Recently, I visited a community project on a housing estate where residents told me they were being terrorised by a gang who were delivering a “county line” to an area about 80 miles away.
The boys were all around 14-years-old, wore balaclavas and were dishing out acts of violence and torching vehicles. All had been excluded from school and all had been sent to a local pupil referral unit with a very poor reputation, which none of them seemed to attend.
Families were living in fear, and everyone seemed to be just waiting for tragedy to occur.
This shocking situation is not unique. There are primary school children involved in drug-running and gang activity, teenagers being chased in broad daylight by other young people waving machetes, homes where the children involved in the drugs trade are the main breadwinners, and communities where organised criminals seek out and groom very vulnerable children who have fallen through the gaps, including in the education system, almost with impunity.
Across the country, too many vulnerable teenagers are losing their lives and their liberty, life chances are being destroyed, and talent held back. The services and systems that are supposed to be keeping them safe and supporting them to succeed are often unfit for purpose.
Teachers and school staff are now having to do more and more beyond simply teaching, including picking up the pieces when other services are not there or are not trusted by vulnerable children and their families.
Nobody should question their dedication, commitment, or professionalism, but schools cannot do everything on their own – they need help.
Since Covid many of these problems are becoming more extreme. I see a future where problems like a lack of school readiness, speech and language development issues, mental health conditions, and increased poverty have an even greater impact on vulnerability and lead to even more exploitation and harm.
There are the systemic problems in the education system – serious falls in school attendance, curriculums that don’t appeal to a sizeable minority of students, an overstretched and underfunded SEND system, low quality alternative provision settings, and PRUs which feel more like prisons than an environment for learning.
We also have an inspection system that can penalise inclusivity and reward those schools which move on children who are deemed to be an inconvenience, troublesome, or unlikely to achieve academically.
Meanwhile, a fifth of our young people are leaving education without even the most basic qualifications, and the attainment gap is growing.
None of this has been helped by the carousel of different prime ministers and education secretaries.
The lack of a coherent government plan to tackle these issues is why I launched the year-long Commission on Young Lives. Our expert panel included two MAT CEOs, Sir Kevan Collins, as well as others with expertise in working with schools and with vulnerable children.
Earlier this month, we published our final recommendations in our report, Hidden in plain sight (2022).
Along with the many proposals we make around family support, poverty, the children’s social care system, youth justice, mental health provision in communities, tackling racial disparities, and boosting the youth services workforce, we believe that there are reforms that need to be made to the education system to encourage a more inclusive system and to enable a joined-up, coordinated programme for protecting vulnerable children and supporting them to succeed.
Government needs to start by establishing clear leadership and accountability for all its work with young people by bringing activities into one department – a renamed Department for Children, Schools, and Families. This department would be responsible for safeguarding, exploitation, youth work, youth justice, family support, social care, education, and skills.
The children’s minister role should be upgraded to minister of state level, attending cabinet, with vulnerable children a key ministerial responsibility.
The government should also set the tone for a new culture of inclusion, support, and accountability across all schools, bringing an end to the over-reliance on exclusion in some schools.
Schools should have high expectations for all their children, alongside an expectation that they will have the resources to support those children who need it – enabling them to stay in school or encouraging them to attend school.
I am not proposing to outlaw school exclusions or recommend financial sanctions and fines for schools, as I believe these punishments can become a thing of the past with a new culture of inclusivity and accountability. However, I do believe that the exclusion of primary school age children should be banned, and that schools should be supported with the necessary resources to achieve this.
Removal of a child from secondary school should also become a genuine last resort and only possible following a programme of support and when signed off by the CEO of an academy school or MAT, or the director of children’s services for local authority schools.
I also want to see MATs and local authorities monitoring rates of racial disproportionality in the use of exclusions and to take action to tackle this obvious problem.
Our report calls for a new transitional fund to enable local authorities to develop area-wide inclusion programmes, and for a new inclusion measure to be introduced by Ofsted to inform judgement. We want to see PRUs disbanded, and specialist provision established in and around schools instead.
The centrepiece of our recommendations is a new Sure Start Plus programme – a “Sure Start for teenagers” network of intervention and support that reduces the risks vulnerable young people face, encourages them to thrive, and moves us away a society that frequently fails to proactively prevent teenagers from becoming caught up in serious violence, exploitation, and crime.
I believe embracing an “invest to save” ethos through a national co-ordinated programme of intervention and support that identifies and responds to vulnerable young people’s needs would drive down risks.
Like Sure Start centres, Sure Start Plus Hubs would lead and co-ordinate health and wellbeing support, early intervention, education psychologists, mental health support, SEND support, and support for families through trauma-informed and responsive practice – but with a focus on teenagers.
Our schools are full of facilities and resources that are under-utilised. I would like to see all secondary schools supported to open their doors for breakfast before school, after school, into the evenings, and during weekends and school holidays.
We need to make all our schools a huge community resource available to all young people and their families.
Out-of-formal-school programmes could be co-ordinated with local Sure Start Plus Hubs, with activities delivered by youth practitioners, local community groups, sports coaches, artists, and volunteers. Capital funding would be made available to pay for minor alterations to school buildings to open-up extended hours, and funding would be made available to schools and community groups to provide out-of-school programmes. All of this is achievable, and many schools already do it.
None of this comes cheap, and we have called on the government to be creative about raising funds to pay for it – from diverting the proceeds of crime away from the Treasury black hole to our schools and communities, to a windfall tax on social media companies and mobile phone providers, to using National Lottery money more creatively.
Fundamentally though, it requires government to reassess its priorities and to put education, schools, and vulnerable children at the centre of its plans for levelling up and growth.
What is the alternative? Thousands of young people are being exploited by gangs and criminals, there are teenagers carrying knives, and we have a system that is churning out a shockingly high number of students without the most basic qualifications.
We cannot hope to build a modern, forward-looking economy and society until we tackle these problems – and I believe our recommendations can help to do it.
- Anne Longfield is chair of the Commission on Young Lives and the former children’s commissioner for England.
Further information & resources
- Commission on Young Lives: https://thecommissiononyounglives.co.uk/
- Commission on Young Lives: Hidden in Plain Sight: A national plan of action to support vulnerable teenagers to succeed and to protect them from adversity, exploitation, and harm (final report), November 2022: http://bit.ly/3g7WWTL