Learning to Fail

How Society Lets Young People Down

Fran Abrams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135264826
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

During a decade of relative prosperity from the mid-1990s onward, governments across the developed world failed to crack one major issue – youth unemployment. Even when economic growth was strong, one young person in 10 in the United Kingdom was neither working nor learning. As the boom ended, the number of young people dropping out after leaving school – already acknowledged to be too high - began to rise at an alarming rate. As governments face up to the prospect of a new generation on the dole, this book examines the root causes of the problem.

By holding a light to the lives and attitudes of eight young people, their families, their teachers and their potential employers, this book will challenge much of what has been said about educational success and failure in the past 20 years. For two decades, policy makers largely assumed schools were the key to ensuring young people got the best possible start in life. Yet for many children the path to failure began well before their first day at school.

Through the stories of these young people, this book reveals how marginalised young people are let down on every step of their journey. Growing up in areas where aspiration has died or barely ever existed, with parents who struggle to guide them on life in the 21st century, they are let down by schools where teachers underestimate them, by colleges and careers advisers who mislead them and by an employment market which has forgotten how to care or to nurture. Learning to Fail goes behind the headlines about anti-social behaviour, drugs and teenage pregnancy to paint a picture of real lives and how they are affected by outside forces. It gives a voice to ordinary parents and youngsters so they can speak for themselves about what Britain needs to do to turn its teenage failures into a success story.

Chapter 1
The importance of places

Just off the traffic-clogged East India Dock Road, through a concrete archway and across a bleak square surrounded by three-storey 1960s blocks, was a flight of stairs leading to the maisonette where Yasmin lived. Running down these one muggy August morning I came face-to-face with a striking piece of graffiti: on the painted breeze-block wall were a dozen sets of initials set out in two neatly sprayed columns, and next to them an inscription: “E14 4 LYF”.

Halfway out into the pedestrianised square, with its moth-eaten shrubs and its air of decay, I found myself sufficiently intrigued to turn back for a second look. Something about the work said it was more than the mere defiant scribbling of some bored teenager. The care with which it had been placed there spoke of serious intent, almost of ceremony. What intent, I wondered? To express some lasting bond, some deep solidarity between these 12 unseen youths, certainly. But “E14 4 LYF”? Not “E14 Rules” or “E14 Rocks”, not even “E14 for ever”. For Life. It looked almost a statement of resignation, like some sort of sentence – a promise that this group would stick together and never leave, perhaps despite some perceived pressure to do so. Or maybe an affirmation that even if they did go, their little piece of this London postcode would go with them.

This little inscription struck me as symptomatic of something vital to understanding why so many young people failed to make a neat transition between the worlds of education and work: the centrality of place to their decision-making processes.

None of the young people I met on this journey had come from “London” or “Manchester” or “Barnsley”. They came from Wombwell, or Kendray, or Collyhurst, or Cheetham Hill. When the spray-painters of Poplar did their work they were almost certainly not even referring to the whole of London East 14, which stretched from the smart gastropubs and converted warehouse dwellings of Limehouse in the north to the white working class enclaves around Island Gardens in the south. This tight little group would surely have seen its turf as extending merely to a few streets around this square. When I Googled “E14 4 LYF” I turned up a web page for East London Bengali rappers and the battle cry: “BuRdEtT E14 RuN Da EaSt BuRdEtT MaSsIvE 4 LyF E14” – a reference to a gang based on a thoroughfare that ran north from the East India Dock Road just opposite Yasmin’s block. Places mattered to most of the young people I met, and many of them saw “their” places in quite precise, tightly drawn terms.

How do places affect life chances?

How much difference did this make, I wondered? Was this territoriality just another version of the tribalism long since associated with youth cultures and football teams? Or was it something deeper, more likely to narrow young people’s horizons and restrict the choices they might make in the future? In short, having decided to stay rather than to go elsewhere, would those dozen spraypainters from Poplar be more or less likely to succeed in life as a result?

