Scream (S

From the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was clear that lockdown measures were going to deeply impact life as we knew it. However, for a long time, the specific impact on youth was overlooked. It was only months after, when the first data sets on increasing youth unemployment became available, and new research shed light on how the pandemic was affecting young people beyond our physical health, that policy makers and media alike started to pay attention to youth.

Since then, we‘ve read headlines about the pandemic having a disproportionate impact on youth, young people losing their jobs and struggling to make ends meet, students having to queue at food banks, and mental health becoming a second pandemic. And yet, the focus so far has been on the short term. What does this all mean for young people’s future prospects? What is going to happen beyond the lockdown? With our new report, “Beyond Lockdown: the ‘pandemic scar’ on young people’, we sought to go beyond the immediate impact of the pandemic, and analyse the youth-specific medium and longterm consequences of Covid-19 in Europe, with a focus a focus on three key areas: work and income; education and learning; and mental health and well being.

Our research is based on the findings of a survey of 4,500 young people across Europe as well as focus groups to get more detailed feedback from young people on their experiences. We also used this report to go one step further to investigate promising practices as well as gaps in the institutional response, and identify key recommendations for the way forward.

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