Teachers will easily picture the scene. It is four o’clock, the corridors have emptied and a kid knocks on your classroom door on the hunt for some advice. You stop your marking mission, welcome them in give them your full attention as they set out their latest dilemma. Your brow furrows as you realise it is pretty serious – it concerns their whole future and it turns out that their options are limited. The problem is that their preferred option would put them in a situation where their actions break the law. What do you do?
I hope I would struggle to find a teacher out there who would back the law-breaking option. But what if both the teacher and student didn’t know the law? What if that led to teachers unknowingly advising kids to make ‘law-breaking’ choices? Unfortunately this is not a ‘what if’ – it is happening in schools up and down the country today.
Here is how. Labour’s Education and Skills Act 2008 set out plans to raise the participation age to 18 by 2015 in order to tackle the issue around young people not in education, employment or training head-on. Participation was the key word – the act took away two options for young people when they finish their GCSEs. They can’t choose to do nothing and they cannot choose to get a job that has no accredited training attached to it. Put simply – 1) no bumming around and 2) no dead end jobs. Everything else from school to college, volunteering with accredited training or an apprenticeship was to be encouraged.
What was unusual (and brilliant) about this act was that the duty to participate (ie doing something that’s not option 1 or 2) was placed directly on the young people – not on their parents – with supporting duties on local authorities (to provide opportunities) and employers (to check that any kids they hired were enrolled on a part-time course). While everyone has a role to play if this is going to work, the young person is in the driving seat, taking responsibility for their life and future. This was a bold step forward.
When the Tories came in in 2010 an important change was made to the act – specifically the enforcement clauses were paused and the secretary of state was given the power to implement them when they felt that the time was right. Something weak about ‘burdens on employers’ was cited as the rationale and the legislation was altered accordingly.
However, while small, this was a dramatically important amendment. The change created a fundamentally new act that still places all of the same legal duties on young people, local authorities and employers but, crucially, removes any powers to intervene if any of those groups fail to comply with the expectations placed on them. Welcome to Limbo Law – the law with no teeth.
This change has two important consequences. First, it fails to tackle the issue of young people taking option 1 or 2, the very issue which the act sought to address in the first place. We know that spending time NEET is a major predictor of later unemployment, low income, depression and poor mental health. For those who console ourselves with the thought that education is not a matter of life and death, actually for these young people, for the most vulnerable children and young people in our society, it really is. Research in the north of England estimates that one in seven long-term young people who are NEET are dead within a decade. This change therefore represents a huge step backwards.
Second, it leaves legislation on the statute books that leads to a situation where schools, parents and other professionals may be advising children to break the law when they are encouraged to take a job that has no accredited training attached or alongside it. There is something very uncomfortable about the message this sends. Is breaking the law OK if there is no enforcement to follow it up? Is it breaking the law if nobody knows you are doing it? What if your most trusted teacher has encouraged you to do it? I suspect the majority of the profession would agree with me that this sits contrary to some of our basic values.
Not only is the system therefore failing these young people by allowing the damaging status quo to persist, through the creation of this Limbo Law it is criminalising them at the same time.
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Matthew Hood is a teacher and a member of Progress
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