The first question, it seemed, was whether people in poorer areas were actually more or less geographically mobile than others. Were they, as some commentators had suggested, held back by their own inability or reluctance to move? Academic studies seemed to suggest the answer to this question was not simple.

Researchers from the University of Teesside, for instance, interviewed young people in post-industrial neighbourhoods in the late 1990s, and returned five years later to find out whether they had moved, and how far. While many had moved locally, only two had left the area. There was a similar pattern among the eight young people I chose to follow, too. One had lived in the same house all her life; the other seven had had a total of 25 moves between them. But only two had ever moved more than a few miles – one from West Africa to London and one from Ipswich to London. Five had been forced to move, sometimes several times, because of family problems. One had had a total of eight moves, largely prompted by poverty and homelessness.

It seemed the young people I met were suffering a kind of double whammy – they had to deal with frequent disruptions caused by house moves, which often forced them to go to a new school and make new friends even when they had only moved a short distance. Yet while their more affluent contemporaries might have suffered the same disruption it was likely to have been counterbalanced by them getting more space or going to a higher-achieving school – the moves of the young people I met were often to communities and housing no better than that they had left. While some of them had moved to get an extra bedroom or two, others had been on downward spirals in which family breakdown led to a move to a worse area, which then led to them making the “wrong” kind of new friends, which then led to further moves.

So, it seemed clear places did have a practical effect on the young people growing up in them. If they lived in areas where there were few jobs and the schools were struggling under the weight of social problems, they would have to work hard to overcome those problems. In some cases, families who had lived in previously quite prosperous – though solidly working class – areas had found themselves, without moving at all, in places that had become increasingly dysfunctional.

Barnsley

“I don’t know if it’s me being sensitive,” Chris Sorby told me. “But Barnsley does seem to have an image problem with the rest of the country. It appears to be the butt of people’s jokes.”

The day before I met Sorby, the manager of a private-sector company that ran the contract to provide careers advice to teenagers in the town, Barnsley had beaten Liverpool in the FA cup and had won the chance to play Chelsea at home. I parked up on a freezing February day and wandered through a bustling, attractive town centre, a solidly built place that felt as if its long-dead architects had a real sense of civic pride. It was hard to tell whether the atmosphere had been boosted by the win, but the traders in the market hall did seem to have something of a spring in their step.

The BBC had been up to do a report, Sorby told me over a cup of tea in the warm offices of Nord Anglia Lifetime Development, but even through the haze of euphoria the coverage had been viewed locally with some suspicion: was Huw Edwards taking the mickey?

“They wheeled out Dickie Bird, that old Barnsley stereotype,” Sorby said. “And a pub landlady who said, ‘We’re all hard up here, we can play anyone.’ I think people here play up to it. It’s almost as if we know what they want, and we give it to them. I wonder whether they would have bothered if it had been some place down south. There are some places that get treated differently, and Barnsley seems to be one of those.”

If the people of Barnsley were a little chippy it was hardly surprising, for the town had taken some serious knocks in recent years. The closure of its pits, its sewing factories and its glassworks had left it struggling to re-establish a clear identity. A year or so before I arrived, that struggle manifested itself in hard statistics when Barnsley was officially declared as having the highest proportion of disengaged 16–18 year-olds in England. In late 2005 one in seven had been out of work and out of education.

Since then a co-ordinated effort had been made, and the figure had begun to drop. Barnsley, unlike Manchester or the London boroughs I visited, had a monthly “strategy group” to deal with the issue, chaired by its director of children’s services and attended by key people working in relevant education and community organisations. Yet everyone agreed the history of the area made the job a tough one.

Almost everyone I spoke to in Barnsley talked about generation following unemployed generation, about a lack of aspiration that sprang historically from an abundance of well-paid manual work. Yet the authors of a classic 1950s study of a Yorkshire coalfield community – pseudonymously named Ashton – gave rather a different picture. It described a world in which at least a proportion of families had had high aspirations for their children, although in most cases it seemed they had led nowhere: “It is reliably learned the mining areas are the best areas in all Yorkshire for selling such publications as The Children’s Encyclopaedia – publications which cost from £12 to £15 and which parents buy because they want to ‘do something’ for the child’s education,” they explained, before going on to describe how they asked a sample of residents whether they would encourage their sons to be miners. Two-thirds – about the same as the proportion of the adult male population that actually were miners – said they would not: “Indeed this question was only asked in order to confirm the statement heard many hundreds of times in the Yorkshire coalfields since 1945: ‘I hope no son of mine ever works in the pit.’”

