England is raising a ‘bedroom generation’. More than a third of 15-year-olds say they hardly ever leave their bedroom except for school, and nearly one in five now spend no evenings out with friends at all.
Almost one in four 15-year-olds spend 6 hours or more waking hours in their bedroom on a normal weekend day. But who can blame them for retreating to their bedrooms? As the places and freedoms that once drew young people into the world have deteriorated, sedentary screen-based activities have filled the vacuum and become the default way adolescents spend their spare time.
Nearly half of adolescents fall short of healthy activity levels, and there are almost 100,000 more sedentary 11 to 16-year-olds doing no activity at all in an average day than in 2018/19. Fifteen-year-olds in the UK report the lowest life satisfaction of 27 European countries, and more than one in five children start secondary school with obesity.
More must be done to ensure every child can discover lifelong hobbies, build healthy habits, and learn the joy of being active at school. This report sets out a plan for a new Right to Sport to ensure every pupil, no matter what school they attend, takes part in five hours a week of extra-curricular activities at school, of which at least two hours is sport or physical activity, on top of a mandatory two hours of curriculum PE.
Outside of the school day, if we want teenagers to spend less time on screens, we must take on the task of rebuilding an environment in which active, social and independent adolescence is the norm. Three in four 15-year-olds want to spend more time doing activities outside their home, but as things stand, only four in ten secondary pupils take part in sport and physical activities outside of school, and less affluent children are often priced out of sport clubs. We have a plan to get teenagers from alone to active – a package of low-cost, high-impact reforms designed to fundamentally redesign the balance of teenage life away from the dopamine and isolation of the bedroom and into the adventure and belonging of the real world.
Our ambition should be a generation of secondary school children who are not isolated in their bedrooms, but confident and connected to their communities.
The race towards a healthier, happier generation starts now.
Read Part One HERE
