Service as a rite of passage
9th March 2009
There are three recurring discussions I have with taxi drivers as I travel around the country- the weather (usually grey), where I'm from (Wakefield) and the state of the youth of today (the top two solutions proposed by most drivers being national service or bringing back the birch!)
It was during such a journey that I considered the need for a third response to the 'youth of today'; what is it that makes a young person a citizen and how can this be made real for them? I asked myself do we need a modern day rite of passage; acknowledging the journey from youth to adulthood in some way that gives the individual that sense of transition and arrival in a new emotional place in the world? The keys to the pub as it were.
It was in this vein that myself and Dr Howard Williamson, Professor of European Youth Policy at the University of Glamorgan, had one of our many conversations about the real need for a youth transition initiative. Howard had written a paper in 1997 and together we refreshed it in 2002 on the basis of our debate. As pointed out in the paper, this debate is not new. In the 1980's as youth unemployment became a critical social issue, there were calls from a variety of sources for such a programme. The debate then between a choice-based approach or a compulsory one. My view is that there is very much a case for a universal youth transition programme in this country. A compulsory programme that's fun, engaging and developmental, designed with and by young people. Compulsory for the same reason that school is: we need to ensure every child benefits not just those that have the support to make the right choice. I could go on, but I've reached my word limit and it's time to get out of the cab!
Lord Victor Adebowale MA, CBE ?
Finding a silver bullet
The idea of compulsory national civic service for young people outlined by James Crabtree and Frank Field MP is interesting, but not new.? For many years politicians and policymakers have called for such a scheme, envisaging it as a silver bullet to perceived youth alienation and apathy.? While I agree with the authors, that we must do something for the Class of 2009 and to tackle rising youth unemployment, the answer lies in offering attractive and compelling volunteering opportunities that appeal to young people, not bringing back a form of conscription in civic service.
The outcome of the last big and considered debate on a compulsory scheme was the creation of 'v', an organisation which I chair.? Established in 2006, v is mandated to inspire a new generation to serve society by increasing the diversity, quality and quantity of volunteering opportunities.? By bringing together the private sector, government and the community and voluntary sectors, v has built a network of national and grass roots organisations that together have created over 875,000 full-time, part-time and short-term volunteering opportunities in such areas as the environment, fashion, technology, poverty, health, the arts and mentoring.? v's new full-time programme, vtalent year, extends these opportunities even further into some of our most disadvantaged communities.? What should we learn from this experience?? Well, it is clear that the real silver bullet for UK policymakers is tapping into young peoples' passions and interests.? This is also the model followed by AmeriCorps, the US organisation so often cited in these discussions; compelling opportunities, not compulsory service.
If changing economic and social times are increasing the political attractiveness of a compulsory scheme and reawakening the debate, then young peoples' views and opinions should be central to the discussion.? v and its partners will be working to ensure that is the case over the coming months.
It is possible to provide young people with compelling full-time volunteering opportunities that would harness their talents and dynamism and offer a constructive route through this recession.? This would need resources and co-ordination, but would cost a fraction of the expensive national 'grande project' imagined by Crabtree and Field. It would also be far more effective.
Rod Aldridge, Chairman of v, the youth volunteering organisation
Too good to be true?
A national citizenship service, promoting identity, community, self-esteem and confidence in sounds too good to be true – and it is.
Yes, these are values we want to promote, but they are better promoted in the real world of work rather than the mock 'communities' invented by politicians. It is the same with citizenship classes in schools. They sound like a great idea, teaching kids how to become upright, engaged citizens. But it boils down to politically correct mush.
There is no end of useful work that young people could do, much of it work that would improve our environment and our lives. But that's not what they would end up doing. Who is going to be organizing these activities? A particular kind of local official whose life is to promote some notion of 'community responsibility' that has no clear meaning at all.
When researching my new book, I found that once-useful activities like voluntary service are now something that kids do solely to tick a box on their CV, not because of any real motivation to make people's lives better. A whole industry has sprung up, charging parents thousands to make sure their kids get that politically-approved, but barren, tick.
A national citizenship service would have the same artificiality. It will target political imperatives, not real needs, and sadly won't teach kids much about real human relationships at all.
We actually already have a 'national citizenship service' for young people. It has the benefit of being a really good idea, and not a daft one. It is called school. Despite spending an additional 68% in real terms since 1997-1998, our funding system rewards failure, swamps teachers with paperwork, and produces 20,000 school leavers without literacy. Let's fix that idea first.
Dr Eamonn Butler is Director of the Adam Smith Institute and author of "The Rotten State of Britain; Who Is Causing the Crisis and What to Do about It", out in April.