Many young men would find jobs as errand-boys, drivers’ mates or builders’ labourers, only to be drawn into mining by the wages, they said. Yet they also described a community in which the work ethic was not always strong, perhaps as a result of jobs being both easily available and often unpleasant:

In Ashton the working men’s clubs hold a weekly draw, and winnings can amount to £60. For a prizewinner in this draw to turn up with his workmates on Monday morning would occasion a great deal of surprised comment. It is thought natural to take the opportunity of not going to work when such a windfall occurs. ‘Winning the pools’ is the great vision of ending worries and giving a man the chance to decide his own destiny, to be no longer at the mercy of all that his job represents. Money gained in such ways holds out the possibility of breaking down barriers.

It was something of a paradox about Barnsley that when outsiders arrived, its people formed what seemed to be quite a tight little unit with a clear idea of who and what they were. Yet in fact it was nothing of the kind, and never had been. Within its own family, there were very clear divisions.

“Kendray is only about – what? – two miles from Barnsley centre, it’s walkable. Yet it’s a distinct community,” Sorby told me. “And people there would present issues like travel to Barnsley as a barrier to working here.” One of my interviewees, who lived in Wombwell, told me she was not local though she had lived there 20 years or so: she came from Jump, which was two miles further down the road. In the days of the pits, people lived and worked within their own small community. Very few people thought they came from Barnsley; each village had its own identity and the rivalries between them were intense.

“It does link back to the mining communities,” Sorby said. “The vast majority of the villages probably exist because there was a pit there. There were a number of sewing firms too – SR Gent was very dependent on Marks and Spencer, with its ‘Buy British’ slogan that it used to have. They were industries that were reliable. The pit was a job for life. That whole thing’s changed. You had sewing firms, you had M and S, and you just assumed that would always be there.”

Everyone in Barnsley knew things were not what they used to be. Yet on one level, the town did seem sometimes to be in denial about the fact that its bedrock had been so radically changed.

“It goes back to that sort of pit village where all your employment needs and all your shopping needs and whatever are met within the community,” said Sorby’s colleague Angela Lomax. “You do still stumble across these attitudes, that education isn’t that important, that it doesn’t matter what you do, that you can leave school and get a job. I’m not sure what mythical job that is. There’s a misunderstanding from parents’ perspective about the nature of the economy. I think they saw grandparents maybe having certain things and there’s an assumption they can too.”

The type of job people expected to get had changed, though. “I was working at Willowgarth, near Grimethorpe, before Christmas,” said Lomax. “I had one young lady who wanted to work in a hairdressers, but it had to be at Grimethorpe. I said, ‘Tell me where the hairdresser’s are in Grimethorpe’. Between us we came up with one. You try to unpick the reasons why, but sometimes they don’t know, it’s almost what they’ve been brought up with.”

Parents’ attitudes to their children’s futures had changed little in recent decades, she said. “It’s almost that they want to keep people here. You have instances of young people who have the potential to go to university, and our role is to encourage that. But then they go to the family and they say: ‘What does someone like you want to do something like that for?’”

After I left the town centre I drove the couple of miles south-east to Kendray, a post-war estate on the side of a hill which formed part of Barnsley’s urban sprawl. Not much further out, the borough became a series of villages with open countryside in between.

My first impression of Kendray was that it looked like a demolition site. Coming in at the bottom end of the estate there were piles of rubble, giving way further up to dilapidated houses and run-down shops. But the centre of the estate was a revelation. At its heart was a large, well-tended green area with modern play equipment. Further up the hill was a huge new health centre, a new primary school, a new police station. Across the green, a private-sector company was building new houses. Kendray was a place in transition.

