Category Archives: Young people

Schools ‘need more help’ to tackle rising number of sexual assaults by pupils

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Charities say better guidance is needed over increasing number of sexual assaults in UK primary schools

Schools must be given clearer guidance on how to handle peer-on-peer sexual abuse among pupils, charities have demanded.

Rape Crisis and other charities wrote to England’s education secretary Bridget Phillipson and Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, last week, calling on the government to step in with clearer statutory guidance on how schools in England and Wales should address sexual violence when both the victim and the alleged perpetrator are pupils.

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A Chinese app is rocketing up download charts – but in Australia, the sudden uptake is not just about TikTok

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Experts say the flood of users to RedNote highlights flaws in the Albanese government’s social media ban

As the TikTok ban looms in the United States, users have flocked to RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu, a China-based app that looks similar to Instagram.

But in Australia, where there is no imminent TikTok ban, the app is also rocketing up the app download charts. And it doesn’t just tell us about TikTok – it also exposes issues with Australia’s forthcoming social media age ban.

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One in five Britons aged 18-45 prefer unelected leaders to democracy, poll finds

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Exclusive: Voters overall are downbeat about politics and almost two-thirds think ‘the UK’s best years are behind us’

One in five generation Z and millennial Britons prefer strong leaders without elections to democracy, and voters overall are feeling downbeat about politics, a report has found.

The polling, due to be published next week as part of the FGS Global Radar report, found that overall 14% of people agreed with the statement: “The best system for running a country effectively is a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with elections,” rather than the alternative: “The best system for running a country effectively is democracy.”

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Tech giants told UK online safety laws ‘not up for negotiation’

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Senior cabinet minister promises not to dilute new measures despite Zuckerberg’s attacks on countries ‘censoring’ content

Britain’s new laws to boost safety and tackle hate speech online are “not up for negotiation”, a senior government minister has warned, after Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg vowed to join Donald Trump to pressure countries they regard as “censoring” content.

In an interview with the Observer, Peter Kyle, the technology secretary, said that the recent laws designed to make online platforms safer for children and vulnerable people would never be diluted to help the government woo big tech companies to the UK in its defining pursuit for economic growth.

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‘Hotel of mum and dad’ in UK at its fullest in two decades, study finds

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Almost a fifth of adults aged 24-34 are living with parents, particularly in areas of high-cost housing

The “hotel of mum and dad” is the busiest it has been for two decades as an increasing number of young adults in the UK choose – or are forced by low wages and rising rents – to live with their parents, research has found.

The prohibitive cost of renting, let alone buying, a home explains why more twenty- and thirtysomethings are “co-residing” with family at an age when their parents would have been living independently, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said.

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Almost 900 weapons seized in a year at Yorkshire young offender institution

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Weapons such as sharpened objects and rocks taken from children aged 15-18 at YOI Wetherby

Almost 900 weapons were seized in one year from children detained in a young offender institution in the north of England, a prisons watchdog has found.

In its annual report published on Friday into HM young offender institution Wetherby in West Yorkshire, the institution’s independent monitoring board found that children were in possession of a range of improvised weapons. The children told IMB they carried the weapons because they felt unsafe behind bars.

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Councils failing to take homeless young people into care

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Exclusive: UK teenagers placed in temporary housing until they are adults as there are fewer obligations to support them if they are not care leavers

Councils are treating teenagers like homeless adults and placing them in unsuitable temporary housing rather than taking them into care, new research has shown.

Local authorities are “waiting out the clock” when assessing vulnerable 16- and 17-year-olds until they can be classed as adults. The teenagers were kept in the dark about their rights after escaping “harrowing” family situations involving physical and emotional abuse, addiction and mental health problems, according to research by the Coram Institute for Children charity.

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Grill’d was able to pay Arda $3 less than minimum wage. Unions want this youth ‘loophole’ abolished

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Advocates argue it’s time for young people’s wages to rise but business groups claim paying more will push some companies into insolvency

Arda Konstantine could vote, drink and drive a car. But as they were 19 years old, their employer, Grill’d, was legally able to pay them just $16.50 an hour – $3.38 less than the hourly national minimum for their age.

If Konstantine worked at the fast food chain’s airport store, their rate bumped up an extra $2. While employed at Grill’d, Konstantine never got weekend or public holiday rates.

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‘We live on Pot Noodles’: rickets hits homeless families with no kitchen

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Families placed in hotels in England are being forced to live on snack foods, putting young people’s health at risk

Homeless children placed in hotels are developing rickets and other diet-related health problems because their parents lack anywhere to cook.

The Magpie Project, which works with homeless mothers in the east London borough of Newham, where more households are living in temporary accommodation than anywhere in the country, said families living in hotels were eating an unhealthy diet of takeaways and snack foods because they had no cooking facilities or anywhere to store fresh produce.

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Instagram actively helping spread of self-harm among teenagers, study finds

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Researchers say parent company Meta is failing to remove explicit images on the social media site

Meta is actively helping self-harm content to flourish on Instagram by failing to remove explicit images and encouraging those engaging with such content to befriend one another, according to a damning new study that found its moderation “extremely inadequate”.

Danish researchers created a private self-harm network on the social media platform, including fake profiles of people as young as 13 years old, in which they shared 85 pieces of self-harm-related content gradually increasing in severity, including blood, razor blades and encouragement of self-harm.

