“I feel quite unsettled and unsafe”: Young people, belonging, and the broken promise of childhood

“It doesn’t feel like anybody’s helping you, or leading you,” one young person told us in a workshop earlier this summer. They are not alone in feeling that way.  

This is what many young people have told us recently. Growing up in England today means feeling less secure and less like you belong than young people did just a decade ago. Life feels increasingly high stakes, the people and spaces young people once turned to for support are disappearing, and, crucially, childhood itself has stopped being much fun.

We know this because we’ve spent the past few months travelling the country, from the south coast to the North East, speaking to nearly 200 young people and their families to build a picture of what it is really like to be young in England in 2026. Last month we wrote about Britain’s broken social contract and about how young people have lost faith in their future. This blog looks beyond that loss of faith at the daily experiences that help understand it.    

What we found is a generation in need of change. While young people today are still dreaming as big as ever, they are less confident that they are going to be successful, that support will be there for them when they need it, and that they will get second chances should they need those too. They no longer feel they belong – at home, at school, in their communities, online.  

This is what young people have told us, in their own words.

Young people’s life satisfaction has fallen off a cliff – particularly for those worst-off

Above all else, growing up should be fun. Childhood is an opportunity to play and experiment, to learn without some of the worries that come with being an adult. But the young people we spoke to told that they are feeling increasingly stressed, worried, and anxious.  

Data on life satisfaction is a cause for concern. All young people in England are less satisfied with their lives now than 10 years ago, but life satisfaction has declined particularly sharply for young people living in the most deprived parts of the country. The proportion of young people aged 16 to 24 across the country who are satisfied with their lives has fallen from 62 percent in 2010 to 44 percent today. In 2016, more than half of young people in the most deprived parts of England were satisfied with their lives – today, only one in three are.  

Pupils in English schools are also nearly twice as likely to be bullied or made fun of compared to our OECD peers. Around one in five 15-year-olds report being made fun of at least a few times a month, compared to 12 percent in other OECD countries, and English pupils also report greater exposure to bullying overall. This is further evidence of the everyday experiences contributing to a growing crisis in wellbeing and life satisfaction for young people.

This crisis is profoundly shaping how young people experience their lives. One young person we spoke to articulated this particularly clearly: “As a young person in England right now, I’ll say my life is very unbalanced and just all over the place. I feel quite unsettled and unsafe,” they said. Another reflected that “I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m lost most days of my life.” For many, that sense of being lost is inseparable from the pressures that school and work place on them.

When we ask children and young people about the pressures and stresses that they face in their daily lives, school, exams, and work are mentioned frequently. Young people worry about choosing their GCSEs and A levels, about sitting these exams, about what they’ll do after school, and about what jobs they’ll be able to get at the end of it all. “They explain GCSEs to you like it’s a life-or-death situation,” one young person explained. Others agree: “You never feel on top of your revision. You do one thing and then you’ve got three more things to do.” This isn’t just regular exam anxiety. Data shows that children in England are becoming more worried about getting good grades in school. 43% of children in 2025 were ‘very’ or ‘quite’ worried about their exams in 2025, up from 28% in 2019.

Childhood and adolescence feel increasingly high stakes. “What you decide now can be something that determines things five or six years down the line. Everyone’s saying you’ve got to make your decision, you’ve got to choose the perfect choice right now, and that’s really difficult,” one young person reflected. Many others said similar: “everyone’s just so expectant of you: schools, colleges, family, friends. They’re all expecting you to be some kind of billionaire!”

Young people’s lives feel particularly high stakes because of a growing notion that second chances no longer exist. Even the young people who felt most supported often told us that they felt like they had one chance to succeed, and that if things did not go well, they were not sure what they would be able to do. “There’s not always a way out. Some people don’t get second chances as easily. Just because an option is there doesn’t mean it’s good or that you want to take it,” one young person told us.

Young people increasingly feel like they don’t belong

Young people’s sense of high stakes and lack of support does not exist in a vacuum. It is compounded by a deeper feeling that they no longer belong in the spaces they inhabit every day. In school, for instance, pupils in England are much less likely to agree that ‘I feel like I belong at school’ than their OECD peers. Just 63 percent of English pupils agree that they belong, compared to the OECD average of 75 percent. That means, on average, 11 children in every classroom don’t feel like they belong in their school.  

When young people do feel the weight of high stakes decisions and the pressures that they face in their lives, they tell us that they have nowhere to turn and no one to turn to. “You want someone that’s listening,” one young person told us, “but no, they have to take it further. In school I don’t think you have that opportunity.”  

In our workshops, young people identified a lack of available spaces in which they belong. Since 2010, England has seen a sharp reduction in youth centres, after school clubs, sports, arts, and music clubs, and other enrichment opportunities, meaning young people have fewer places on than their homes, school, or workplaces in which they feel they belong, and fewer trusted adults to turn to for support. One young person reflected that “I think our current lives really lack the in-person connection that we really need as humans,” while another added that “my dad always used to say that there would be youth clubs and communities and places where young people could just go without having to spend money. There would be people there who were older, someone you could go and speak to. I think that’s lacking now.”

Childhood is no longer fun

In our last blog, we saw how this generation has lost faith in their future, believing they’re less likely to become successful and more likely to become unemployed. In speaking to over 175 young people all over England, it’s clear that it’s not just their future they’ve lost faith in; it’s their everyday lives too.  

In our workshops, one young person told us that “I feel like I’m just rotting away in bed.” Others reflected that “I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m lost most days of life,” and that “We’re young. I feel like we should just live our lives a bit.” May other young people told us the same.

At the core of the social contract is a belief that the next generation should fare better than the last, that our children will live a better life than we did. So far, it looks like their teenage years lack the foundations of this promise: young people are less satisfied with their lives than the previous generation, more likely to experience bullying, and less likely to feel like they belong.  

The fact that young people feel like this should matter to all of us – not only because a generation that feels unsupported, unconfident, and left isolated has consequences for our economy and our public services, but because young people deserve more. They deserve to grow up feeling satisfied with their lives, feeling supported, and feeling that their opportunities are in their hands.