Volunteers vs Draftees
The idea of creating a national civic service program is a sound one. If properly implemented, it can have many of the communitarian benefits envisioned by those who champion it. However, making compulsory national service work is much more difficult than is often implied. I suggest that before implementing the full-blown compulsory service program, a preliminary pilot project should be formed, to include no more than fifty thousand youngsters, and that all be volunteers.
The main matters that need to be worked out are the following: firstly, national service members should not constitute cheap labour that pushes current employees out of work. One must be sure to find tasks that otherwise would not be done, but deserve to be carried out. In one American city a joint board of labour representatives and community leaders was formed to provide such a screening. Aside from the intrinsic merit of proceeding this way, it also has the political benefit of reducing the opposition of labour unions to such service.
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Secondly, one must form some kind of supervisory infrastructure, ideally one that inspires people rather than merely ensures that they will do what they committed themselves to do. I witnessed AmeriCorps volunteers who showed up late, left quickly, and yet were fully compensated. Some never left home. Without proper oversight, soon the national service members may well acquire a poor reputation and a culture of abuse may be formed.
Most places that could use national service members must prepare for them. One cannot simply drive up to a nursing home and say, "Here are fifty youngsters, put them to good use," nor send them to the other side of a mountain and say, "Clean up the river, see you at five." In a study we did of a hospital, the management already had volunteers who read to the blind and drove around wheelchairs. The management did not know what to do with their new arrivals, and asked them to cut placemats out of reams of papers, an obvious make-work task. Soon the morale of the new arrivals sunk. They felt useless and became alienated from the whole project.???? ?
The notion that if youth of different social backgrounds are joined to work together they will develop cross-class and cross-ethnic bonds is a dear one. However, the American experience shows that groups tend to self-segregate and that social organizers are needed to help form bridges.
Above all, the motivation of draftees is rather different from that of volunteers. A national service best be up and running, composed of volunteers, before draftees are added—if it is to be made mandatory at all.
Amitai Etzioni, Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at The George Washington University, author of The Spirit of Community.
Civic responsibility and working class values
13th March 2009
I know Frank Field and he's a wonderful man but this scheme is misconceived. He wants to remove every young person from their chosen career into a compulsory period of civic service. But the person who holds a real job in the market place is already performing a civic service, and real jobs teach the civic virtues better than do government or compulsory schemes. Frank Field and James Crabtree are right to recognise the problem of feral youth, but governmental solutions should not detach the useful majority from their chosen careers and goals.
The state has deracinated ordinary people and - as Frank Field himself has articulated so well - the state has nationalised their schools, friendly societies and hospitals. No wonder the once-respectable working classes no longer identify with those institutions or with their values. If we are to civilise our disaffected youth, we must address not the symptoms but the causes, and we should return power and choice to ordinary people. We should abolish all regressive taxation while reverting the schools, friendly societies and hospitals to their former, charitable but fee-paying, selves. Thus will the old values of the respectable working classes be restored, nurtured by the environment that had fostered them originally.
Terence Kealey, University of Buckingham
Understanding the need for civic responsibility
The age of responsibility has arrived on our shores.? Britain has a window of opportunity to transform the lives of a generation through an ambitious national civic service scheme.?? The British tradition of volunteering is a great thing.? But it is different to organised and visible, team based, idealistic, year long 'service'.
The social need for such a bold measure is evident.? Young people face a challenging and often confusing transition to adulthood, and frequently enter the adult world too early, without the life skills that enable them to thrive, not just survive.? ?
The CBI has long bemoaned the lack of interpersonal skills presented to business by Britain's youth. National civic service would mean young people working in teams, learning to communicate effectively and beyond their immediate peer group, before transitioning into the world of work or higher education.? There is already evidence such schemes can provide the benefits that our economy needs.? For example, in the US, the AmeriCorps programme City Year is so well respected that many employers fast track its alumni through their recruitment process.
Business can help lead the way.? What a powerful signal it would be for those law firms currently paying new recruits £10,000 to defer joining their ranks by a year, to instead direct that resource towards supporting their young graduates in a year of service.
However, a team of 21 year old graduates would not provide the type of 'encounter culture' David Lammy rightly seeks.?? Allowing young people to access the programme at any point between 16 and 25 would allow early school leavers to mix with post-graduates.? It could provide a breather for young people not motivated by, or unsure about their options after 16 and help them to make more informed choices based on a broader set of experiences and skills.
National civic service offers the tantalising prospect of transforming the negative perception of young people.? Young 'hoodies' are all too often demonised as 'feral youths' hanging around on street corners.? Imagine instead thousands of young people working collectively, and very visibly, for the good of the local community.
To make this scheme work, it will require a collective and concerted effort from government, public services, business, the media and from communities.? In a time of unprecedented uncertainty, it is an effort worth making.
