In his speech to the Labour party annual conference in 1999 the prime minister spoke movingly about the differing life chances of two fictional children born on the same day. It was a story everyone recognised. One child born into a secure and prosperous family, where education and personal advancement were valued and university and a career were assumed.
The second child, born to a single parent, struggling to make ends meet, underachieved academically and slowly drifted into a life of crime. It may have been just a metaphor in a speech, but look beyond that and you come up with the greatest challenge facing modern progressive governments: the persistence of stark social inequalities in the life chances of children.
According to government figures, there are currently 649,000 sixteen to 24 year-olds in the UK who are economically inactive and not in full-time education. 405,000 more young people are unemployed and 10,000 fifteen year-olds are ‘missing’ from schools in England and are not accounted for anywhere else. These are young people who, despite government innovations like Connexions and the New Deal, remain disconnected from mainstream society and are consequently at risk of long-term poverty and possible offending.
The multi-faceted social exclusion experienced by disadvantaged young people is well documented. Almost four percent of sixteen to 24 year-olds offend. One in 20 sixteen to 24 year-olds have used class A drugs in the last twelve months. Approximately 50,000 young people in the UK are taking anti-depressants and 96 percent of eleven to fifteen year-olds surveyed by The Howard League for Penal Reform have been victims of crime.
Too often young people are being held back from achieving their ambitions by a lack of confidence, low motivation, a lack of suitable job opportunities and early parenthood.
A recent report published by the Prince’s Trust sets out the reality of life for the young people in Tony Blair’s analogy. The Trust asked 888 young people (782 categorised as disadvantaged and a control group of 106 young people who were not considered disadvantaged) about their aspirations, the barriers they faced and about how they wanted services provided to them.
The most striking aspect of the research was that disadvantaged young people expressed the same simple hopes and aspirations as their more privileged peers. They wanted a family, an interesting job and sufficient income to support their lifestyle. Beyond this, they wanted a nice home, the ability to make their own choices in life, and to have friends. Researchers found that these aspirations shift with age and maturity, and were not related to social inclusion. Those aged fourteen to seventeen placed greater emphasis on work and material achievements, while those aged eighteen to 25 focused on relationships and self-fulfilment.
What does separate disadvantaged young people from their mainstream peers is a tendency to favour short-term, tangible financial benefits (for example low-paid, short-term employment or state benefits) without recognising the long-term implications of leaving school without qualifications. Too often the difference between the two groups is that disadvantaged young people may not enjoy either the encouragement or the continuing financial support of parents necessary to think about their lives in a long-term way.
This is why the roll out of education maintenance allowances should be warmly welcomed. The pilots achieved a six percent increase in the number of eligible young people staying on at school. If this is replicated nationally, just under 20,000 more young people might give further education a chance.
Young people have simple and universal aspirations. Too often in the past, the services provided to the disadvantaged were stigmatising and take-up was too low. The challenge for a third-term Labour government is to give excluded children and young people a genuine chance to work, get an education, and live a happy and fulfilling life. Since 1997, there has been progress. But more must be done to ensure universal services are tailored to individual need, giving every child the best possible start in life.