Rory Cahill and Rachel Hamada try to sidestep the old
NEET label and look at how children can be placed on the right path in life
Everything old is new again. in the 16th century the
Spanish Catholic warrior and scholar St Ignatius Loyola, founder of the
Jesuits, encapsulated his attitude to education by saying, ‘give me the boy
until he is seven, and I will show you the man.’ nearly five hundred years
later, Loyola’s words bear special resonance for those in the body politic
attempting to tackle one of the most costly, and stubborn, problems in modern
Scotland.
These are the group of young people we used to call the NEETs,
but as with so much in the post-SNP world, this term is no longer acceptable,
with some arguing hat the phrase sounded too much like the derogatory ‘ned’
tag. instead, those Scots who were previously known as NEETs – that is, those
between 16 and 19 who are not in any form of employment, education or training
– are now known as those needing ‘more choices and more chances’, or the “MC2s”
as some have dubbed them, which is better than “chancers”.
Most observers had predicted a move away from the more punitive and reproachful tone of the previous executive, that may not have explicitly linked NEETs with youth crime and anti-social behaviour but certainly did nothing to challenge perceptions that the two were interchangeable. While the re-branding that has taken place presages a change in the way the SnP government intends to deal with the issue, simply altering what we call this section of our society doesn’t make them go away or address the challenge they pose.
The NEET group is a diverse one and includes people from gap-year takers to children having to care for disabled or addicted parents, from low attainers to young people with mental or physical disabilities. The challenge is immense. A study by the London School of economics published in June found that Scotland’s 35,000 NEETs cost the country £1.7bn a year in lost economic activity and crime. On the whole, NEETs are 20 times more likely to commit a crime than their peers, and 22 times more likely to become single mothers. While many NEETs do eventually enter education and find employment, there is a substantial hardcore that graduate to the adult criminal system.
There has been a wealth of schemes, plans, diversions and policies aimed at dealing with the problem. There should be more apprenticeships, say some, while others call for everything from the return of national service to stronger school-college links. All these ideas have one thing in common – they aim to deal with the problem once it has emerged. The problem with this is that there is a growing consensus that this is the wrong way to deal with the NEET challenge.
Alan Sinclair, a former senior Scottish enterprise official now at the Work Foundation, shares Loyola’s view. In a ‘provocation’ written to address the issue of Scotland’s seemingly intractable NEET problem, Sinclair makes clear his view: “there is a direct link between the experiences of early childhood and subsequent adulthood. And, what happens in the very earliest years of life makes the biggest difference. Brain development is most rapid in the months before birth and up to age five. If that is disrupted by drugs, alcohol, smoking, poor diet or stress then today’s baby becomes tomorrow’s disadvantaged child.
“if we do not engage with struggling parents and parents-to-be then, as night follows day, we know that their children will grow into the least healthy adults who are badly educated, cause their neighbours and the police most problems, and will be unemployed and on benefits. In turn they will have children early and repeat the bad parenting. Current practice is to more or less grudgingly pick up the costs through a miscellany of public services from social work to the courts and prisons, hospitals and JobCentre Plus.”
Sinclair’s views are winning influential supporters in Scotland like from Detective Chief Superintendent John Carnochan of the violence reduction Unit, who knows that NEETs are disproportionately represented as both perpetrators and victims of violence.
A key achievement of Sinclair’s work is that it draws together evidence from all around the world that supports what many of us feel we know instinctively. Many teachers and childcare workers claim they can quickly tell which children in a group will ‘do well’ in life, and which are destined for problems. Even those of us without professional skills in dealing with children often feel we can make such snap judgments.
A study undertaken in Dunedin in New Zealand in 1972 sought to test whether there was any basis in such instincts. Childcare nurses carried out a 90-minute observation of 1,000 three-year-old children and identified an ‘at-risk’ group using indicators like restlessness, lack of attention to tasks and displays of negativity.
