While Jamie’s Dream School is showing some of the difficulties facing teachers and young people, it’s just TV. And as such, it’s chasing ratings. While there is something cringingly enthralling about the chastened and emotionally unintelligent Dr Starkey making up with the overweight and truculent Connor after their little spat, it misses the point.
This week I’ve met two different sorts of young people. My business partner Lucy Harris founder of Agency East and I, are launching a new organisational learning and youth training programme called ambition-UK. We parachute into some major UK organisations and businesses with groups of young people as project and product development teams. Three young girls came along to the meeting who’d been sent by their employment advisors.
It was quickly clear that they weren’t ready for our programme but we wanted to help them and as we talked it emerged that they were part of a bigger self-supporting group of girls who had all been excluded from school since they were 15, with no qualifications and no employability skills. We asked them a few questions about why they thought they’d ended up like this and what might have been different. On this they were amazingly perceptive.
These girls said they felt they had no support from anyone in their families. Until they spoke to us on Wednesday, few had ever spoken to them with anything but disdain, and certainly not respect. There had never been any role-models to explain the importance of learning and they now envy the kids who did. And frankly they thought their advisors were as ill-informed as they were. Now all they want to do is get a job and can’t. What future lies ahead for these young minds, so chaotic, unraveled and at sea?
If our young have no-one to look up to, they will never adopt any positive behaviours. They will never see their value to the world. Wonderful people though they are, a brilliant actor, famous historian or eminent scientist are not enough to do that. Starkey is wrong. Pushy parents and posh schools may still run on rules but they also motivate their kids to seek and find their own value.
So it’s nothing new to anyone who has worked in education that if you put a bunch of kids in a Victorian building that looks like a prison, well, they’ll behave like prisoners. What have they got to lose? Put them in a yacht with Ellen Macarthur and they behave like sailors. Eureka! There is something at stake: they could lose their lives. Give them an afternoon with Rankin and they start to embody creativity. They gain something no-one else has given them, the centre stage; self-respect. They were in what Ken Robinson calls their ‘Element’.
This week I also met Sean O’Halloran the 18 year old chair of Young Advisors and Gary Buxton their CEO. This is a smart programme that trains young people in the skills they need to advise organisations (including local authorities and government) in how drive their services and develop resources in ways that are relevant and useful to young people. What impresses me is the competence and clarity with which these guys are marking out the future. They are doing what we all should have been doing, listening profoundly and acting pragmatically. Taking life in their own hands.
We can’t afford to leave behind generations of disadvantaged young people. Yes we need to stop them eating crap and getting fat, talking over each other and refusing to listen. But most of all we need to give them some self-respect. And believe me, that won’t be achieved by throwing rules (or Latin) at them.
Sean was just off to a demo against NHS cuts. A few calls, and our girls might have an opportunity to work with Chelsea FC’s outreach team.