The Future for Generation C is the Next COVID Emergency

A new generation will be defined by our ability to create a positive future from this crisis. It is also an opportunity for us all.

As the death toll mounts, the economic and social implications become stark. Yesterday (14 April), the IMF warned of the worst slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s and in the UK, The Office for Budget Responsibility forecast a 35% plunge in GDP in the second quarter.

The sheer scale of the challenges we face, requires us to plan for the future as we battle the present. But there is no predetermined Future. Especially now. Only one of a number of possible Futures. Near the top of the list is the need for a plan to help a generation of young people that is already starting to be labelled Generation C.

Generation C will partly be defined by their experiences in the crisis; of social distancing and isolation; of fear and stress; of new constraints and rules; of boredom and meaninglessness. Some will be positively influenced by the growth in community. Some will become more aware and more socially and politically active. But for many more, this will be a brutal experience of uncertainty and loss.

Generation C will also be defined by the enormous challenges that the aftermath of COVID-19 and its consequences will create for the years to come. The immediate direct impact will be on opportunities in education and employment and these could be damaging beyond anything of which we have experience.

At any normal time, one of the most difficult challenges in anyone’s life, is the transition from school based education to working life or further education. Complex personal, economic, social and cultural factors come together to define the opportunities, the challenges and the barriers, real and perceived, that define the choices for young people.

For way too many of these young people, even in ‘normal’ times, the choices that they feel they have, are limited at best. For way too many it’s an under-informed and under-supported choice that they face with resignation or indifference. For the most deprived young people in the most deprived areas, there is very little choice at all.

I have seen this reality in my involvement as a Trustee of Working Options in Education, a charity founded nearly 9 years ago to create positive interventions and support, during the critical life stage of 14–18 year olds https://workingoptions.org.uk/

Working Options started out making interventions at state run Sixth Form Colleges. Focusing initially on colleges located in some of the most challenged areas, the charity has built a programme that now directly involves 150 schools and colleges covering more than half of the most deprived areas in England and Wales and has a bank of digital resources available to young people everywhere.

The need for this kind of intervention has been shown by the growth of reach, engagement and positive outcomes. This has been very hard won. From our first college, it took two years to sign up another two. The next 5 years saw gradual, steady progress, establishing an effective organisational network and programme involving educators and volunteers from business. This bottom up, practical approach, generated results and in the last 24 months we have experienced an explosion of adoption and usage. In research, 88% of participants said they felt more positive about their future.

We have also learned a lot and adapted to the key issues and barriers many young people face in the normal experience of making the transition. They need help to understand and frame the options they have. They want help to navigate the language of business and work. Many require help to assess if further education is right for them and if so, what kind of institution or programme. A key task is to build confidence and motivation as it relates to their future and their own potential. Many want practical help building a CV; most need inspiring to think of their personal brand.

But these are not ‘normal’ times. Now we are looking at a situation exponentially more difficult for the current cohort of young people making this already difficult transition. For many the consequences of the COVID crisis are going to be significantly worse than for those emerging in the years after the 2008 financial crisis. And that was bad enough.

Currently every day is one of a thousand emergencies. Everywhere we look there are systemic deficiencies and personal tragedies. At this moment, we are in the eye of the storm of the health crisis. Quite rightly, almost all our collective focus is on supporting the NHS, health workers, social workers and key workers fighting to save lives, suppress the virus, create effective testing and ultimately an effective vaccine. There is also a lot of focus right now on the social and economic implications of the lockdown and the immediate concerns about when and how to lift it, and the health consequences when it is phased out.

Every issue that we faced as an economy and society has been amplified and accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis. So, looming ahead is the existential crisis for young people making the transition into their own personal futures. We cannot wait for Generation C to become an emergency in September. We need to start to understand and plan for the likely implications with urgency. We need a plan for the future and Generation C needs to be at the heart of it.

Future planning is most obviously happening in businesses all over the world. Changes in consumption and mobility patterns are being analysed and assessed. Macro level crises and recessions always tend to amplify and accelerate trends that were in play already. The digitisation of the economy has leapt forward. New technologies are accelerating upwards. Other sectors and businesses see their decline accelerate downwards. This Government and others have acted pretty quickly and positively to support businesses and workers over the coming weeks and months into the summer. They are today’s challenge.

But think of the challenges that are hurtling towards our young people right now. Think of Generation C. What happens to them this Autumn?

