24.01.2008

Reject compulsory education to 18

Jim Moody argues for full adult rights at 16, including the right to leave full-time education

Affecting concern for those not in work, education or training, and linking this to crime and delinquency, Alan Johnson, education secretary, confirmed on January 12 the government’s intention to require young people to be in school, training or workplace schemes until the age of 18. He left school at 15 and says he regrets to this day not staying on in education himself.

Extending state control of youth and massaging unemployment figures is a more likely explanation. The change, due to be enforced in 2013, would remove about 330,000 people from the books at a stroke. At present, 11% of 16 to 18-year-olds are outside education, training or work. Pupils entering secondary school in 2008 are thus set to become the first to be forced by law to stay in education or training until the age of 18. Full-time paid employment would be against the law for under-18s unless it was combined with an approved training scheme. The government is apparently considering backing the changes by withdrawing driving licences from teenagers who do not comply.

As a kind of trump to Labour’s proposals, Conservative leader David Cameron came up with the re-introduction of national service. In fact, though it might have got the Tory faithful in the shires cheering over their Telegraphs, Cameron limited himself to calling for compulsory six-week courses. Not quite the disciplinarian, uniformed armed forces experience that lasted 18 months when real conscription was last in force. This appears more authoritarian than New Labour, yet in fact it displays exactly the same agenda.

Johnson’s proposals should be vigorously opposed by the left. Young people must have full adult rights from the age of 16 - and that must mean the right to leave full-time education. We are for the extension of access to good-quality education for everyone over 16, but this must be on a voluntary basis. In fact, we demand a whole raft of measures that would facilitate young people becoming revolutionary actors on the stage of human liberation.

At present young people are at the sharp end of society, an easy scapegoat for a declining capitalism’s ills. And this while most have little money and far too many have poor prospects and low expectations. Adding insult to injury, the media, bourgeois politicians and social commentators talk up youth crime and instances of anti-social behaviour in order to create a climate of fear. New Labour home secretary Jacqui Smith even says she never walks alone outside after dark. Actually she never walks about by daylight unless accompanied by her police and other minders.

Every time a young person commits a violent crime, the knee-jerk reaction by ministers is to make up social policy on the hoof, urged on by the gutter press. Oppressive measure follows oppressive measure. In the latest addition to the surveillance state the government has decided that metal detectors (at £5,000 each) are to be installed at hundreds of the so-called toughest secondary schools. As a core element of the new violent crime action plan, this is intended to address specifically what we are told is the growing problem of teenage knife crime. In this instance it is backed by research from the Damilola Taylor Trust that purports to show 80% of knife crime is committed by 12 to 20-year-olds.

Furthering the campaign for ever more social control, the Association of Chief Police Officers has once again stepped into the fray. Its youth crime strategy (It’s never too early, it’s never too late), published as we go to press, calls for truancy officers to be based in police stations, so they can visit the homes of those caught skipping school and causing trouble. The document also endorses stationing police in schools so they can “nip in the bud bad behaviour”.

The most recent horror story is the case of the Garry Newlove who was killed by three teenagers in August 2007. They punched and kicked him to death when he objected to their acts of petty hooliganism. All three were found guilty of murder. Some media anger has been directed at magistrates who granted one of them, 19-year-old Adam Swelling, bail after a previous common assault. Even though this was dealt with according to normal considerations. But the main media campaign has been promoting Garry Newlove’s wife, Helen, who understandably wants more denials of bail. Of course, that would result in more remands in custody, and a further swelling of the numbers held in young offenders’ institutions. Plainly, locking up more and more individuals is not going to prevent murders; after all, two of the other young murderers in this case were not on bail anyway. But when did any kind of measured, let alone logical, approach motivate the likes of the Daily Mail?

Only last week, under the headline ‘That’s how you deal with teenage yobs!’, the Mail approvingly reported that, “A teenage German offender has been sent to Siberia for nine months as part of a ‘somewhat unusual’ effort by authorities to turn him away from violence. ‘If he doesn’t hack wood, his place is cold,’ Stefan Becker, the head of the youth and social affairs department in the central German town of Giessen, said” (January 17).

As well as rational answers a sense of perspective is needed too. Taking the most extreme example, the murder rate over the last 15 or so years has stayed more or less constant. Blips in the murder statistics can be accounted for thanks to such relatively rare cases as the 58 Chinese people suffocated in a lorry in 2001 and Harold Shipman’s score of 218 that was added to the total for 2003. There have been between 650 and 750 murders a year since the early 1990s, in the main by those known to their victims. So there is no murder spree.

Over the three years to 2006, the number of under-18s convicted or cautioned over violent offences rose 37%, from 17,590 to 24,102. For offenders aged 10-17 either convicted in court or issued with a police caution, the total number of offences rose 21%, from 184,474 in 2003 to 222,750 in 2006 (over half were cautions). Convictions of under-18s for carrying knives and other weapons doubled from 1,909 in 1997 to 4,181 in 2006. Giving the lie to the media scare campaign, a home office spokesman said: “There is no evidence that the number of violent crimes committed by young people is increasing. The rise in cautions and convictions represents better enforcement and an improved criminal justice response to violent crime” (The Sunday Telegraph January 20) .