Raising the School Leaving Age is not the Answer

Evening Standard

Raising the school leaving age to 18, an idea floated by the education secretary and now apparently backed by the Chancellor, is one of those policies that looks like a good idea on paper. The Education Secretary Alan Johnson is right to say that 'it should be just as unacceptable to see a 16-year-old working and not receiving any training or schooling' as it would be to see a seeing a 14-year-old at work.

Yet it has so obviously been thought up by someone who has never actually had to try and teach a bunch of truculent adolescents who would rather be anywhere but in the classroom. The theoretical case for putting up the school leaving age is impeccable. In Britain today 11 per cent of 16- to 18-year-olds are outside education, training or work, and the number is rising. We are close to the bottom of the European league table for young people staying on education and training. In a competitive global economy, young people who neither work nor stay on in education are heading for the dustbin of life. And a good proportion of the anti-social behaviour, gang, knife and gun problems in an area such as Hackney are caused by such just young people.

The trouble is that if a young person has to be coerced into staying on at school (or in some sort of training) past the age of 16, then it is already too late. The Government's last big initiative to encourage children to stay on was the education maintenance allowance. It was a perfectly good idea in principle. But I have friends who have attempted to teach young people who are turning up at college only in order to pick up the payment of £30. They report that it is a thoroughly demoralising experience. And now the Government is proposing to force young people, who were happy to forgo £30 for the pleasures of lying in bed all day or low-level criminality, to attend school or college.

Your heart bleeds for the people who will have to teach them. Raising the school leaving age is putting the cart before the horse. We need to deal first with the 20 per cent of children who by age 11 are still functionally illiterate. And we need to pay attention to why so many teenagers are bored and disaffected with education long before the age of 16: all those thousands of consumers cannot be wrong. And we need to invest more in the further education sector too. Of course everyone should stay in education or training until at least the age of 18. The trick is to make them want to.

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