Abandoned Ambitions

Last year in England alone, around 250,000 young people left school with fewer than five good GCSEs including Maths and English to enter one of the toughest job markets in history.

The Prince’s Trust, in conjunction with HSBC, has published a report, entitled Abandoned Ambitions? The need to support struggling school leaders, which shows how poor exam results leaving educations cause young people to abandon their ambitions for finding a good job.

Key findings from the report include that:

• 34 percent of those leaving school with fewer than five GCSEs graded A*-C believe they will end up on benefits for at least part of their lives;
• 20 percent young people waiting for exam results say that worrying about this is affecting their health;
• One in five young people claim they have “abandoned their ambitions” due to their poor qualifications
• Young people with few qualifications are almost twice as likely as their peers to believe that they “will never amount to anything”; and
• 29 percent of young people with fewer than 5 GCSEs graded A*-C say that they “struggled to concentrate on schoolwork due to family problems”.

To download the full report visit www.princes-trust.org.uk/pdf/abandoned-ambitions-web-Aug2013.pdf.