Two sides of the same story: what Clapham tells us about investing in young people

A student's sketch from our Easter programme. This is what young people are thinking about when we give them the space to.

Yesterday, hundreds of young people descended on Clapham High Street. Shops closed. Families were barricaded inside. Police issued dispersal orders. Officers were assaulted. The headlines were predictably furious. And today, 48 young people gave up their Easter holidays to sit in a room and talk about how to make Lambeth a more inclusive borough.Same generation. Same city.

Very different story. I've been thinking about both all day. What happened in Clapham was wrong. Full stop. Nobody should feel unsafe on their high street, and the young people involved will face real consequences, criminal records that could follow them for life. I don't want to minimise that. But I want us to resist the easy narrative. The one that reduces this to a question of character, or parenting, or race. Because it isn't any of those things. It's a question of opportunity. Of belonging. Of what we've decided young people are, and aren't worth.

When you cut youth centres, defund after school programmes, leave young people with nowhere to go and nothing to do, and then act shocked when they fill that vacuum themselves, you don't get to be surprised. You get to be accountable.

Young people organised themselves in Clapham, in large numbers, with energy and urgency. That is not a lack of capability. That is a lack of direction. That is what happens when we stop creating spaces that make young people feel like they matter.

Seven years ago, I started You Be You as an idea. A belief that if you give young people a safe space, real skills and the chance to be heard, they show up. Today proved that again. Forty-eight pupils, in their Easter holidays turned up to attend our programme. Young people who, by their own admission, wouldn't always choose to come into school. They came anyway. They talked about what it feels like to be included. They practised public speaking. They researched issues affecting their communities, affecting them. Issues like how to make Lambeth a safer, and more inclusive borough. They listened to each other's lives and perspectives, the kind of learning that no curriculum prioritises, but every young person needs.

One student asked: "Is this coming back next term?"

I left inspired. Genuinely. Because what I saw today wasn't a programme. It was proof.

This is not a race issue. The young people in Clapham and the young people in that room today are not fundamentally different from each other. They are all navigating a world that has, in many ways, stopped making space for them. The difference is opportunity. Access. Whether someone invested in them or didn't.

The government needs to invest in them. Businesses need to invest in them. Schools, organisations, communities, all of us. Not as a charitable act. As a necessity. Because the cost of not investing in young people doesn't stay hidden for long. It shows up on a high street in Clapham. It shows up in a criminal record at 15. It shows up in a generation that grows up feeling like they have nowhere to go and no one is listening.

Or, it shows up in a room full of young people giving up their Easter holidays to learn how to use their voice and make their borough a better place.

We get to choose which story we tell. But first, we have to be willing to invest in it.