‘They feel like their hard work is going to waste’
The coronavirus pandemic has led to a host of issues and challenges being heightened for the nation’s younger generation. Robyn Vinter reports.
FOR DAVID Potter and his fiancée, Sam Sime, 2020 was supposed to be the biggest year of their lives.
After spending most of their adulthood studying, the couple, aged 27 and 26, had finally finished their PhDs in physical chemistry at Leeds University and planned to get professional jobs, get married and buy a house in a nice Leeds suburb.
Instead, Mr Potter had a job offer rescinded, their wedding has been cancelled and the couple are spending their housing deposit just to survive.
He said: “It’s so hard to get that first job offer and it feels like you’re starting again. To have it pulled is frustrating.”
To make matters worse, the desolate job market has made it difficult for Mr Potter to find anything else, while the couple are still paying rent.
He said: “It’s kind of a shock. You know everything isn’t going to be easy and handed to you but after eight years of studying a STEM subject you hope there will be opportunities.”
Ms Sime, who managed to get a job through taking a minimum wage role as an entry point, added: “I think the real kick is that when you do a PhD, you take a stipend that is below the rate of tax. The situation that David’s in now, he can’t get Jobseeker’s Allowance because he doesn’t have any National Insurance contributions.
“You take a low salary for four years to become this specialist trained researcher but the problem is that employers see a PhD and think you won’t want to work there, that you think you’re too good and you’d want to leave.”
Mr Potter is also ineligible for Universal Credit because of the savings he has built up for a deposit on a house.
He said: “You work hard to save and try to be sensible and not go crazy with spending and then you find out later that actually you’re probably just going to have to drain those savings because you’re not entitled to anything like that.
“Maybe that’s fair enough – we’re not the most in need.
“We’re comfortable enough, not to have to worry about being on the street at the moment and we both have parents who wouldn’t allow that to happen.”
It is a similar story for 21year-old Joshua Chapman who had his dream job offer taken away when the lockdown began.
Mr Chapman could not believe his luck when his first interview after finishing his degree at Sheffield University was a success and he landed a communications job at the Salvation Army, an organisation he has been a member of for as long as he can remember.
He said: “I applied for it on the day of the job ad closing, I was still at uni and wasn’t expecting to get a job. In all honesty I couldn’t quite believe my luck.
“I was absolutely over the moon. It was such an exciting prospect that I was going to be working in London every day. It didn’t cross my mind that the job offer might not be there any more.”
He was “absolutely gutted” to be told the role no longer existed because of funding issues due to the pandemic.
He’s currently living at his parents’ home in Clowne, a village just over the South Yorkshire border in Derbyshire, doing temporary work and applying for full-time jobs.
“I left my part-time job in retail – my last day was the day it closed for the lockdown. They asked if I wanted to be furloughed even though I was leaving and I said no, because I had a job offer.
“It was going to be such a huge stepping stone,” he added.
Another young person facing an uncertain future is 18-year-old Thea Fenwick. She is working as a care home cleaner, although it was only months ago she was competing internationally as a top-level skier.
Ms Fenwick is grounded in Whitby until the pandemic is over and she can fly abroad, meaning she is unable to train.
Even worse, it looks as though her university place, which guarantees the next stage of her athletic career by allowing her to compete at the World University Games, is in jeopardy.
She has just one subject outstanding, GCSE science, which she had been hoping to take this summer.
Unfortunately, because Ms Fenwick was studying online without teachers, there is nobody to give her a predicted grade, which means she may not be able to go to university.
“At this point, I don’t think I’ll have enough qualifications to be able to do it now. I’ll probably still apply and I’ll hope for the best. If that goes ahead, that’s the plan, but I don’t really want to get my hopes up.”
Ms Fenwick was on the GB development team, which is essentially the junior British team, competing in an event called slopestyle – downhill skiing with jumps and rails.
She came third in the European Championships and had been hoping to compete in the Olympics before tearing ligaments in her knee and having to have reconstructive surgery.
“All of a sudden this horrible, horrible injury happened and I was off for two years. It’s all just gone wrong, really.”
Having now recovered, she is unable to train because she is stuck in Britain until the end of the lockdown. She has been working as a cleaner in a care home, which she feels is not “enough” and is looking for a more “front line” care job in the battle against the virus.
While the care home she works in has had cases of coronavirus, they have been contained. Nevertheless, she is living in an empty holiday cottage to limit the risk to her family.
Given some luck, Ms Fenwick thinks she might be able to get back to the level she was competing at before her accident.
She gets some funding from a SportsAid programme for disadvantaged athletes and had been hoping to move to Australia or New Zealand for the summer to ski. But that looks like it may not happen, as she may not be able to work enough to cover the cost of her flights and accommodation.
After multiple disappointments, she is now trying not to make plans too far in the future, and said: “I don’t want to get my hopes up again.”
Alex Brasnett, 18, is feeling equally despondent, having anticipated finishing his BTEC Sport and heading off to university.
It is common for young people studying a BTEC, a qualification taken instead of A-levels, to attempt the exams after the first year and resit them in the second year, when they have a better knowledge of the subject.
However, with his resits cancelled, Mr Brasnett is worried that last year’s exams will be used to decide whether he gets into the University Campus of Football Business (UCFB), a specialist sports university in Manchester, to study football coaching and management.
“With this being my final year and wanting to go to uni, I have worked harder this year. It now feels a bit pointless,” he said.
Mr Brasnett is living in Ripon with his mother Nicola Barraclough and two brothers, 21-year-old Jamie, who has just finished a degree in accountancy and finance at York St John University and Sam, 15, who will be doing his GCSEs next year.
Ms Barraclough said: “Jamie wanted to apply to a company to go and train with them for three years, but at the moment nobody seems to be looking to take young recruits on.”
She is not sending Sam back to school yet but feels torn, as it is a crucial time for his education.
She added: “They feel like all the hard work that they’ve done is going to waste. They’re looking into the future and they’re thinking that they’re not going to have a career.”