The scale of the change required to help young people to flourish is becoming clear: we need to understand and support their expectations and aspirations and take a holistic and joined-up approach to their needs, based around their life cycle, not around the services provided to them.
These aims chime well with the notion of personalised support and the need to make the most of reduced budgets. But they present a serious challenge for those who are seeking to make them happen. If we are going to offer young people the best support and springboard we possibly can, we need all of those connected to them – schools, youth workers, colleges, apprentice schemes, employers and, in some cases, the police - to sign up to working together in a coherent way with a shared mission. We also need to do all we can to help families and communities support young people.
Tough to face as it might be, there are actually few alternatives to the above, unless we accept that we are not going to offer young people the help they need. So let's look to the positive, believe we can offer more and take the opportunity to be bold and begin to reshape support for young people in every aspect of their lives.
The starting point has to be in recognising the realities of young people's lives in all their complexities – the ambition, the confidence, the pressures, the vulnerabilities, as well as the potential and the barriers that too often get in the way. And it is here that we need better research and evidence.
We know the risk factors: poor parental supervision and discipline; a family history of criminal activity; parental attitudes that condone antisocial and criminal behaviour; low income; poor housing; and large family sizes. We also know that low achievement that begins in primary school, aggressive behaviour, bullying and truancy heighten these risks. All of these factors increase the likelihood of young people becoming involved in crime and antisocial behaviour; being unable to form positive relationships; leaving formal education without qualifications; misusing drugs, alcohol and other substances; and having school-aged pregnancies.
We also know that protective factors, such as strong bonds with family, friends, parents, teachers and community leaders are helpful. The development of social and learning skills to enable participation and devise solutions; and recognition and praise for positive behaviour all also help counteract the negatives.
But how many services systematically work with others to apply this knowledge in a coherent way? The starting point has to be early intervention in helping children and families get off to the best start. There is now little doubt that good support in a child's first three years can set them up for life. But it is not an inoculation. Continued support, especially at key points of risk, has to become the norm. Imagine if all secondary schools ran parenting courses during Year 7 to help parents learn to listen, emphasise and set boundaries - all the skills we know they will need in spades in the years to follow.
Community-based provision is also important. We should have children's centres offering support from nought to 19, working alongside schools and with communities themselves doing their bit. These "community hubs" would be places where young people - and parents too - could go to find help, trusted advice and good things going on.
The joined-up support we expect children's centres to offer young children and their families could be translated to the teenage years with better links to healthcare, colleges, music, sports, the police and the Troubled Families teams. Some of these links are in schools already and many more could be for young people. There would also be more intensive support if things began to go wrong – the turnaround equivalent for teenagers.
So what do we need to do next to help young people flourish? We need to change the system and attitudes towards young people; make them and their families a top priority; turn services inside out and make them much more joined up. We need to improve our understanding of the evidence of what works; and increase understanding, skills and abilities on how we work with young people and families – taking a whole-family, strength-based approach.
We need to create the environmental conditions that enable prevention, early intervention and youth and family support to thrive; offer leadership, professional motivations, skills and collaboration; and improve the inter-professional respect of young people, families and each other. We need to focus more on the needs of young people and their families in the years of transition between primary and secondary school, when a young person's life undergoes some of its most radical changes.
A simple starting point would be to communicate with young people and their families as they move to secondary school, to work out with them what extra help they might need to help achieve their ambitions. This extra help could be paid, in part at least, by the pupil premium. Again, simple stuff. But a good start.
