Almost every aspect of how Britain's schools are run discourages the personal development that young people need

We've forgotten to teach social skills, and our children are stagnating

Last year a bright 15-year-old, who comes from a home without books but goes to a highly rated grammar school, came to stay with us for a week over Christmas. At first he said little. It was clear that he wasn't accustomed to laying tables for dinner or making conversation with adults. Then, as he listened to other people's noisy discussions, he began to ask tentative questions. What is a government minister? What is the EU? Who's Mozart? Did Japan fight in the second world war? What does Palestine mean, and what does it have to do with Israel? His curiosity and his intelligence were obvious. His inarticulacy and lack of a general or social education, despite his apparently desirable schooling, were heartbreaking.

Neil had never been to the theatre. No one had ever read him a book. He shared a room with an unemployed, drug-taking brother. Most of his friends had gone to tough comprehensives and were now dropouts getting into trouble. He had made some middle-class friends when he started secondary school, but as time had gone on the gulf between his experiences and theirs had begun to seem unbridgable, and the friendships faded. School was an exam factory, where teachers had no time to answer broader questions, open doors or give individual children faith in their futures. Since Neil knew no one who had ever escaped from a rough area like his, he had stopped believing that he might be an exception. Isolated at home by his aspirations and intellect and at school by his background, he had become deeply depressed and taken to truanting.

This week's report by the Institute of Public Policy Research on raising young people in Britain, Freedom's Orphans, makes grim reading. Neil's experience is increasingly common. There is a widening gulf between the way the more affluent majority socialise their children and what happens to those with fewer resources. The children who don't have the same experience of socialisation are being permanently left behind.

As the IPPR's analysis of recent research makes clear, this is a relatively new phenomenon. We already know, from the dual studies of children born in a single week in 1958 and in 1970, that social mobility weakened dramatically over a short period. There was an 84% chance that a child born into the richest quarter of the population in 1958 would no longer have been in that position by their early 30s. But almost half of the babies born into wealthier families in 1970 would remain in the wealthiest group.

The IPPR has identified that, over a dozen years, personal and social skills, such as self-control, self-motivation and an ability to get on with others, became 33 times more important in determining children's futures than they had been before. In 1958, those with low incomes were only marginally less likely to develop good social skills than the well off. But the 1970 cohort showed a big gap in these skills between the classes.

The earlier group had easier paths to adulthood. Most lived with both parents, and could continue with education or go straight into relatively well-paid low-skilled or unskilled jobs at 16. Deindustrialisation, and the rapid changes to family and social structure, changed all that. Youth labour markets collapsed, families became more fragile and complex, more mothers went out to work. Major inequalities emerged in the way different classes were socialising their young. Rising affluence at the top let richer groups pay for their children to take part in structured and fulfilling activities. But, lower down, a significant proportion of children and young people had both less security in their lives, and less time with known and trusted adults to help them make sense of it. As a result, these individuals were far less likely than others to develop the resilience, the confidence and the abilities they needed to take up opportunities in this new and more uncertain world.

The IPPR warns that these divisions in society are as real now, and likely to grow wider. In language particularly strong for a leftwing thinktank, it says that the changes to families have undermined their ability to socialise young people, and that communities have lost their ability to enforce social norms. Adults in Britain are less likely to intervene when they see antisocial behaviour than any others in Europe. It concludes that "we have failed to replace the basic building blocks of socialisation (family, religion ... and rigid employment paths) with any coherent alternative".

This is an important intervention because it begins to answer a question that has so puzzled the government: why, despite so many efforts, there is still so little social mobility, so much bad behaviour in public, and so little improvement in the educational achievements of the deprived. The government has always taken a mechanistic view of how people behave, tending to assume that providing opportunity, exhortation and penalties will be enough. It needs to start thinking about social and psychological barriers, and how children can be helped to acquire desirable qualities like consideration and drive. So far it has engaged in that argument in just one area; Sure Start nurseries were set up to give infants the security and stimulation that would develop their personalities and minds. But beyond that age there has been little thought about how to bring children up.

Many initiatives may be needed, but the one institution available to every child is school. Unfortunately, almost every aspect of how schools are currently run discourages the development of the personal skills so many children need. Five years ago, anxious infant teachers were telling me that many pupils were coming into school unable to talk properly, because they had so little engagement with adults, and yet the national curriculum was only interested in teaching them to read or write. There was no time for the conversations these children needed.

Schools concentrate on learning for tests, with no time to respond to children who can't keep up. The resulting bewilderment, and sense of being part of an unresponsive machine, breeds resentment and hopelessness in those left behind. It needn't be this way. New research shows that children in schools which encouraged reading for pleasure have more self-control and higher self-esteem. But those schools are rare, and we are encouraging the opposite. Two years ago, figures showed that British teenagers who had been brought up with the national literacy hour had the some of the highest reading ages in Europe, but enjoyed it least.

Changing schools' approach to children would demand radical rethinking. At the moment there is a vacuum in many young people's lives, where adult guidance and support used to be. We are worse off than many European countries because we fail to match either of two patterns. As the IPPR director has pointed out, in southern Europe young people grow up surrounded by strong family, community and religious bonds. In northern Europe, where Scandinavian countries have patterns of family breakdown and single parenthood similar to ours, the state spends much more money than we are willing to do providing social organisations that can fill the remaining gaps.

We have arrived at the worst of both worlds. Both morality and self-interest argue for a change. We can't afford to let the Neils or their friends continue to be so dangerously and pointlessly adrift.

Jenni Russell
8 November 2006

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1942046,00.html

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