A survey of 400 11- to 18-year-olds released by the organisation last week asked young people to identify 21 political issues and rank the five that mattered most to them. Student fees were viewed as most important, followed by smoking, Third World debt and the war in Iraq. Fair trade and global warming came joint fifth.
But young people appeared much less bothered that they cannot voice their feelings at the ballot box until they turn 18 - the issue of lowering the voting age to 16 sparked much lower levels of interest.
In a points system devised by the pollsters to measure how each issue was ranked, votes at 16 scored just 133, compared with respective scores of 730, 384 and 293 for university fees, Third World debt and global warming/fair trade.
A spokeswoman for the Citizenship Foundation said: "Young people are interested in global issues as opposed to local or national ones. Is it that they are interested in issue-based politics, but not necessarily in making that change themselves, or is that they don't feel that they can?"
www.citizenshipfoundation.org.uk.
