The Sunday Times
22 May 2008
Article published - 11/11/2007
Last weeks Queen's speech missed a chance to help our low-achieving young unemployed. Frank Field explains what ministers should be doing. There were two crunch issues needing radical thinking in last week's Queen's speech if Labour was to begin serious welfare reform. What can we do now for those individuals who, after 11 years of massive taxpayer investment, can neither read, write nor add up? Simultaneously, what do we do to revolutionise education performance so we reduce the number of people entering this group in the future?
So far, attempts to tackle the situation have not worked. Despite a near doubling of the education budget since 1997, one in three pupils moving from primary to secondary education fails to achieve the minimum skills in English, maths and science. The numbers failing to achieve the 3 Rs rise to a staggering 4 out of 10 children. The production line spits these children out into secondary schools whether they are ready or not.
My guess is that all too many of these 4 out of 10 failing pupils continue to stumble -since only half the pupils at the age of 16 gain a minimum leaving standard at GCSE of five passes at A* to C, including English and maths.
This failure among young people is thrown into extreme relief by the Neets those who inhabit a twilight world where they are not in education, employment or training. The proportion of Neets is growing: the biggest surge is among 16 to 18-year-olds, up from 154,000 in 1997 to 206,000 last year.
What did the Queen's speech produce in terms of concrete ideas for crucially needed welfare reform? Not much, I'm afraid. Gordon Brown doesn't have to appoint a minister to think the unthinkable as Tony Blair did with me. All he has to do is ask some of those young people travelling towards a permanent place in the welfare queues what they would do if they could change the system.
Over the summer I had a fascinating opportunity to learn why it was that some young people in my constituency, Birkenhead, stopped going to school when they were as young as 12. One evening I was asked to present awards at the Tranmere Community Project, run by Jill Quayle in one of the poorest areas of the country.
For more than 20 years I have tried to get the tiniest part of taxpayers' money that seems to be spent with so little effect by the state machine diverted to Jill. If anyone deserves to be Citizen of the Year for being an outstanding social entrepreneur, it is she.
In an old Methodist church she runs a project where she uses theatre productions and physical activities (including Parcour, a new kind of street acrobatics involving running up walls and jumping off railings) to re-engage young people who have given up on formal education.
I sat at the back of the hall as the lads came in. I knew their faces quite well.
They were not strangers to me. I had seen them around over the years and knew they had caused real trouble. In many cases I felt it was only a matter of time before they were banged up.
The transformation that taking part in Jill's project had wreaked on them was amazing: they were brilliant at Parcour and knew it. They were all talking about the jobs they hoped to do. All of them were wonderfully fit and some of them had used their new skills to get themselves into the army where they will now put the fear of God into the Taliban instead of the local community. Others, under Jill's guidance, had finally learnt their 3 Rs and to join the human race.
When Ed Balls, minister for children, schools and families, gets up in the Commons on Tuesday to continue the Queen's speech debate, he could do much to empower groups like Jill Quayle's. She had 10 boys who were still on the books of the local school; the taxpayer is spending Pounds 140 a week on each of them -that's Pounds 1,400 a week that the state is paying for an education they aren't getting and that Jill is providing for nothing. Money on that scale would revolutionise what Jill and others like her can do; at present she is dependent on charitable handouts and has to lobby constantly for crumbs from the national lottery and other funding sources.
Taxpayers are paying for these boys to be educated: why not let the money follow the individual boy rather than paying it to institutions that are not servicing their needs?
In Birkenhead there is a flourishing Polish community doing the jobs these boys have not been trained for. We have given up on the idea of schools imparting technical skills such as bricklaying or mechanics. In Poland they give young men these skills, and they come to Britain and use them. The system is not giving the Birkenhead boys a trade and many of them from broken homes with single mothers are desperately lacking in male role models, of whom there are precious few in schools.
The brilliant Tranmere Project Parcour teacher at the awards ceremony was obviously a positive and powerful influence on these boys' lives. With proper funding, organisations such as Jill's could pay such gifted teachers properly to rescue the most difficult children.
