The teenager is an odd creature. It keeps strange hours (it’s nocturnal really), does everything very loudly, from listening to music to speaking on a mobile phone, and has a healthy disregard for authority (unhealthy, of course, when it’s parental authority that’s disregarded).
Above all, the teenager is unpredictable. Yet it is this strange breed that the government is now targeting, with apparently contradictory messages: you must, in future, stay on at school until the age of 18, you might, in future, be able to vote at the age of 16.
There are already many contradictions in a teenager’s life. He or she can join the armed forces, marry and become a parent at 16. Yet buying alcohol or cigarettes and watching some movies is forbidden until 18.
As a society, we want teenagers to take more responsibility, and to take it earlier, yet we complain that childhood is being eroded too quickly. It’s not surprising we can’t agree on a simple answer to the question: when does a person become an adult?
The easy option would be to leave these teenagers alone, with their hormones, spots and weird language. But the truth is, we can’t. They matter too much to society. An independent, government-commissioned review of skills by Lord Leitch, published in 2006, predicted that by 2020 there could be a 50% increase in jobs demanding high-level skills. That will leave little room for one particular sub-species of teenager — the Neet. A Neet is a young person, aged between 16 and 18, who is not in education, employment or training.
A government green paper on raising the school-leaving age, published last year, identified eight varieties of Neet: angry young rebels, quitters, rebels without a cause, cool dudes, hedgers, settlers, escapists and strugglers. Some 11% of 16-to-19-year-olds belong to one or another of these tribes, with an even higher proportion of 16-to-24-year olds. In the Northeast, it’s estimated that a quarter of young adults meet this description.
This is a British problem, not a worldwide one. We are ranked twentieth in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries for rates of staying on in education, with only 76% of youngsters aged over 16 remaining in education or training. As Schools Secretary Ed Balls told MPs this week, our staying-on rates are the third lowest in the western world.
It seems, then, nothing more than plain common sense to do what the government is proposing — to raise the school leaving age to 17 in 2013 and to 18 by 2015.
The CBI approves of this, so do the trade unions. The main objectors are young people and their teachers. It is bad enough, says the NUT, to try to keep the lid on a classroom of bored 16-year-olds who do not want to be there, without prolonging the agony for another two years. And, yes, there are plenty of angry young men and women who would much prefer to be out in the world of work, earning money to pay for those drinks and cigarettes that they are not really allowed to buy.
Other critics of the government’s plan point to the 400,000 bunkers-off who are below the school-leaving age at present. Why not concentrate on getting them into school and keeping them there, to at least learn the basics, rather than focusing on those aged over 16?
Or why not focus on the early years, when bad habits are set, instead of trying rescue a 16-year-old?
All these are good arguments, but the government is right to invest its billion pounds in creating more apprenticeships, more training and more vocational education. It is a huge sum of money, but the problem is at least as big. A cost-benefit analysis of social security payments, crime, antisocial behaviour and single-parenthood, all disproportionately found among early school leavers, would confirm just that.
Yet without making teenagers feel better about themselves, persuading them to keep learning might be impossible. And that’s where the vote comes in — that ‘contradiction’ in policy so many commentators have made so much of. I too have wondered about letting 16-year-olds vote. Schools that hold mock elections often find it is the Crazy Frog or Mr Blobby joke candidate who hammers the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat contenders.
But arguments against allowing 16-pluses to vote seem eerily similar to the Edwardian arguments against votes for women — they are not properly engaged in public debate, insufficiently educated, have to rely on another breadwinner. That makes the arguments just as spurious. They are pretty connected — many of these alien teenage creatures — and as well informed as most people. They have interests and views.
Above all, if we want to persuade them to learn more, for longer, we have to respect them. And in any democracy, it starts — only starts — with the vote.
