Youth clubs won't tame the teenage yobs
As British teens are declared the worst behaved in Europe, Sue Palmer says the reasons are obvious but short-term gimmicks are not the answer. Plus Philip Johnston on youth clubs then and now
The air is filled with the sound of stable doors slamming. Now that British teenagers are officially the worst behaved in Europe, policy-makers of all complexions are battling it out to dream up half-baked schemes to redeem them. But can anyone seriously imagine today’s disaffected youth thronging to join in the ‘‘fun activities’’ of a youth club in every town, as suggested by Ed Balls, the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, in a multi-million pound scheme to keep them out of trouble by providing them with more ‘‘facilities’’?
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And as for the Institute for Public Policy Research’s suggestion of a legal extension of the school day, well that sounds suspiciously like internment. You’d need barbed wire to keep them in.
An alarming number of young people are now seriously damaged by the fall-out of 20 years of social and cultural change. Rather than trying to stick Elastoplast on the gaping wounds appearing in society, we should be looking at what’s gone so comprehensively wrong and trying to put it right. And, most critically, acknowledging that the problems start long before the teenage years.
Earlier this year, Unicef informed us that, on a wide range of measures of well-being, British children scored lower than any others in the developed world.
We can’t be surprised if unhappy children turn into self-destructive and anti-social adolescents. But, as one of the richest, most successful nations, we should be asking what’s gone wrong with childhood.
The answer isn’t rocket science. In the process of becoming so wealthy and successful, we took our eye off the ball in terms of rearing our young. We lost track of certain essential and very obvious ingredients for healthy child development – real food (as opposed to processed junk), real play (as opposed to sedentary screen-based entertainment), real education (not just the pursuit of test results and targets) and, perhaps most important of all, the opportunity for children to spend time talking to and learning from the loving adults in their lives.
It wasn’t that the adults of Britain stopped caring about our children. We just stopped caring about childcare. A competitive consumer economy depends on people believing that stuff is more important than relationships.
You’re a winner if you’ve got stuff, a loser if you haven’t. So earning enough for a new kitchen matters more than chatting to the children in the old one. Buying children off with the latest wide-screen television or PlayStation beats hanging around at home while they go out to play.
The day-to-day personal attention needed to nurture and civilise a child disappeared – because we just didn’t value it. As a harassed mother said recently to a nursery worker I met: ‘‘I don’t have time to bring up my child.’’ She’s far too busy out earning the money to pay the nursery fees.
Government policy has helped this problem on its way. New Labour’s twin aims were a strong economy and social justice. To achieve the former, they allowed the market to develop without restraint; to achieve the latter, they took unprecedented control of education.
In the absence of parental time and attention, the forces of marketing and education increasingly mould our children’s lives and minds. Marketers are deeply interested in children.
In the past decade, they’ve recognised the vast potential for generating sales through pester power and ‘‘guilt money’’ (parents buying presents to compensate for their lack of presence at home).
The nag factor is now a vital element in selling a vast range of products, from junk food to family holidays, to cars. And since most children now have a television in their bedroom, access to the minds of the next generation of consumers is startlingly easy.
Multi-million dollar budgets and the services of top psychologists are now devoted to winning children for particular brands by the promotion of a ‘‘cool’’ lifestyle – sexy, superficial, self-obsessed. Children learn early that winners are cool and losers aren’t.
It would be nice to think that education might counter the culture of cool by introducing children to other sources of human satisfaction – intellectual inquiry, art, music, sport – civilising and hopefully socialising them along the way.
But when government sets tough targets for achievement in national tests and ignores everything else, schools begin to focus exclusively on exam results, and the prospect of a wider, more liberal education flies out of the window.
These ham-fisted policies have also managed to infect education with a winners or losers ethic. Children from middle-class homes tend to do better in tests, so they’ve been winners from the start, while those from poorer backgrounds have sunk to the bottom.
To try to even things up, the Department for Education and Skills has tightened the screws on failing schools with even more targets – this year there are even some for language development at the age of five. But, like most of life’s important lessons, basic language skills are caught, not taught.
Children learn to talk through interaction with their parents and other adults at home. If, as is increasingly the case, they turn up at school with little previous experience beyond staring at a screen they’re in no fit state to enter the educational hurdles race.
Disadvantaged children today (especially boys, who lag behind girls in developmental terms) are the victims of a double whammy. An obsessively competitive education policy, hyper-controlled from the centre, means they’re victims at a very early age of a culture of failure at school. And a completely unregulated market economy then scoops them up into a self-indulgent – and ultimately self-destructive – culture of cool.