What was really striking to me was how bright and gifted these boys were. So often they are written off, but I realised what massive potential many Neets have not least in the ideas they have for how the education and welfare system could be made to work with them rather than against them.
The government believes it will persuade more young people to stay on in education by letting them claim a Pounds 30 per week education maintenance allowance (EMA) through their schools after 16. Maybe. But the plain truth is that none of the young people registering at the Tranmere Project gets EMA because Jill's project is not large enough to qualify. Again, the funds need to follow the individual so that community leaders like Jill can channel it for them.
After the Tranmere Project I talked to many other young people about what could be done; none was that interested in thinking the unthinkable. Their attention was concentrated on thinking the workable: to abolish welfare as we have known it. One of the groups I met was part of the government's "welfare to work" initiative called the New Deal (which so far has cost Pounds 2billion).
I had not realised how stigmatised many New Dealers felt by being classified as such. The courses they were offered were a dreary and irrelevant "one size fits all" collection, mostly centred around IT.
One enterprising young woman told me that she kept being offered an IT course when what she wanted was to train as a personal trainer so that she could work in a gym or run her own business. Through sheer force of personality she had managed to get the jobcentre to give her half the money she needed. But it wasn't enough to pay for the course, so she had had to go back on the dole.
"Why," she asked, "couldn't they have allocated me the money and let me go and negotiate a rate for the training that I wanted? I could definitely have persuaded someone to train me for less."
They were frustrated by the rigidity of the system which did not let them choose their own destinies. I asked the group whether -if they were in charge of their own training budgets -they would spend any money at all with the training provider with whom the New Deal forced them to enrol. I realised from their look of amazement that this was a question not worth asking.
What about running their own training accounts? There was a pause. Might not Jobcentre Plus make it part of its job to provide them with a whole range of approved training providers? The group warmed to the idea. They particularly liked the idea that they could hold the budget strings, because the funding would follow them so they could force up the quality of training on offer. They also suggested that Jobcentre Plus should give them details of the grants that employers could get by employing them so they could use this information when knocking on employers' doors looking for work.
Many Neets said the rot began at school where no one took seriously their wish to go out to work at the first opportunity. All the effort was to get them to stay on in education (which Balls announced in the Queen's speech that he is now to make law). Many of these young people were bright and entrepreneurial and wanted to get out into the world and run their own lives.
The group's own first plank in their revolutionary programme of self improvement was that planning for a job at 16 must be recognised as a legitimate end in itself by schools. Penalising them for not staying on had failed. They knew that if they left school at 16 and failed to get a job, there would be no dole money until they were 18. Likewise they knew they could not join the New Deal until then.
Planning to get a job should for them be a key part of their final school year.
Last week Balls announced that unemployed 18-year-olds would not have to wait a further six months to join the New Deal, as they currently do. But why not begin a new kind of New Deal for 16-year-old school leavers while they are still in education? It might persuade quite a few of them to come back through the school gates. This would help to counter what the Neets group complained of -a school culture centred around staying on which did not prepare them for the jobs they wanted to do.
For other young people in the group even such a new system would come too late.
They were unanimously keen on the idea of a school leaving certificate to ensure that they had basic skills -literacy, maths, IT and so on -which, once passed, meant they could leave school as young as 14.
Now that would be an incentive, they said. The Pounds 10,600 that taxpayers allocate for the last two years of schooling, they suggested, could be made available for them to draw on once they knew which training schemes they wished to take.
Radically, all the young people I spoke to believed that their right to benefit should be time limited and that such time limiting might knock some sense into the larger group of New Dealers who, they alleged, had no intention of getting a job if they could help it.
These are all sensible and workable suggestions. The prime minister should embrace the ideas of Neets and New Dealers themselves for self-improvement. It would be the clearest demonstration yet of his intent to transform the centralised state into an empowering one that fits individual aspirations and the wider challenges of the 21st century.
Diary dates for December 2008
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