Citizenship education has been on the national curriculum in England since 2002, pupils in Scotland are expected to learn about politics through Modern Studies classes and similar teaching also takes place in Wales and Northern Ireland.
But Dr James Weinberg, an academic at the University of Sheffield and one of the new group's co-founders, says in reality most schools are not able to teach political literacy adequately.
"Research that I did last year and other research projects similar to it, have found that it's only taught discreetly in a fifth of schools."
He says that research carried out by the Department for Education in 2019 "suggested that just one in seven schools have a single trained citizenship teacher and, where the subject is taught or reported to be taught, it accounts for just 1.5% of learning hours".
The APPG will be working with Shout Out UK, an organisation that already runs classes in schools across the country, focusing on topics including how to form and debate opinions and where to source accurate information.
"When we were getting to Year 12, registering to vote, it would have really been nice to have that background knowledge already," says Zeynep Celik Kocak, a Year 13 pupil enrolled on one of Shout Out UK's classes at Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, East London.
The pupils here all say that one of the biggest things they've learned is how to spot when a news story might be fake.
"I remember during the first lockdown, a specific 5G video, it went viral all over social media," says Lisandr Qose. "I remember people from different schools posting about it, people from my school posting about it."
Spotting fake news
Goldinne Opoku-Agyemann agrees: "Some of my peers, even though they would seem rational people, they also tend to fall for these kind of things as well because they don't go out of their way to research."
But she says the political literacy lessons meant she didn't fall for the conspiracy theory.
"They taught us how fake news and all of the phenomena around that is really misleading. I honestly didn't fall for it because they taught us how to identify and rather than spreading the fake news, you go and search for it for yourself."
The APPG wants all pupils across the UK to receive a similar level of political literacy teaching as those at Mossbourne Community Academy. It will also campaign for a new politics qualification - likely to be a BTEC or GCSE - and conduct further research into the links between civic teaching and engagement.
The group is made up of parliamentarians from across the political divide - Conservative MP Simon Fell and Labour peer Ian McNicol will act as chairs - but how can it reassure parents that lessons about issues such as Brexit and coronavirus will be impartial?
James Weinberg says: "That is already written into law. The 1996 Education Act makes it very clear that teachers and teaching staff can't be imposing or advocating partisan opinions in the classroom. We have to trust our teachers to be able to teach civic competencies, to teach political literacy."
'Difficult topics'
But he acknowledges that for this to happen effectively, teachers will need to be given the right tools.
"Provide them with initial teacher training schemes and continuing professional development that make them feel comfortable addressing what are sometimes controversial and difficult topics," he says.
A lack of engagement and understanding in politics is not unique to younger generations.
The pupils at Mossbourne Community Academy all said they would have liked to understand Brexit more, but during the Brexit drama of 2019, YouGov found only 13% of British adults knew exactly what "backstop" meant, while only three in 10 understood the details of a "no-deal Brexit".
"I do think that in terms of political literacy there is a problem not just amongst young people, there are plenty of people that I speak to that feel they don't understand how politics works," says Cat Smith.
But she says it's right that the group is focusing solely on young people.
"This APPG is focused on young people and I guess in some ways that's probably the best place to start.
"If we invest in young people now and they engage in the democratic process, hopefully that is creating the habit of a lifetime and will solve the problem in the longer term."