Blame the schools. Alan Milburn’s report on Neets, published in May, was one of the most damning comments on the welfare state I have read. It described a new generation of a million mostly poor Britons now encouraged to fare worse, not better, than their parents. This means, said Milburn, that “the great British promise” – the advance of generations – is being broken. A sizeable chunk of the population is going backwards.
The number of young people not in education, employment or training – one in eight of all 16- to 24-year-olds – is rising fast and will be 1.25 million by 2030. More than 80% of them claim to want to find a job, education or training. A third even have “good GCSEs”, but 44% of them are on state benefits, now costing £8.1bn. Many of them suffer from anxiety and other disabilities, according to the NHS. The number of young people with special educational needs has doubled in 10 years. Mental ill-health is bordering on pandemic levels.
The Neets crisis is a gift to politicians. There is always someone else to blame. The most obvious target is Labour’s curiously punitive treatment of small businesses and casual or unskilled jobs. Curbing zero-hours contracts and proposing first-day job security are measures that seem almost targeted at keeping Neets out of work.
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But the complaint ringing ever louder from employers is that young people leaving school are unready for work and life in the real world. August’s Department for Work and Pensions survey of employers’ views is an indictment. More than 90% thought the education system should offer more vocational pathways to young people. They pleaded for the young to understand personal motivation, teamwork and time management. They believed schools were too focused on ensuring children and young people passed exams, and lacked anything passing for careers guidance.
Reading these reports leaves an eerie sense of a total mismatch between schools and the social and economic life of the community beyond their gates. They seem like monastic institutions, fixated on their own seasons and periods, and on “subjects” handed down from the past. Above all, they love to measure what they teach, even if it has nothing to do with their pupils’ futures.
If I were an employer I would want new entrants educated in handling money, public affairs, the law, crime and punishment. They should learn about citizenship, the economy and the environment. They should know about public health and their own physical and mental wellbeing. They should be taught elementary ethics and the meaning of morality.
This should be just a beginning. What Neets most clearly lack is self-confidence. The new oracy movement is pleading for practical lessons in getting the young to talk clearly and present themselves to others. They should learn to articulate views and listen to others and learn how to agree and disagree. I cannot imagine a more critical skill, yet it is virtually untaught in schools. The reason, of course, is that authority cannot measure it. There is no league table for confidence.
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Here the temperature rises. I used to notice pupils at my local secondary breaking up for the day. They would burst through the gates conversing in twos, threes or larger groups. These groups would merge and dissolve down the street like clouds. I liked to see them as a metaphor for the economy at work.
Today those same groups are quite different, composed of pupils with heads buried in phones and with just a few of them shouting into the air. The American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, finds this a universal facet of younger generations on both sides of the Atlantic. Social media is denying them the art of conversation, of intellectual tolerance. It is electronic introversion and there is no GCSE in that – let alone a job interview. These phones must disappear.
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Milburn’s Neets report is interim. It poses the problem. We await his solution this autumn. It will doubtless elevate the importance of technical and vocational education alongside the cult of the academic subject. Nothing would aid this more than to end the disastrous merging of universities and technology colleges that took place 30 years ago.
Is it too much to dream that Milburn might look deeper? For more than a century, education’s radicals, such as Rudolf Steiner, Maria Montessori and John Dewey, have sought to bring a fresh relevance to what is taught in schools. Reading, writing and arithmetic remain necessities, but they are primary-stage skills usually acquired before the teens.
Secondary curriculums emerged from the 19th-century academies and have remained little changed ever since. They rank as noble pastimes much to be cherished, but they have scant relevance to the future lives and livelihoods of most pupils. Teaching, the world’s most conservative profession, merely clings to them. Britain’s Neets are the most unjustly treated victims.
