NEETs are only a symptom of a much deeper problem

Tweet

 

It has been suggested this week that “Primary schools in England should be required to identify children at risk of leaving education at 16 without finding a job”, with a view to putting mentoring / tutoring arrangements in place for the children thus identified. Although the review is specifically about England, the same issue exists in Wales. There is something profoundly depressing about the idea that we can and should categorise children in such a way before they are even 11 years old - or even, according to the author, for pre-school children.

It’s not a new issue, and the links between deprivation in childhood and poor opportunity in adulthood have been well understood for at least 60 years – I read the seminal study on the issue by JWB Douglas (“The Home and the School”) back in the 1960s. Six decades later and we’re still only debating how to address the symptoms – because treating the symptoms is what the proposal for mentoring and tutoring is about. That’s not to argue that we should not be trying to treat the symptoms – any help that we can give the children concerned is to be welcomed.

But really, after all that time, we shouldn’t still be debating potential corrective actions at all – we should be addressing the underlying cause. It remains the case that the social class and financial situation of the parents are the factors with the greatest influence on children’s life chances. Even if we were to accept that the situation of the parents is down to their own choices in life (although I hasten to add that I don’t accept that things are as simple as that), that is no justification for restricting the opportunities open to their children. Yet, far from seeking to make the starting point in life less unequal, recent decades have seen a continued concentration of wealth and income in fewer and fewer hands – and the gap between the richest and poorest in society has grown, not shrunk.

Gross inequality isn’t the natural order of things, and life doesn’t have to be that way. It is the result of political choices made by UK governments, both Tory and Labour, over decades. And the most depressing part of the reporting on the pending review is that it doesn’t even seem to touch on that.