Young people's most vital asset is hope

There is no shortage of debate now about the impact of the cuts in public services. We all have our evidence of how services are being reduced, and how many vulnerable families are receiving less support.

I think most of us realise that this process is only going to escalate – that the main cuts are going to take effect in the next two to three years, with many more job losses and service contractions. And we must all be aware by now of how the numbers of children growing up in poverty are rising fast.

But the most important factor is not the loss of services. It is not even the loss of income for children and families. It is the potential loss of hope. And maybe we can do something about that. Let me try to explain.

Everyone needs hope; the sense that our personal situation might improve, and that good things might happen to us. Young men who see no chance of getting a job in the foreseeable future can rapidly end up rejecting the education or training that is on offer, and sliding into negativity.

Teenage pregnancy rates are much higher among young women who see no clear opportunities ahead for satisfaction through work or training. The greatest provider of resilience to enable any young person to overcome short-term disadvantage is the belief that tomorrow may be better than today.

Today, many young people do not believe that they are going to be able to get jobs when they leave school or college. They see little chance of securing a decent income. The concept of a safe job is almost gone. Instead, early adult life can look like one long hazardous journey. For the strong, or the very able, the sense of constant challenge may be invigorating and motivating. But the proportion of those for whom the future looks bleak seems to be rising.

I wonder if the impact of this is all the greater because of the period of prosperity through which we have passed. For more than a decade, we have assumed that “things can only get better”; full employment seemed within reach; we became more prosperous each year; and everyone bought into the value base where growth and improvement was always to be desired.

Before this, in the 1980s, the prevailing philosophy was one of cut-throat competition – we talked about a generation of “Thatcher’s children” who seemed to see value in conflict. Even further back, in the 1960s many young people genuinely thought the world might end in a nuclear conflagration; planning for the future seemed futile, and many people lived ?for the day.

Each generation has needed to hope they could achieve what has been important to them. When hope has been threatened, then happiness and success have suffered in turn.

What does this mean for today? Well, we need to look beyond our more recent hopes, and revisit the value base we promote for young people. We know it is going to be many years before we return to days of prosperity, improvement and growth, if we ever do. So we must learn to value something else, something attainable and positive.

Well-paid jobs cannot be the only thing we encourage young people to value. We can instead nurture the importance of contributing to others, of living sustainably, of developing and retaining strong relationships, of living life well. All these, and many other things, are attainable even in recession, and some might say they have always been more important than making money and making material progress.

We must be explicit about such values. School, colleges, politicians – all still promote the values of materialism and growth. Stick to these, and we face many years of hopelessness for a young generation, the negative effects of which will reverberate and haunt us.

Times are hard today in children’s services. But we are still richer than the great majority of the world; our material living standards remain very high. It is the mismatch between our hopes and reality that causes the problem – and while it is hard for us to change the financial reality, we can start to change the hopes.

Sir Paul Ennals is former chair of the Children’s Workforce Development Council