Outlaw alienation

Civitas, 23 March 2007

Education secretary Alan Johnson’s announcement that school dropouts will be criminalized has met a mixed response. ‘Attendance orders’ will be slapped down on teenagers detailing a course that they should attend; teens who breach the order face a £50 fixed penalty or prosecution. As Alex Frean points out in The Times, criminalizing school non-attendance is not in itself a new concept in our education system. What’s new is that the move criminalizes pupil rather than parent, and of course that the offence applies to over 16-year-olds.

So what is the thinking behind the move? ‘It should be as unacceptable to see a 16-year-old in the workplace without any education or training as it was to see a 14-year-old, which used to be common before the Butler Education Act [of 1944],’ says Alan Johnson. What Mr Johnson forgets, is the increasingly high number of under-16 year olds who truant today. This provides a pertinent lesson for the case against raising the leaving age: pupils will wish to stay in education if it’s relevant to them; compelling them to stay will be necessary only if education isn’t successful in this respect.
The response on this issue is mixed because of the proposed tactics – make pupils stay on – but there is consensus on the fact that the current situation is a problem. That Britain ranks bottom amongst developed countries when it comes to staying-on rates is an indictment of pupils’ experiences of school up to 16 as well as what’s on offer post-16. For many teens who aren’t going to go into ‘academic’ work in adult life more school is often unappealing and not very useful. Clearly this is the issue that needs to be remedied. Let’s outlaw alienated youngsters rather than post-16 non-attendance.