One cannot help but welcome also the promise of free universal education (not schooling) for all to the age of 18; an end, one hopes, to the current lottery of the 16-18 phase of education with poorly managed transitions and inadequate offers, which mean many young people find themselves either not in education or training that meet their needs - in low skilled, low waged work with no thought by their employer of fostering their learning - or indeed unemployed or disengaged.
When the 16-18 phase of learning becomes part of the mandatory offer then surely there will have to be an investment of resources into the alternative programmes of learning run in non-formal settings.
For many young people this will be the only kind of learning that will keep them in education until they are 18 - the only kind that recognises their potential and makes them feel good about themselves. So, good news but with an unpleasant sting in the tail!
Government believes, perhaps rightly, that the only way to get the mandatory nature of the 16-18 phase taken seriously is to introduce sanctions, civil at first, but culminating, probably, in criminal action, for those who persistently fail to engage. But action against who?
Ask nine out of ten government ministers if they think the failure of a young person to thrive and achieve in compulsory education is down to the individual pathology or structural and systemic failure and I bet they will say that for 99.9 per cent of young people it is the latter.
So why place the sanction on the young person or their family when the failure to engage 16-18s must be down to the fact that the 14-19 offer to the individual has been inadequate and not met their needs? It could be suggested that any sanction should in the first instance be against the state institution/s or strategic body responsible for the 14-19 offer to that young person - now that would focus minds and investment!
I believe the youth work sector needs to get behind the 16-18 entitlement and really make it work but I also believe we must vehemently resist becoming the cause of the criminalisation of some of the most vulnerable young people the system has already failed.
