Manchester teenager Lauren Stocks blew our minds when her three-minute speech about exam stress went viral from the Labour party conference back in September. “There’s a statistic we were shown when I was about 13 or 14 that told me 3 in 10 people in every classroom suffer with a mental illness,” the 16 year old said, voice trembling with emotion. “Now I’m going to be a bit frank here conference. That is bollocks!”. Too right it is, Lauren. Exams are rubbish. Exam related stress is rubbish. You know what isn’t rubbish? Standing up in front of a room full of lanyard-wearing delegates to fight the corner of every “spaced-out, stressed-out, depressed kid in a battlefield where they can’t afford pens and paper”. That is not rubbish. That, ladies and gentlemen, is mega. Lauren’s now Vice Chair of Campaigns for North West Young Labour and doing her A-levels at a sixth-form centre in Rusholme (history, sociology and politics, if you’re interested). Her advice for 2018 is if there’s anything you can do to improve people’s lives, then pass it on. You know what? We have a feeling it starts with being good and kind.