Sophie Livingston
Qualified support
I am one of those who would vote "strongly for" civic service. There are important qualifications, though.? First, it would need to be strongly organised, with a good deal of discipline. In each group, 1-3 people would have to be in charge, with authority and sanctions. Where individuals were working with old people or kids, they'd have to be screened so they could be trusted. The scheme could fail badly if there were more than isolated cases of maltreatment or criminality. Second, it would need to be comprehensive, embracing everyone: no outs for the privileged, or anyone else. And third, it would need to have fun in it: much of which would be created by the people themselves, but some of which would be provided by, eg, theatres, cinemas, sports centres, universities, even.
?John Lloyd
London NW3
Responsibility and social inclusion
Dear Sir
Further to the Article 'Citizenship First' by James Crabtree and Frank Field in your March issue, I would like to explain a little more about the work of the London Boxing Academy (LBA) to your readers.
We are an alternative education project that works in partnership with local schools, the Police and Pupil Referral Units. We provide a sports-based GCSE curriculum for young people aged 13-16 who are unable to function in a normal school environment.
We use boxing and other sports to teach students an understanding of team work, self discipline, respect for others, decision making skills, anger management and to create a feel-good factor that raises self esteem. We help our students successfully transfer these values to their academic work and vocational courses as well as life mastery in general.
Many of our students suffer from multiple disadvantages but are generally well behaved, enthusiastic and capable young boys and girls who simply need more attention than mainstream education can provide. Some do have anger management problems and have been involved in the youth justice system, however unlike almost any other organisation that carries out similar work, the LBA has never experienced an on-site incident that required police support.
Our staff to student ratio is little over two to one, we constantly exceed best practice in our procedures and training, our attendance levels average 91% and we have over a 90% success rate in returning some of the hardest to reach young people in London to education training or employment. But more importantly we have helped many of our students turn their lives around in ways that targets can not measure.
Our local partners believe we are one of the most successful and ground-breaking projects of this nature in London and we have been asked to open a second site in September. Despite this we have received no financial help from central government whatsoever, hence the 'shabby warehouse' in which we are based.
We are not a new policy or a grand scheme that may or may not work. We are a pioneering, proven and successful social inclusion charity on the front line, helping to solve some of the most serious social problems facing Britain today.
Yours sincerely,
Simon Marcus, Co-Founder of the LBA
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Backlash and the rise of young citizens
For many years the occasional great writing leaps from the pages into practical reality and improves the world around – Oxfam from a letter, intermediate technology for Africa, from a feature in the Observer.? The prospect feature 'Citizen First' by James Crabtree and Frank Field is beautifully written, in the best tradition of such creative thinking – asking 'why not' rather than simply 'why'.? But my best guess is that if the idea of compulsory civic service makes young citizens it will be for the very opposite of reasons than the authors imply.? This proposal will generate resistance, civil disobedience and a generation clash that will shake and perhaps freak Britain.
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The authors report that two thirds of adults view young people as disrespectful and two thirds of adults polled by Prospect would be supportive of compulsory civic service. All this does to my mind is to re-echo the timeless prejudices of older generations.? It does nothing to start from where young people are, nothing to connect with the deeper causes of youth disengagement.? If we can to debate the behaviour of young people, we should surely include their voice in that debate.
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Now, this could be a proposal which young people might welcome, no less than the adult world and they can be conservative in their views when it comes to what needs to happen in the world around. If this proposal could be developed and debated with young people, it would have more chance of success.
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At present young people do not feel treated with respect, as I know from the research I have done for my new book 'Consumer Kids' with Professor Agnes Nairn. They are tired of being portrayed (hoods up, jeans down) as a social evil and have their own passions and concerns, which could indeed count as citizenship if we loosened our tight-lipped notions of what forms of participation count.? Big business too portrays young people as criminals for downloading music and video, but if the laws of the country are so stupid as to make it unlawful to burn your own music from your own CDs to your own iPod, then what on earth do we expect?? Adults, in short, are being childish.
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Personally, I say let's use the money it would cost to tackle fuel poverty and child poverty.? But if compulsory civic service goes ahead, it will be on top of a 'creeping welfare state' that has extended compulsory education into early years and into post 16 life. So my personal guess is that a critical mass of young people will do more than reject it - they will resist it.? They will use what they enjoy out of the programme, but they will fight you in the virtual worlds. They will fight you on the social networks. They will fight you with flash mobs and with humour. They will boycott the companies whose money will inevitably come in to sponsor the McCare and McMakework jobs you create.
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You will have, as you wished, created young, active citizens but not perhaps in the way the authors planned it.
Ed Mayo is Chief Executive of Consumer Focus
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