The offices of the Kendray Initiative were just off the green in a former council house with no visible doorbell. Eventually I managed to attract someone’s attention and the heavy steel security door was opened – the bell was hidden in a special place where local children could not find it, I was told – life here was still far from perfect. Over a cup of tea – Barnsley is a great place for teadrinkers – the initiative’s programme manager, Elaine Equeall, gave me some history.

“It had become – I hate the expression – a sink estate where people didn’t want to live,” she said. “High levels of crime, really poor quality roads and gardens. The initiative came from the ground up. There’s a lot of people who live in this area who’ve been here a significant number of years and have seen it deteriorate, and they’ve said: ‘Enough’s enough.’”

The initiative started in 2001, with a group of residents laying the foundations. More than £3 million in public money was promised over seven years, with the environment and crime being the first issues to be tackled. And to a very large extent, it worked. At the start, there were 240 empty homes on the estate. By early 2007, there was a waiting list for housing in Kendray. The estate had seen a huge improvement, Equeall said, though some of the underlying problems were still there.

We had been joined by Karl Lyons, who worked part-time at the local referral unit for pupils excluded from school but who had also been knocking on doors in Kendray looking for disengaged youngsters.

“They were the forgotten army. But this year for the first time because of the pressure from central government, there’s been a huge amount of work done,” he explained.

Lyons had lived in Barnsley all his life but had worked elsewhere, most recently as the vice-principal of a further education college in Nottingham. Now, towards the end of his career, he had returned to work in this changed world.

“I worked as a teacher in Darfield between 1975 and 1980 – if the boys wanted to get a job there were four pits within walking distance. They didn’t need any qualifications. There was a sewing factory that took every single girl without qualifications who wanted to work. It was a working class area – not particularly poor but nevertheless working class – with low aspirations but with a work ethic. That would have been replicated in virtually every village round here.

“People say there are jobs, and there are, but what’s replaced the reasonable levels of income that the pits used to provide, and the sewing factories? Villages were sustained by the mines, corner shops – they’ve disappeared. What’s replaced the reasonable wage levels of the pits is very low-level minimum wage temporary contracts. The choice of employment now is very minimal,” he said. “This work’s opened my eyes to what’s not been replaced.”

Whenever I left Barnsley to drive home down the A1, I left with mixed feelings. Unlike London, which had many identities and much that was confusing and alienating about it, Barnsley had coherence and warmth. Yet that coherence seemed in part to have been achieved by absorbing a sense of loss, of absence. The sense of belonging, of identity that came with the mines and the factories, had not gone away with them; not completely. It was still there. Now it was an identity sustained not by the presence of those things, but in a strange way by their absence. Barnsley was a place that used to have pits; a place that used to have factories; a place that used to have a clear reason for existing.

The role of local networks

It was clear, then, that coherence and local pride had to some extent become negative factors for young people in Barnsley. They had grown up with a sense of loss, and with an almost fierce kind of pride in their town and its heritage. They sometimes seemed to have a feeling that other places, other futures, were for other people and not for them. Yet the strength of their communities, their social and family networks, was real.

Barnsley was not the only place where I found local social networks strikingly strong. In Manchester, I was out and about one day when the young man who was showing me around was introduced to a teenager of a similar age who lived a mile or so away from him. Within minutes the two of them had established they had several friends in common, and when we all repaired to someone’s mother’s house for a cup of tea she was quickly able to add a few more mutual acquaintances to the list. That might sound trivial, but my feeling was that it mattered. In their classic study of life in the East End in the 1950s, Family and Kinship in East London, Mich...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• The Young People (Some Names have been Changed)
• Introduction
• 1. The Importance of Places
• 2. Changing Chances
• 3. Aspirations
• 4. Poverty
• 5. School
• 6. Changing Families
• 7. Street Life
• 8. Making Choices
• 9. Further Trouble
• 10. The World of Work
• 11. Race Matters
• 12. The Difference for Girls
• 13. Reaching out
• Conclusions
• Footnote – Outcomes
• Bibliography