Eighteen years later, the ‘at-risk’ children were compared with a control group, with astounding results. The children the nurses had identified as being at-risk after just an hour and half of observation had grown into noticeably more violent and anti-social young adults. nearly half – 47 per cent – of the at-risk group were abusive towards their partners, compared with 10 per cent of the control group and two and a half times as many of the at risk group had two or more criminal convictions. Of those convictions, 55 per cent were for violent offences including rape and murder, compared with 18 per cent of the control group.
Of course, not all children with problems at an early age, or those from deprived backgrounds, become rapists or murderers. In fact, very few do. But a large proportion become NEETs, and then long-term unemployed. Sinclair argues this is because many in the NEET group have not developed the skills required to thrive – or even survive – in today’s modern service-based economy.
“A large slice of our workforce is not good at talking and listening, working with people or solving simple problems. Or, to put it more bluntly, it is about people not having the right attitude and behaviour.”
We see this evidence all around us. Go into any pub or café in one of Scotland’s bigger towns and you are as likely to be served by a Pole, or a Lithuanian, or an Australian or New Zealander as you are a Scot. In Glasgow last year – where one in five young people is a NEET – there were 6,000 hospitality and tourism jobs that could not be filled.
So we know many of the reasons why young people become NEETs and that waiting until they have already been alienated from education and the world of work to intervene is often too late. We need to prioritise the early years, especially for those coming from backgrounds that we have already identified as being contributors to poor development. But what does an effective early years programme look like?
Sydney may be one of the most beautiful cities on earth, but it also has areas as deprived, drug and gang-ridden as any Glasgow badland. The Waterloo/Redfern local authority area, while becoming gentrified in parts, still contains some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the country, including pockets that are ‘no-go’ zones for police.
It was in this environment that Greg Antcliff, a senior manager and early years psychologist with Australian charity the Benevolent Society, launched a programme that could lead the way forward for Scotland. “We put a psychologist into a childcare centre for a number of hours per week in an area with high-needs children. We were asked by the childcare providers to come in and support their staff because the children were quite difficult and they couldn’t keep staff, so they had a constant turnover of staff.
“The psychologist worked with staff on the importance of meeting children’s unmet emotional needs, and dealing with their behaviour, because if you just discipline the behaviour, you are still leaving the emotional needs unmet.”
Antcliff and his team used video equipment to record the children’s behaviour and then analysed it to assess which children were most at risk, and what strategies could be put in place to address this, an updated version of the same principle used by the nurses in Dunedin 35 years earlier.
Antcliff’s team instructed the childcare centre staff in the basics of attachment theory, which teaches that instead of disciplining poor behaviour, staff should try and understand what was causing the behaviour, and respond accordingly. Antcliff says the aim was for children to see the staff as a ‘secure base’ that not only could they confide in, but feel secure around.
“the bad behaviours in that childcare centre dropped and you went in there and it was calmer space to be in. insecurity doesn’t foster development and by training staff to offer security to the children, we stopped the children from having to continually second guess the predictability of their environment.” he says.
He says that evaluation showed a 60 per cent improvement in the number of children in the clinical range of behaviour disorders. With this level of success, the programme has been expanded to include training parents in the fundamentals of attachment theory that have proven so beneficial to staff. The programme as also received funding to be taken to an additional 18 childcare centres across Sydney.
Strong support for social, emotional and behavioural problems was supposed to be established in Scottish schools by the passing of the Additional Support for Learning Act in the last Parliament. An HMIE report published last week shows that this has not happened. tam Baillie of Barnardo’s, who was at the report launch, says that patchy implementation of the Additional Support for Learning Act, particularly when it comes to looked after children and children with social, emotional and behavioural problems, has major implications.
“We know that Scottish education performs rather well compared to other OECD countries, but those who are failing are failing very badly. Full implementation of the ASL Act, maintaining young people in schools and avoiding exclusions, will have a major effect on bringing those groups up and making sure they don’t end up not in education, employment and training.”
If the government can rise to the challenge of successfully pursuing the full implementation of this Act across all local authority areas, then a large group of NEETs-to-be will already have been given more chances. But the new freedom afforded to councils to decide their own education budgets may mean a haphazard pattern of NEET prevention across the nation. the class size argument rages particularly fiercely in the context of early primary teaching, with teachers generally arguing that the smaller the class, the more attention can be devoted to the individual social, emotional and educational development of each child.