It’s no good trying to counter the effects of this mess with more state-sponsored ‘‘edu-care’’. For care to work, it has to be personal – full-time for tiny babies, quite a lot of time for the under-fives, and around the edges of the school day for older children.
It’s personal care that provides children with emotional resilience and a sense of social responsibility. Handing them over to state institutions doesn’t work. And leaving them at the mercy of predatory market forces is just neglectful.
In the long run, the pursuit of stuff is nowhere near as important for society as making sure that all our children get the love, time and attention they need.
What society needs is a complete overhaul of work-life balance and attitudes to child-rearing. Lame suggestions for engaging those youngsters we’ve already failed in ‘‘fun activities’ or compulsory extra hours in school aren’t just laughable, they’re tragic.
Table tennis, tatty sofas and tank tops
I can just about remember it. An overlit, large hall, attached to the church. There was one table-tennis table, invariably occupied, a couple of tatty sofas and a battered record player in the corner playing T-Rex. Cups of orange juice were lined up on a trestle table, behind which stood an earnest, older – though still young – man in an Arran sweater, who ran what we called a youth club.
It was an alternative to hanging around on the streets of north Kent, but a better one only when it was raining or below zero.
There were girls; but they loftily ignored the scrofulous, high-voiced adolescents in their tank tops and hung around those 15-year-olds who could already grow sideburns and looked 25. After all, they could get them a drink in the pub and probably offered something more, though we were never quite clear what until later.
We were the beneficiaries, if that was the word, from the findings of the Albermarle committee, which ushered in a golden age for youth provision. Before us, most young people were in the Scouts or the Boys’ Brigade. If they weren’t, they were probably about to start work, or in an apprenticeship, or even contemplating marriage.
By the beginning of the Seventies, however, a demographic surge of hormone-packed teenagers clearly threatened the stability of the nation. If we’d had the money to buy alcopops and vodka, we would have been the drunken terrors of the earth, as a think-tank study has suggested today’s youngsters are.
But the most our pocket money ran to was a bottle of cider – if we could find someone old enough and sufficiently irresponsible to buy one for us from the off-licence. Otherwise, we just hung around on the street, looking about as menacing and as feral as a flock of budgies.
So, what to do with us? Lady Albemarle’s answer was the youth club. Her 1960 report triggered a huge expansion of such centres, staffed by paid, full-time youth workers. It established a national youth service with the avowed aim ‘‘to encourage young people to come together into groups of their own choosing’’. The report called them ‘‘an opportunity for commitment, an opportunity for counsel and an opportunity for self-determination.’’
We saw them as an opportunity to pick up – or, let’s face it, not pick up – girls.
By the time we came along more than a decade after Albermarle, the youth club was probably past its heyday. Better television offered a reason to stay indoors. Schools began to provide more extra-curricular activities for the larger numbers remaining for A-levels and university. As the years went by, video games and internet cafes appeared far more enticing than standing around in an embarrassed huddle in a church hall.
Youth clubs all but disappeared, or so we were led to believe. Then, yesterday, we learnt that they are to be revived in a £124m investment paid for with money purloined by the Government from unclaimed bank assets, which is the sort of larcenous activity youth clubs were meant to avert.
Beverley Hughes, the children’s minister, said these new centres would be "exciting, modern, up-to-date places" – so they are evidently not modelled on their precursors. For some reason, she was of the view that growing up today was more ‘‘difficult and complex’’ than it was for us.
Well, at least today’s teenagers will not have to worry about having nowhere to go. In Bermondsey, south London, for instance, they can trot along to the new £10m Salmon Youth Centre, due to open soon on a site where a youth club has existed for 100 years. It is run by a Christian organisation, but any similarity with the draughty church hall of blessed memory ends there.
This is an all-purpose, multi-storeyed shrine to ‘‘Yoof’’, with a sports hall offering badminton, five-a-side football, basketball, volleyball, indoor hockey and trampolining. There are changing rooms and showers for 70 people, a fitness studio, bike store and workshop and a climbing wall.
For the artistically inclined, there are rehearsal and music studios, an art and craft room, seminar and training rooms, work and study spaces, training kitchen, reprographics and an IT suite. Then there is a large social area, chapel, group work rooms, volunteer and staff accommodation, minibus parking and camp store.
For goodness sake, there is even a counselling room. Now, that’s where we would have spent most of our time.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jhtml?xml=/portal/2007/07/27/nosplit/ft-teens-127.xml
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