Introducing our Future Voices Group 2026-27!

At Youth Futures, our mission to understand what works – through robust evidence and insight – is fundamentally about facing the realities of young people’s experiences in the labour market: what we know, what we don’t know, and what needs to change. Working alongside young people with lived experience is not an optional extra in that process; it is central to how we face those realities honestly.

Since the earliest days of Youth Futures, our flagship youth engagement programme, the Future Voices Group, has been instrumental in ensuring that young people who are most affected by the system are at the heart of our efforts to change it. Future Voices Group members’ voices, insights and ideas are embedded across Youth Futures’ work, and they support us to drive meaningful change – from shaping evidence, to influencing employers and policymakers.

Future Voices Group 2026

The programme is now entering its fourth cohort and we are delighted to welcome our new Future Voices Group for 2026-27, comprising 19 young people aged 18 to 24 from across England, all of whom have intersectional identities, and are underrepresented and marginalised in the labour market.

This year, the group includes four senior members who completed the programme last year and have now taken on leadership roles within the group. Having previously participated in the programme, they bring an additional layer of experience, as well as offering guidance and support for our newer members.

How the 2026 Programme Works

The Future Voices Group is Youth Futures’ core youth advisory group, ensuring our journey towards systems change is directly shaped by young people with first-hand experience of the barriers facing those furthest from opportunity. Our ambassadors are split into two groups, with the shared aim of influencing policy and practice across the youth employment system, focusing respectively on employers and policymakers.

Each term, members develop co‑produced group projects geared towards each audience, such as creative assets, campaigns and other resources, to bring their stories and our evidence to life. Our ambassadors amplify the youth employment challenge through a range of additional opportunities, including speaking at events, media appearances, and supporting research.

The group also has the opportunity to contribute to the design and implementation of some of the Government’s key policy offers for young people, through the Youth Guarantee Advisory Panel co-convened by Youth Futures and Youth Employment UK.

As well as sharing their lived expertise to strengthen our work, we want to ensure that members have opportunities to develop key skills. Throughout the programme, young people receive training to support confidence-building and personal development across a range of areas, including communication, collaboration and influencing.

The energy, candour and commitment they have already shown has been invaluable, and we are excited to work with them over the next two years!

Lived experience and identities across our Future Voices Group include:

• Being out of work, education and training
• Taking a vocational pathway to work
• Apprenticeships
• Universal Credit / engagement with the Jobcentre
• Care experience
• Facing discrimination when trying to find work based on ethnicity
• Autism
• Learning disabilities or learning differences
• Mental health conditions
• Justice system experience