything that i've said today the majority of the young people that we spoke to said that they believe they're going to have better lives than their parents i think this generation call them snowflakes call them whatever you want they're a lot more understanding and emotionally aware in a lot of different ways um and that also gives me help but i think they're also incredibly resilient i call it like you know generation resilient when you hear some of the like i've heard genuinely quite heartbreaking stories i've cried about four or five times um over the past four months especially talking to young needs and care leavers and young carers the amount of resilience that these young people have it amazes me how they keep going and i think Like, you know, in many ways, that's the main thing that gives me hope.

57:00And what also gives me hope to be honest is all of the incredible civil society people in the sector that work, like endlessly to try to give young people the skills and opportunities that they need.

57:10Elliott:There are so many amazing people really doing great work, aren't there? We hope to keep platforming through this. I mean, you are obviously one of them. I did have one other thing I want to say before we go. What would you say to the Telegraph journalist that called young people today boring and said, really they should just be bonking for Britain? Oh, I mean, to be honest, I don't take the Telegraph that seriously because they're a bit of a joke. But I mean, you know, I think that's probably in relation to the fact that a lot of young people are now looking for stable relationships. I mean, call young people whatever you want.