Postings from the front line

In the office yesterday we were having a chat about the way the media portrays young people as either victims or aggressors. This was illustrated very plainly on the Today programme this morning - I emerged from sleep to listen to three consecutive news items, one on French young people apparently "copying English youths and adopting 'le binge drinking'", one on the increase in the rate of young people self-harming, and the final one on anti-social behaviour by young people leading to the death of a learning disabled man. All depressing stories, but representing three different perceived traits of young people; weak and frivolous, depressed and vulnerable, aggressive and cruel. Surely it's not just political bias but age bias too that the BBC has to be aware of.

The cost of custody

PG Wodehouse famously got into a great deal of trouble for suggesting that anyone who had coped with a public school education could cope admirably in a PoW camp, and the comparison between public school and an open prison has often been made.  Who knew that locking up a young criminal, however, costs £140,000 a year, six times the cost of sending a child to Eton?  In February 2,195 children aged 10 to 17 were held in England and Wales.  Research from the New Economics Foundation has shown that youth custody makes young people more likely to re-offend, and be unemployed later in life.  Send them to Eton, maybe, but we wouldn't want them to pick up any more bad habits.....

The old chestnut of teenage drinking is back, but this time covered in the New Yorker and in typical in-depth style. It writes about the Italians of New Haven, who came to the US in the 19th century and brought with them a drinking model of regularity and moderation that was unheard of. Research on Italian Americans showed that they rarely had drinking problems if they stuck to the same regime of moderation that they had adhered to in their old country, where, as the feature put it, “alcohol has no larger social or emotional reward”; in the Italian community, that position is reserved for food. As the writer puts it “When confronted with the rowdy youth in the bar, we are happy to raise his drinking age, to tax his beer, to punish him if he drives under the influence, and to push him into treatment if his habit becomes an addiction. But we are reluctant to provide him with a positive and constructive example of how to drink...” Everyone knows that ‘drinking alone’ is a bad sign indicating alcoholism, but I think Britain’s problem is more about what could be called ‘drinking in isolation’. Drinking by young people that is not connected with food, celebration or community (other than the community of other young people in a similar situation) is dangerous drinking. It takes the act itself into isolation, where getting drunk is the sole purpose.

Devian Patel is 24, and has had a job since he was 13, when he embarked on his first paper round.  He worked all through school, and university.  In November 2010 he was made redundant by the computer company for whom he worked.    In order to keep his skills up to date, he is working with Changemakers on our website.   “I realized that rather than sitting around at home and thinking about myself, I needed to just look outside and see how I could help other people.” Ironically, the Young Person’s Guarantee, launched by the Department for Work and Pensions, which means that a young person who is unemployed for six months as a result of the recession will be guaranteed the offer of a job, training or work experience, only applies to 18-24 year olds, and Devian is 25 next month.  He is positive about the scheme, though, although wary of the caveat that it only applies to those who have been unemployed for six months.  “It’s a shame it couldn’t be extended to older people”, he said.  “It’s making a very big assumption about when the recession actually started.” As someone with a very strong work ethic, Devian has been surprised at the dramatic effect being unemployed has had on him.  “The maximum I have never had a job for is a month,” he says.   “I have had to let it sink in.”  He has also had a rude awakening about benefits.  “I am only just figuring out now that that housing benefit is not a perfect solution. There is a lot of fighting to get what you are supposed to receive.” Like a lot of young people, Devian had taken out a loan to get him started as he needed to furnish a new flat.   “When I was made redundant I had the loan hanging over my head.  Luckily I had done the payment protection scheme, but when you contact the loan company you have to ring an 0845 number, which is not cheap on a mobile.”  He has found the Consumer Credit Counselling service helpful but said guidance for young people in his position is not easy to find.   “It seems like a lot of people have been set back by going to university,” Devian says.  “I did four years and I have got a student loan of about £16,000.  None of what I am doing is paying that off.   The course which I have done has provided me with the right knowledge and the vocabulary, but when I am applying for jobs I am being turned down because I don’t have the experience.  How can I get experience when no-one will give me the chance?  It seems to me I would have been better if I had come out of sixth form and gone straight into a job.  At least they would have sent me away for training which I wouldn’t have had to pay for.“ 

 

By Year 10, 28% of girls are unhappy about their appearance, says a report by the Children's Society.  This is a shock headline that makes every parent quiver with anxiety and want to rush home and reinforce their children's beauty to them.  However if we look at it in isolation, away from the media stories about child anorexia etc, what are we actually saying?  I do not think this is much of a change from what has always been the case.  I find it difficult to think of anyone of my friends when we were in our early teens that would have described themselves as happy with the way they looked.  Anxiety about appearance is a hallmark of adolescence.  Trapped in that hinterland between growth spurts, hormonal changes and in a behavioural wilderness of wanting to sob like a child and also be treated as an adult, what self-respecting teenager would be happy with the way they looked?    What I found more worrying was a Girl Guilde's report that reported 46% of girls would consider cosmetic surgery.  Mild discontent with one's physical appearance is normal, but for an entire industry to be built around the immediate and irreversible "correction" of that discontent is truly horrifying.  A friend in the States tells me that one of the most popular graduation presents for girls leaving High School is a 'boob job'.

A colleague attended an engineering event recently and noticed a faintly embarrassed looking 17 year old hanging around at the back of the room.  She presumed he was there as some kind of work experience.  When the presentation began she discovered that he had entered an innovation competition, designed a cosmic ray (yes, really) and that as part of his prize it was currently being put into operation.  By NASA.  Talk about reaching for the stars......

