The research showed that young people questioned spent an average of 20% of their income on travelling to work, and that a third of them had to travel more than 30 miles per day for work or education.

Emma Cooper, chief executive of Scottish Rural Action, said: “Young people in rural areas deserve the same access to education and employment as young people who live elsewhere, and to do that, we need an integrated, reliable, frequent and affordable public transport system.

“Young people are telling us that they are missing out on jobs and training because public transport costs too much for them, which will have a lifelong impact on their skill levels, earnings and our rural economy.”

Tens of thousands of young people in England, including children as young as six, are being prescribed antidepressants by their doctors. The figures have prompted concern that medics may be overprescribing strong medication because of stretched and underfunded mental health services.

Data obtained by the Guardian shows that 166,510 under-18s, including 10,595 seven-to-12-year-olds and 537 aged six or younger, were given medication typically used to treat depression and anxiety between April 2015 and June 2016. The figures, released by NHS England under the Freedom of Information Act, show a 12% rise in the numbers taking the drugs over the same time period.

And the April article mentioned above rounds out the story as follows:

Doctors in deprived coastal towns in the north and east of England are prescribing almost twice as many antidepressants as those in the rest of the country, analysis of prescription data shows.

Blackpool, Sunderland and East Lindsey, in Skegness, fill the top three spots for the most prescriptions out of England’s 326 districts. 

Psychologists said the findings were consistent with links between deprivation and depression, anxiety and other mental health problems. But they added that seaside towns faced a particular set of difficulties that could give rise to mental health issues.

Hundreds of thousands of young people are being encouraged into low-skill, low-pay, on-the-job training schemes to meet ministers’ “mad” target of creating three million apprenticeships by 2020, new figures reveal.

The research shows that 60 per cent of all new apprentices are now studying for qualifications worth no more than five GCSE passes. In contrast, less than 3 per cent of new apprenticeships were at the higher level – equivalent to a foundation degree.

So far this year, there have been only 220 new science and maths apprenticeships created at any level, while engineering and manufacturing apprenticeships make up fewer than one in five of the new jobs.

Many of the roles being offered on the Government’s website appear to be little more than traditional school-leaver jobs in clerical, catering and retail work “rebranded” as apprenticeships. There are now apprenticeships in street cleaning, warehouse labouring and shop work.

This allows employers to pay a new 18-year-old worker just £2.73 an hour compared with the national minimum wage for that age range of £5.13. While employers are obliged to pay those staff for the one day a week they spend in academic training, this is more than made up for by the government grants available for taking on apprentices.

This article tells us:

Six in ten university graduates in the UK are too qualified for the jobs they are doing because of a shortage in high-skilled vacancies, according to new research.

The report warns that graduate qualification has reached “saturation point” and it is leading to employers asking for degrees to recruit in los skilled jobs, including work at call centres, bars and coffee shops.

The research, by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), which represents human resource managers, revealed one in twelve graduates now occupy jobs where their talents are not needed.

The warning came a day before thousands of youngsters are set to find out their results in the GCSEs.

The CIPD found just under 60 per cent of graduates are over-qualified in Britain, one of the highest proportions in Europe – only crisis-hit Greece and Estonia have more.

Countries with a history of strong vocational training such as Germany have only 10 per cent or less of graduates in non-graduate positions.

Britain’s pensioners are emerging from the austerity years with their standard of living unscathed, while their children and grandchildren are struggling to make up the ground they lost in the recession, according to new analysis by a thinktank.

As George Osborne puts the finishing touches to his pre-election budget, to be delivered next Wednesday, the research from the Resolution Foundation, first published in the Guardian, found that pensioner households saw their incomes jump by almost 10% in real terms between 2007 and 2014. Working-age households suffered a 4% cut.

This fresh analysis will reignite the debate about how the benefits of economic recovery are being shared, and whether future governments can continue to protect spending on pensioners at time when issues of intergenerational equity have come to the forefront of political debate.

Around 100,000 teenagers whose jobs or training should be tracked by Whitehall have disappeared off the radar, parliament’s spending watchdog has said.

Councils and the government must do more to monitor the activity of 16- to 18-year-olds, according to a report by the Commons public accounts committee.

Margaret Hodge, the committee’s chair, said 148,000 out of two million 16- to 18-year-olds in England were known not to be in education, employment or training – widely described as Neets – and figures appeared to show that another 100,000 were unaccounted for.

“If the activity of young people is unknown to the local authorities where they live, they are unlikely to receive targeted help. It would seem common sense that the main reason the number of Neets is down is that the law has changed to require young people to continue in education or training until at least their 18th birthday. It is difficult to show that any other interventions, such as careers advice, have been effective,” she said.

The report said the Department for Education (DfE) recognised it could do more and would work with councils to identify and share good practice. In some areas the activity of 20% of young people was unknown, compared with a national average of 7%, the committee said.

The MPs called for the DfE to state what it would do if the careers advice offered by a school was found to be poor, and raised concerns that many councils did not help teenagers with the cost of travelling to school or college.