(Ex)aspiration nation – what do our young people really want?

Earlier last year, Prime Minister David Cameron shared his views on youth aspiration. 'If you ask children in the UK…' he observed, '…all they want to be is pop stars and footballers.'

Well, at BritainThinks, we really have asked them. In collaboration with youth specialist field agency ResearchBods, we interviewed 679 young people aged between 14 and 16, and 527 parents of kids the same age. We also ran focus groups in London, Coventry and Leeds to dig a bit deeper. The results may surprise Mr Cameron.

We learned that this cohort of young people are more serious, conscientious and industrious than the Prime Minister would have us believe. Their aspirations seem grounded and reasonable. Seventy per cent want ‘a job they love’; 56 per cent want to be married/in a stable relationship/to have a family with kids and 54 per cent want to move out of the parental home, preferably owning their own. By contrast, just six per cent want to be famous or ‘on the telly’, five per cent aspire to being rich enough not to have to work, and a paltry one per cent set their goal as ‘owning designer brands’. We asked them to bring along a photograph of their ‘most wanted’ object to our focus groups. Most brought a picture of a modest semi-detached home.

And these young people are not afraid of hard work, either. Three-quarters would work even if they were rich enough not to, 61 per cent believe that success is all about hard work – not luck – and 67 per cent see setbacks as a chance to prove themselves. Two-thirds would prefer to work even if it paid less than benefits

So far, so good but when we get more precise about their expectations, a few alarm bells start ringing. On average, they expect to earn around £35,000 in 10 years’ time (median annual earnings for twentysomethings are signifi cantly less at just over £21,000). And when we look at the kind of work they expect to do, more disappointment looms. Only three per cent would consider working in manufacturing and just eight per cent would consider retail or sales, while a long queue is forming for creative industries (24 per cent) and media or publishing (20 per cent). And not one of our interviewees anticipated being unemployed after completing their education – a fate that, in reality, currently awaits one in five 16-to-24-year-olds.

Personal finances are potentially problematic, too. Three-quarters are optimistic about moving out of the family home, and 60 per cent expect to own their own property by their mid-thirties. As the parents in our sample noted, neither prospect is particularly realistic in the current climate. Half the children interviewed believe that their parents will help them with the deposit on their first home – but fewer than a third of parents say they actually will step up to the plate.

There are also some fascinating gender differences. Some things matter more to girls than boys – girls value ‘being in a stable relationship’, ‘having children’ and being ‘comfortable with your appearance’ much more than boys do. Instead, boys rate being well off and ‘living in a place you like’ more than girls. Perhaps most telling, girls expect to earn less than boys. Their expected earnings are a full nine per cent lower – scarily close to the actual gender gap of 9.6 per cent identified by ONS last year. Not surprisingly, therefore, only a third of girls expect to earn more than their partners when they are older – compared to 58 per cent of boys. These differences are reflected in the role models chosen by each gender: boys select a diverse range of business and sporting leaders (Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Richard Branson and David Beckham) while girls are much more likely to refer to celebrities (Jennifer Lawrence, Beyoncé and even Justin Bieber).

Whatever questions this poses, the answers do not seem to lie in politics. We showed the focus groups photos of leading politicians but there was next to no recognition of any beyond the Prime Minister and London mayor Boris Johnson. Perhaps tuning into David Cameron’s own (misplaced) beliefs about their aspiration, only a third of the young people we talked to thought that any political party could help them achieve their goals. Just over half think that voting is a citizen’s duty, compared with around three-quarters of parents. Perhaps most worrying of all is that these hard-working and determined young people are setting their sights well beyond UK Plc; 65 per cent are worried about the lack of opportunities for people like them in Britain in the next decade and almost half of our sample believe that living and working abroad will give them the best chance to live the life they would like.

We completed this fieldwork in the same week that German Chancellor Angela Merkel appealed to Europe’s youth to consider apprenticeship opportunities in Germany. Does her better understanding of what our young people want make a future brain drain inevitable?

Deborah Mattinson is founder director of BritainThinks [email protected].

This article was taken from the September 2013 issue of Market Leader. Browse the archive here.