June 14 in blog
I gather the Government’s ‘respect czar’ Louise Casey has been in town yesterday, bestowing £175,000 on us to promote ‘respect’ in the community. However, rather than leave it up to the Council to decide how to spend that money on reducing anti-social behaviour, it seems she has dictated it will be spent on hiring a ‘parenting expert’ amongst other things. Why can’t Blackpool decide how to spend its own money?
‘Parenting experts’ has a whiff of the nanny state to it for me. The Government has promised, for Blackpool, what they term ‘managed properties and outreach services’. What this amounts to is a series of ‘safe houses’ in the community where problem families will be ‘dispersed’ to.
Does it work? We’ll have to see. But as with so many of this Government’s social interventions, it only serves to tackle the symptoms of a deeper social malaise. It doesn’t tackle them at source, it waits until they become a noticeable problem and then throws money at it. Far from showing they care about Blackpool, this is actually another example of Labour turning its back on the town.
There is no simple or easy answer to the question “What are the root causes of anti-social behaviour”? You could write a whole book on it. But at the heart of it, in my view, is the failure of the comprehensive education system over the past 40 years. We are now seeing the third or fourth generation of families who have only known comprehensive schooling. The cumulative failure to both teach children to aspire, and enable them to fulfil aspirations, has created a large unskilled underclass. They lack the skills to enter the higher-paid jobs, but they are unwilling to accept the lower paid unskilled jobs that seem now to be the preserve of east European immigrants. We are stuck with this dilemma. One in eight of Blackpool’s 16-19 year olds are in neither education, employment nor training. That is 650 altogether, surviving somehow, doing who knows what. Certainly below the radar, without any income or purpose. If the education system was an enabling system, with a vocational emphasis where needed, those 650 might be more purposeful in their lives. Instead, the state has failed in its duty of care.
First Liam Fox, then David Cameron, have spoken of our ‘broken society’. It is not a series of discrete problems such as youth crime, drug addiction, truancy and so on which can be solved with an eye-catching initative. Education, as I have written elsewhere on this blog, is like the Circle Line on the London Underground – it intersects with almost every line in the system, sometimes more than once. Education does the same – it may be truancy in secondary school, perhaps caused by family breakdown, and followed by dropping out of higher education under the financial burden.
First step? Sort out education. Now. Don’t just hire a parenting expert.
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June 17th, 2007 at 9:27 am
Hi Paul
I accept your comments regarding the impact of comprehensive education and there is no doubting it’s effects on modern teenagers. I would point out however that there are a number of vacational qualifications already available that have been pushed by local development agencies for some time. The problem is that qualifications like the NVQ, in most cases, offer very little tangible, relevant work based skills that are useful for employers.
I think that the state of young adult society today in some areas is impossible to blame on one major factor. There is an inherent lack of ambition, drive and self-reliance amongst many young adults and it is difficult to see how this ingrained mentality can be effectively altered within this or even the next generation. Clearly any improvement will come from a combined effort from the education system and (most importantly) the parents. Sadly it may be too late to alter the mind set of many parents, so the education system has to come first. This cannot be fixed however simply by revamping the NVQ system. Encouraging young people to take personal responsibility for their lives, develop their own strong moral code and aspire for more than they have been given is the only way that the education system can begin to help the young people they are so desperate to assist.
Matthew Smith
Managing Director, Dilectus Ltd
[email protected]