Vulnerable Teenagers

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is one of those debates—and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong for tabling it—where, as you listen to it, you think, “Yep, we’ve been here before. We’ve done this before and heard it before.” What you have not heard is the current context. County lines and the emphasis on knife crime are the new twist. Anyone surprised that gangs are full of 14 year-olds has not been paying attention. If you go into any prison, you will find that the scholars are the ones who stayed in the education system until the age of 14; most were out of the system way before that. That has been a depressing fact for a long time.

I do not think there is anything radical in the report, but bringing it all together is the important point. A tick-box culture of support—saying, “Yes, we’ve done this”, “Is this the job of the education sector or should it be somewhere else?” or “Which bit of the education sector system has done what at what time?”—leads to the discovery that the person we excluded from school has decided they do not like the alternative provision at the pupil referral unit and has disappeared, and now our criminals have realised that that person is an excellent delivery system for narcotics. That is not too far off the Artful Dodger, for God’s sake.

We have to try to have a more coherent attitude to this issue. We as the political class have to say that the current Government seem to have acknowledged that the problem is there and are moving away from “Let’s be tough”. Every time that anyone in any department says, “We’re going to be tough and do something about this”, I get a cold shudder down my back because they usually then create a new problem. If you send people to prison, as the current Government have realised, either you end up having several bouts of offending before they come get of it, usually because they are getting too old and it tends to be a younger person’s game, or they stay in because they have committed more serious offences. Unless we can start to break that cycle by having a more coherent attitude across the piece, we are going to continue having the same problems.

I do not know if society is incapable of removing the problem altogether but we can certainly reduce it. There are a variety of actions that have been identified that help here. By supporting and helping voluntary organisations and activities—youth clubs and so on—the state can create the right environment. I must declare one of my little interests here: sport is the ultimate voluntary activity. When someone starts participating in a particular sport, they join a tribe, not a gang, which will embrace them with its own ways and bizarre rituals. I must declare that I am a Rugby Union player, but all sports have that element.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

We all have our problems.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Addington (LD)]

True enough. The parliamentary team is playing again soon so the physiotherapist may well benefit.

These are groups that thrive on activity. Dance, music and so on all have a variation on this. When it comes to support—I have said this before so I might as well do so again—Governments here are very lucky because most sports clubs have a tradition of not being that involved with the state. We tend to do it ourselves, unlike in France where you would play at the stade municipal, or in Germany where, as I have said many times, when the FA says to its German colleagues, “How much do you spend on supporting pitches?”, the response is, “Oh, we don’t do that; it’s a local government job.”

As we got there first, sporting structures in Great Britain tend to have acquired grounds, status and the ability to maintain themselves, but I hope we will hear something in the near future about how the Government will support these structures because all sports have a problem with retention. They need to get people to play not just as children but as adults because there is always a problem with that: people tell me, “We have lots of children joining”, and I say, “Great, but unless you get them to play as adults then you have no coaches, no long-term interaction and no investment back into society.” I hope that the Minister will let us know what the Government’s strategy is for maintaining these ultimately volunteer groups.

The same strategy that works for them, by the way, will also be very helpful to all the other creative things—arts and drama, et cetera. If the Minister were prepared to tell us how they are prepared to do something really useful, such as teaching somebody how to be a treasurer or secretary of a voluntary group, they would help all these groups and every small branch of a charity. That is the last of my little rant on that subject.

There are the educational problems. The noble Baroness must have been expecting this, but how are we going to spot those who are failing earlier and intervene better? We have heard about the special educational needs review, which we have been expecting since September. We will now not have it in January, which was the last thing we heard, but “early in this year”. I have got a fiver on March. I do not know whether I will win that bet—I am quite prepared to lose it, if we have it slightly earlier—but we have been waiting a long time. The 20% failure rate to achieve anything really measurable at school is not a surprise. It is also a consistent figure. The social factor or the fact that these people do not find acquiring knowledge that easy must be the consistent things here.

As president of the British Dyslexia Association—I am dyslexic myself—I say that some people cannot learn to do something that most people, let us face it, pick up comparatively easily. You can argue about what the best system is for reading, which the support system is best for reading, learning et cetera. Most people pick that up fairly easily and we have designed the systems to be fairly easy to pick up, which is why we use them. If you are not doing that, you need other interventions. These problems are combined with poverty and the lack of support because when it comes to special educational needs, guess what? The people who get the help are those who have the type of parents who go out there and drag it out of the system. Once again, I must declare an interest as having had, shall we say, one of those behind me.

Unless we get a better idea of how early you should intervene to identify and support somebody, that person, while in the school system—that huge, dominant chunk of your early life—will be told they are failing. It is quite a logical process to remove yourself from something you are failing at and get out of it. It might even be a sign of intelligence to get out of there, so I hope the Minister will give us some more hints about how this review is going to take place or at least some assurances about the amount of effort that will go behind it because that 20% failure rate will still be there.

Another interest of mine is that everybody’s standard computer will read a document to you. It also has a software package so that you can talk to it and it will write for you. Every one of your Lordships has that: every mobile phone has it as well. How are we working that into the system? How are we helping someone to get through if they have trouble sitting down and studying in the classroom? How are we identifying the person who does not? The male of the species is the bigger offender here. Girls in classrooms tend to try to hide and disappear; boys kick off and get excluded. That rule of thumb is one reason why we did not identify as many girls as boys in the past. We all thought there was an imbalance between the two in frequency; we are now discovering that they are much more even.

I hope that the Minister will comment on consistency of approach and that the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, will talk on behalf of a group who regard themselves, shall we say, as the Government in waiting. If I were looking at the polls, I would think that it would not be an unreasonable expectation—though it ain’t over yet, as we all know—so, between the two of them, perhaps they could say what consistencies they would take from each other. It is about getting some consistency in these approaches. Wonderful schemes do not often work if it is about being tough, or being new or different. Usually, it is about a consensus of approach being maintained over a few years so that we stand a chance of making a real impression on these problems.

As I said, this may be a new manifestation of them, but all the problems are consistent. We have heard all these things before about ethnic diversity and how certain groups are not being reached for cultural reasons. We need some form of consistency because otherwise we will be back here in a decade having the same sort of debate again with the same sort of report—but having a slightly new thing to latch it on to, which the papers have been telling us is the end of society. It is not. It is just another group of people with their lives ruined.