Imagine you are an 18 year old and just a few weeks ago you were studying for your A Levels. First, there was a very uncertain few weeks in March. Would there be exams? How would those exams work? What if you were ill? This was followed by the announcement of ‘no exams’. This caused you to celebrate, but it was quickly followed by uncertainty around how grades will be assessed and given out. Ofqual may have now set out the process and broad criteria of how grades will be calculated, but how will that really work? For those wanting to get into higher education, this creates a sense of Russian Roulette. Do you get into your University or college of choice, or not? For the lucky ones, you get the allocated grades you need, and the immediate impact of the crisis is relatively benign. All may seem fine.

Only, for many less well-off families and young people across much of the country, this is where the wider impact of COVID-19 becomes very significant.

Just imagine that you’re in a household where your parent or parents have lost their jobs or have been furloughed. You experience the stress and the worry. The future of your family and whole community suddenly looks very different. You’ve probably lost your part time job and almost certainly your planned summer job is gone. What is the impact on how you think of your own Future?

So, if you decide that you can’t now go on to further education, will you be able to get a job anyway? When the economy starts to come back properly, there will be hundreds of thousands of people out there who have lost their jobs for no reason or fault of their own or their company’s. Will businesses struggling to recover post crisis, hire young people without experience, when there is a huge pool of people, possibly with the experience to make an immediate impact.

In many cases, there just may not be the jobs out there to give young people a choice to work. But then again, if there aren’t any jobs, how do you feel about that student loan? What was a perceived £30k burden, but with some promise of a return by the age of 30, now looks like an even more daunting burden with a very uncertain path to repayment. This is a huge cliff edge for thousands and thousands of our young people. This is also a time bomb for many universities and further education institutions, especially facing a dramatic drop off in overseas students in the next academic year.

So, if young people turn away from further education, either at 18 or at 16, they face a daunting labour market. If they decide to stay in education it is a very big bet on recovery. It is a double-edged cliff. Add in all the young people leaving University this year and the problem doubles.

The real concern is that without radical thinking and action, we could consign Generation C to years in a wilderness that could blight their lives forever.

But what if we turn that potential future on its head and think of Generation C as providing a resource to capture the potential of technology and propel the economy into a new more positive Future. What if we used the crisis to create a plan and solution with the scope of Beveridge Report and the capabilities of data science, artificial intelligence and new technologies. Broadly speaking, the response to the 2008 financial crisis was written within the old rules. That meant trying to balance the books within an established framework and gave us ‘austerity’. In Spain that meant 50% unemployment for people under 25 that lasted more than half a decade. We can take the opportunity to rewrite the rules for a world that will never be the same anyway.

Right now, we have to protect our health, social and key workers. We have to protect the old and the vulnerable. But right now, we also have to start planning to create a viable future for Generation C. The human and societal costs of not doing this will be ruinous. That future is hurtling towards our young people at speed.

At Working Options, we will do everything we can to provide practical support for the first 2020 cohort. We have already started to adapt our thinking and our programmes to prepare for the situation that our young people will experience. We will throw ourselves into the heart of the action. But this problem needs system wide solutions.

We cannot waste this crisis. This is the opportunity to re-write the rules. The COVID-19 crisis is so pervasive and deep in its impact, we are already rewriting the rules in real time. We need to take that approach to the economic system bottom up. We need to accelerate and amplify the environment that supports the technology, data science and new economy start-ups and businesses of the future. We need to build and reward models of sustainable growth, wealth creation and positive societal impact. We need an integrated policy approach to building the platform for Generation C to flourish in education and work; from funding to apprenticeships. We need to rethink and transform what we mean by productivity and create a step change in our performance. We need to take a radical approach to harnessing the talent of our young people to enable them to create a better Future.

The COVID-19 crisis is truly society wide. It is also a very human one, for all of us. There are many analogies being made to WW1 and WW2. In those wars whole generations of young people were called up into an experience very different and brutal, from the future they had planned. Unless we act now with Generation C in mind, the future many of our young people had been planning, could be replaced by one with no opportunity and no hope. It would be a different kind of brutality, but just as wasteful and just as cruel.

The opportunity in this crisis is to rebuild a stronger, fairer, cleaner, happier, more productive and prosperous society. Let’s harness Generation C as the engine to make a Future where wealth creation and community go hand-in-hand and with opportunity and sustainability built in.

So, whether you are in business, education, technology, the media and especially if you are Generation C, please help start a proper debate. Whatever your thoughts, we need ideas. We cannot wait. Their Future is almost here.