ATL

Can we fix it?

ATL general secretary Mary Bousted looks at the plight of young people and their future in a so-called broken society

Young people should have an essential birthright. They should be outraged at the state of society, convinced that they can right all the wrongs in the world, and brimming with frustration that adults are not hanging on their every word and acting accordingly. Optimism should be the preserve of the young. But I fear that this vital DNA of youth is in short supply at the moment.

Teachers, lecturers, leaders and support staff working in schools and colleges are dealing, every day, with the consequences of what the Prime Minister, David Cameron, calls our 'broken society'. But the broken society they witness and experience through their work is not some mythical, value-free, moral wasteland. The broken society comprises young people who arrive at school unable to learn, anxious because they are living with parents who have lost their jobs, whose debts are unsustainable, who can't pay the household bills and who fear that their home will be repossessed.

Let there be no doubt that the consequences of the broken society are felt most acutely by the young and that things will get worse as the UK's economic crisis deepens.

Unemployment in the last three months rose faster than it has done in 17 years. For the young, the consequences are particularly grim. There are now more than a million young people aged 16 to 24 not in education, employment or training (NEETs). And if you are young and black, the prospects are even grimmer.

A recent Institute for Public Policy Research study has shown that almost half of black people aged between 16 and 24 are unemployed, compared with 20% of white people of the same age.

The scale of the crisis is demonstrated by Martina Milburn, chief executive of the Prince's Trust, when she says: "There are now enough unemployed young people to fill every football stadium in the Premier League, with almost 200,000 left queuing outside."

It is teachers, lecturers, leaders and education support staff, working every day with young people in schools and colleges, who have to cope with the corrosive effects of the loss of hope in the young who see, quite rightly, that they are going to have to pay for the sins of the bankers. The young now foresee a future with all the things that they want in life — the dignity of good work; the security of a family and a home; the right to leisure and to the good things in life — being denied to them through no fault of their own. What a waste of young talent, young hope and young lives. What a terrible crime against the most vulnerable and the most innocent. Because the young did not engage in sub-prime mortgages and leveraged buyouts.

Ruth Sutherland, writing in the Daily Mail (21 November 2011), puts it well when she describes: "A generation of young people denied access to the underpinnings of financial stability — a job, a home, a pension, unable to buy into adulthood, marriage and the business of raising children in a secure environment." The bond between generations, that the work of one will support the childhood of the other, who will in turn support the workers in old age, is being fractured. The consequences of this are incalculable.

Education professionals know that it gets really difficult for them to tell their students to work hard, get good qualifications and then a good job when those same students know that there are just no jobs out there. We are living in a society which is not showing a proper duty of care to its young people. The cutting back to the bone of Sure Start (124 centres closed since the coalition government came to power) is adversely affecting the future life chances of the youngest, most vulnerable children. The abolition of the EMA tells our poorest, most vulnerable teenagers that their future doesn't matter.

And why am I, ATL general secretary, writing about the economy and not about the brilliant job done by our schools and colleges? Because it's still about the economy. That long-lasting cliché lasts just because of its fundamental truth. Economics is about both the production of wealth and the distribution of wealth. And the fact is, in this country we have one of the most unequal distributions of wealth and income in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The connection between that inequality and our huge range of educational achievement is not coincidence.

Dealing with the so-called long tail of underachievement in our schools should be a top priority. But that can't be achieved through education policies alone, but only by economic policies which reduce inequality in our society. And if our society is broken, that is one of the most powerful ways to fix it.