Deep dive workshop: Education to work

The Grown Up? Journeys to Adulthood engagement programme was launched in Summer 2024. This programme dives into how young people aged 14 to 24 are making the journey to adulthood – and what this means for policy, research and wider society. It aims to fill the gaps that exist in understanding how Generation Z is experiencing this phase of life and how policies and systems can better support them throughout their journeys to adulthood.  

As part of the Grown Up? programme the Nuffield Foundation commissioned specialist social research agency Hopkins Van Mil (HVM) to carry out two intersecting research and engagement projects with young people during the course of 2024-2025.  

The first is running a Youth Insight Group (YIG) made up of twenty 14-24 year-olds from across all four UK nations, who meet in-person or online, nine times over the course of the Grown Up? Journeys to Adulthood programme. The YIG work alongside HVM to shape and inform the second part of the programme; three sets of place-based Deep Dive Workshops (DDWs) with 16-24-year-olds.  

These workshops take place in a diverse range of locations across the UK and focus on three specific topics within the programme: young peoples’ experiences of education to work transitions, digital lives, and mental health and wellbeing. The findings from the first set of DDWs, on the journey from education into work, form the basis of this report.