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Most readers know of my long association and support for the Prince’s Trust. I’ve just been reading their latest research – Broke, not broken. The research, which highlights a clear aspiration gap between the UK’s richest and poorest young people, shows how a quarter from poor homes (26%) feel that “people like them don’t succeed in life”.
The report is based on interviews with 2,311 16-to-24-year-olds from across the UK. Young people growing up in poverty are three times as likely to believe they will “end up on benefits for at least part of their life” and almost four times as likely to think they will “end up in a dead-end job”.
But the finding which ‘got me’, which hasn’t got too much publicity, is that 39% of those from deprived homes didn’t have a desk at which to work, 28% had no access to a computer and 30% didn’t have access to the internet.
Bluntly, a computer and internet access should be a ‘basic’ for all young people. ALL the young people I personally know have had that ‘from birth’. The fact that they are computer literate is a given. To not be is a huge and life changing disadvantage.
Of course, working with the Prince’s Trust is my small way of doing something about this. But the Trust helps, at most 50,000 young people a year. A mere fraction of the number that need help.