Good old Boris.  What did we do without him?  James Cleverly will stand down from his role as the Mayor's Youth Ambassador to become er…..Chair of the Waste and Recycling Board.

Good piece in the Observer by Barbara Ellen about the fact that the young people she knows are more mature, organised, calm, have more self-belief and are generally more 'together' than she ever was.  It all goes along with my generation Y theory that my generation is secretly, deeply and shamefully jealous of them.  Entering the world of work in the middle of a recession is obviously a disaster, but in terms of opportunities offered through the web, ease of travel and the gradual breaking down of barriers between school and work I think generation Y is in a pretty good position.

Oh good grief.  Government-backed charity Beatbullying picked chart-topping band N-Dubz as its ambassadors only to have to withdraw its commendation of them after Dappy texted a woman who had been critical of him on Chris Moyles' show with, if you could make sense of the ungrammatical text-speak, what could possibly be construed as a death threat.  Why do charities feel they can employ "edgy" people and then become shocked when they act edgily?  Also as the woman who rang in enraged Dappy by describing him very accurately "as a little boy in a silly hat" or something similar I shouldn't imagine she believed him capable of a long-distance assassination.  The media have of course done their usual job on this, and within the same coverage have made Dappy look like a self-important infant and Al Capone. 

Interesting letter in the New Yorker about young people, the children of first generation immigrants, feeling disenfranchised from the country in which they live because they “only see the disparity between their community’s impoverished isolation and the cosmopolitan wealth of their host nation.  The low paying jobs that their parents embraced become for them a stigma.”  The writer, Jeff Weiss, uses Muslim young people in the Netherlands as an example.  He says that “unlike their parents, they have no ready options to emigrate elsewhere in pursuit of a better life.”  Our mission should be to help these young people find that “better life” here.

I think I have heard the best apprenticeship story ever.  16 year old Emily Hart joined a hairdressing salon in Knightsbridge, spent the next four years travelling the world with her boss, hair guru Errol Douglas MBE, (himself the product of an apprenticeship) working long hours for seven days a week and doing TV shoots, fashion shows and celebrities' appearances, and has just won Young Hairdresser of the Year at the age of 21.  She said it was hard work but "the experience I gained was priceless".  She compared what she had learnt and what it had cost her with the cost of going to college, and said there was no competition.  "I tell everyone I know who's going to college to do hairdressing not to bother but to do an apprenticeship instead", she said.     It is Apprenticeship Week from 1st-5th February 2010 and the government has committed to one in five young people being able to take up apprenticeships rather than one in fifteen as it stands at the moment.  While Emily and Errol are fantastic adverts for the apprenticeship system, it would be nice to feel that young people have a choice between the two based on aptitude ather than economic necessity.   

I'm listening...."   A school-based counselling service called Place2Be is working with children who would customarily be diagnosed with ADHD and medicated accordingly.  Just giving them a calm, quiet place to talk and get supportive advice  has had impressive results on young people who were on the verge of being excluded.  Any child can post a note into the special Place2Talk lettterbox and request a fifteen minute appointment at lunchtime to talk about anything they want.  I am thinking of introducing one in our offices.....   Just as the  key to success with therapy is for the therapist to be consistent, for young people with turbulent home lives the regular in-school presence of counsellors is an accustomed opportunity for them to rely on support.  When young people bond with a teacher, that teacher's departure from the school can be devastating.  Having neutral staff there as a consistent listening support is a fantastic idea.   

Another day, another opportunity to get cross about teachers.  "Why should they be allowed to close the schools when I have to go to work?"  "I can't get my child to school because the roads are too slippery and the news said we shouldn't leave the house", "They''ve only closed the school for Ofsted reports so their attendance records don't look bad", "Why can't they play in a snowy playground?  We did and it didn't do us any harm" ad infinitum.  The facts are that if teachers can't get to school, the school cannot open and can we all remember that the last time this happened was 30 YEARS AGO?  It's not like it happens every winter.   We ought to be grateful that we are having a proper winter.  By the time our grandchildren go to school London will be a seaside town and I bet we even try and blame that somehow on the education system....

I am going to begin compiling a bit of a misery-making list of “Subtle media attacks on young people”.  We have the summer “Your exams don’t count as they’re getting easier every year” headline, the word “hoodie” used to describe anyone under the age of 21, and now we have “slacktivisim”, the rather snarky word used to describe anyone who signs internet petitions or who protests online.  Sue Perkins first identified it on Radio 4’s News Quiz, saying that activism now consisted of putting “RT @iraq” or whatever on your Twitter account and then pressing send.  The word slacktivism implies that young people are taking the easy route to protesting.  Twitter and Facebook campaigns have been phenomenally successful.  I think they are pragmatically using all the tools at their disposal to make their voices heard.  Veterans of Aldermaston and Greenham Common might be snooty about it but one look at the youth of the protestors at Copenhagen shows that their dedication to causes is as strong as ever.  I vote we change slacktivism to “Pro-Activism”.  Anyone  fancy starting a Twitter campaign? 

Lovely story about a seven year old, threatened with a return to the Congo from his UK school because his parents had split up and his mother’s visa had expired.  His schoolmates signed petitions and raised awareness of his case and he has now been granted leave to stay.  One amazing thing about multi-cultural Britain is that children are exposed to the workings of politics at such a young age, and have the confidence to fight for what they believe is right.   Children see things with amazing clarity, and to them “the right thing to do” is obvious and unassailable.  Naivety can move mountains, and thank God for that.