When the Labour government came to office in 1997 the proportion of UK children in poverty was one of the highest in Europe, having doubled in the 1980s (UNICEF, 2000). The proportion of 18-year-olds in education was joint lowest in the European Union (EU) (OECD, 1997), and permanent exclusions had been rising (SEU, 1998). The UK had more 15- to 16-year-old drug users than any other EU country (EMCDDA, 1998), and the number of under-21s convicted of drug offences had doubled between 1990 and 1995 (Parker et al, 1998). Regular drinking by school pupils had risen in the 1990s, as had the mean number of units consumed by those pupils who drank (Becker et al, 2006). UK teenage pregnancy rates had been stuck at or above the early 1980s level, while rates in most of Western Europe had fallen, leaving the UK with the highest teenage birth rate in Western Europe (SEU, 1999b).

The new government was highly critical of the levels of youth disadvantage it inherited, both because of the negative impact on the lives and prospects of the young people affected, and the costs to society of the resulting high levels of unemployment, crime and ill health. Numerous policies designed to improve matters were introduced between 1997 and 2010. Now the children born in 1997 are young adults, it is possible to assess what happened to them during their teens, and whether their adolescence went better than that of their predecessors.

This chapter looks back at the policy changes Labour introduced in England on nine key domains of youth disadvantage prioritised in Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets: child poverty, attainment at 16, secondary school exclusion and attendance, young people not in education or training, teenage conceptions, adolescent drug use, alcohol use, and youth crime. It summarises the key policy changes, and analyses the data on outcomes, paying particular attention to the generation born in 1997 who turned 18 in 2015. The data show striking reductions across all of these domains. However, for subsequent cohorts, a number of these downward trends have stalled or begun reversing. If progress is not to be lost, it is important to understand what was achieved, how much of it can be attributed to policy, and how this can be built on.