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Australia passes world-first law banning under-16s from social media despite safety concerns

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Bill passes amid warning that process has been rushed and that a ban could push teenagers towards the dark web or into isolation

Australia’s parliament has passed a law that will aim to do what no other government has, and many parents have tried to: stop children from using social media. The new law was drafted in response to what the Labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese, says is a “clear, causal link between the rise of social media and the harm [to] the mental health of young Australians.”

On Thursday, parliament’s upper house, the Senate, passed a bill by 34 votes to 19 banning children under 16 from social media platforms.

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Proportion of children in Great Britain with gambling problem has doubled, data reveals

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Gambling Commission figures show shock rise to 85,000 in number of young people suffering gambling harms

The proportion of young people in Great Britain with a gambling problem has more than doubled, according to “astonishing” official data that prompted calls for urgent government intervention.

New figures from the Gambling Commission, which regulates bookies, online casinos and the national lottery, revealed a shock rise, to 85,000, in the number of children classified as having a gambling problem under widely used diagnostic criteria.

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LNP leader launches Queensland election campaign with promise of mandatory isolation for child offenders who assault guards

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David Crisafulli pledges minimum isolation periods for youths who attack staff despite evidence of dangers of solitary confinement

The Liberal National party leader, David Crisafulli, has promised to introduce “mandatory isolation periods” for children who assault workers in youth detention, as the Queensland opposition formally launched its state election campaign on Sunday.

Speaking to a crowd of LNP candidates and party faithful in Ipswich, Crisafulli focused much of his remarks on what he has dubbed the state’s “youth crime crisis”.

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Overwhelming majority of young Americans worry about climate crisis

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Survey of young people aged 16-25 from all US states shows concerns across political spectrum

The overwhelming majority of young Americans worry about the climate crisis, and more than half say their concerns about the environment will affect where they decide to live and whether to have children, new research finds.

The study comes just weeks after back-to-back hurricanes, Helene and Milton, pummeled the south-eastern US. Flooding from Helene caused more than 600 miles of destruction, from Florida’s west coast to the mountains of North Carolina, while Milton raked across the Florida peninsula less than two weeks later.

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Salford Lads Club: historic youth centre battles to keep doors open

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Building opened in 1904 and featured on Smiths album sleeve needs ‘urgent cash injection’ as grant income falls

Salford Lads Club, the youth centre immortalised by the Smiths on the sleeve of their third studio album The Queen Is Dead, is under threat of closure.

The rising costs of maintaining and running the Grade II-listed building, as well as a drop in grant funding, have left it with a shortfall of about £250,000.

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Portugal pauses audacious plan for decade of tax breaks for young people

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Measure designed to stem brain drain is pulled from budget at last minute amid conflict between coalition partners

Portugal has paused plans intended to stem the country’s brain drain by offering young people a decade of progressive tax breaks that would have seen them paying nothing at all in their first year of work.

The proposal, advanced by the centre-right minority government of Luís Montenegro, had been one of the most eye-catching schemes in Portugal’s 2025 budget.

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‘He felt absolutely lost’: the crisis behind the rising number of UK children being homeschooled

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Anxiety is the most common reason why parents choose to take pupils out of school

Steve Bladon has been a headteacher for a decade. Yet when he found himself temporarily home educating his 11-year-old daughter, who had such severe anxiety that she couldn’t leave the house, he admits he felt “absolutely lost”.

“Initially we had no idea what to do,” he said. “All we knew was that she needed time and space, so we weren’t compounding her anxiety.”

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EU to offer new youth mobility scheme in test of Labour ‘reset’ with Brussels

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Officials warn repeat of Tory rejection could dent new government’s hopes of pacts on defence and agriculture

Fresh proposals to allow young people to move between the UK and the EU will be presented to the British government within weeks, in what is seen as a key early test of Labour’s “reset” in relations with Brussels.

Informed sources say the first draft of a new version of Ursula von der Leyen’s April proposal has already been discussed by member states and will be put to a working group in Brussels next week.

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Young people addicted to ketamine a national problem, says UK expert

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Situation potentially fuelled by people unable to access mental health services self-medicating, clinic founder says

Young people becoming addicted to ketamine is a national problem that is growing rapidly, a leading addiction psychiatrist has said.

Specialist ketamine clinics have recorded a surge over the past two years in the numbers of young people coming through their doors, many of whom have struggled to engage with mainstream treatments. NHS and private clinics have also reported significant rises.

Owen Bowden-Jones, a consultant psychiatrist and founder of the pioneering Club Drug clinic, said he had seen a definite increase in young people after “a pretty big lift off” in ketamine’s popularity, making the drug a national problem.

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Death of the corkscrew? Only 27% of young people in UK own one, report says

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Prevalence of screw-top bottles and abstinence among young people blamed for falling popularity of gadget

It was once an essential piece of kit in every kitchen but, like the corks that gave it a reason to exist, tastemakers are announcing the “death of the corkscrew” after it lost the battle with screw-tops and younger consumers who do not know how to use one.

Forget music or fashion, it turns out that it is ownership of a corkscrew that divides young and old, according to research. Only 27% of 18- to 24-year-olds own one of the devices while for the over-65s that figure stands at 81%, according to the annual trends report by the household goods retailer Lakeland.

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