Gordon Smith is headteacher at Glasgow’s Jordanhill Primary School. “I teach at Jordanhill now, which is all leafy glades, but I was a headteacher in Easterhouse, one of the most deprived areas in Glasgow, for 20 years before that.” he says he is frustrated by the debate going on about evidence on class sizes and says that what is needed is action. “You have to reduce class sizes. It’s a no-brainer to say that children from deprived areas are going to benefit from more quality adult attention. It doesn’t matter if classes are reduced to 18 or not but smaller class sizes will help.”
But he does stress that preventing the NEETs problem cannot be laid at the door of schools alone. “It is vital, and we are now getting the government to recognise, that education is not a stand-alone part of a child’s development. You need to invest in early years, and join up with health, social work, the community and families… you want to avoid using social work only as crisis management.
“For example, at my old school we had what was called the homelink project. This was a room where parents could come and visit, and do anything from learning to use a sewing machine, to studying for Standard grade maths or seeing health visitors. The school was a community centre. Even formalised education is still about working with parents as a partnership. You have to involve parents in the curriculum so it’s not just purely an academic exercise. The Curriculum for excellence is going in the right direction.
“School should just become an everyday thing. We need to change the system to suit the child and not the child to suit the system, which unfortunately, some of my secondary colleagues still seem to be trying to do.”
Bill McGregor, general secretary of the Headteachers’ Association of Scotland (soon to be known as School Leaders Scotland), which represents leaders at secondary level, says that one positive at the moment is the progress of individual learning plans. The effect of these plans, which mean that every child has an individual learning “journey” tailored to their aptitudes, needs and interests, he says, is starting to percolate through to secondary schools.
However, he thinks that one of the problems at secondary level is that the national Agreement on teachers’ salaries meant guidance teachers got less money, a move that left them feeling demoralised and undervalued at a time when their input was critical. At busy, bustling secondary schools, it’s hard for individual pupils to get the depth of continuous support they might need to channel them in a positive direction.
McGregor says that the NEET group encompasses not just those who go to school, but also a large number who don’t go to school because of chaotic family backgrounds, parents unable to enforce attendance, or because their disruptive behaviour has meant they are excluded. And he offers a dire warning. “This has to be tackled – in a materialistic society like ours, we are divided into the haves and have-nots, and if we don’t do something, we are going to see an extension of the gang culture that is taking root in England. The NEET group, many of whom are extremely disenchanted, are likely to form a major part of this.
“When Scotland as a country has lost its manufacturing base and has to rely on brains and skills, we cannot afford to just lose a large chunk of the population.”
While early intervention makes sense on numerous levels, the hordes of young people who are already in the NEET predicament cannot be forgotten, and organisations such as Youthlink, Fairbridge, the Prince’s Trust and Columba 1400 do invaluable work giving young people a sense of hope and purpose.
But one of the saddest scenarios must surely be when someone who is in the NEET category makes a positive move and applies to college to get into education often in important fields such as construction and social care – and is knocked back. For people with low self-esteem, such a result can be devastating and can often deter them from trying again.
A report launched just last week into the capacity of colleges illustrates this happening. It showed that some 2 per cent of the group of young people in need of “more choices and more chances” represented unmet demand. That is, these young people applied for places, but were rejected – due to a multitude of factors including lack of capacity or funding and a feeling among colleges that there was a lack of employment opportunities for completers. hopefully, this piece of research will stimulate thinking about how these people’s wish to study can be met, to avoid losing them back into a wilderness of no educational or job prospects.
For NEETs, like all of us, grow old. As they pass the 19-year-old mark, they may technically exit the NEET category, but they continue on outwith education and employment, and don’t stop being a blot on the national conscience and balance sheet because they are no longer in the first flush of youth. the NEET category of 16 to 19 was always an arbitrary one, and that’s why it is right, while continuing work to support all school leavers to the next stage in life, to focus also on the babes in arms and give everyone the chance to develop their full potential from the outset, rather than starting when they are already old enough to have sex and get married.
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