19 December 2008
By Paul Dicken
Refocusing public services to raise the aspirations of young people in deprived communities will form a major part of government social policy in 2009, according to the Cabinet Office. An analysis of evidence and social policy carried out by the Cabinet Office’s Social Exclusion Task Force was published on December 16. It will be used to create policy recommendations in a social mobility white paper to be published in 2009. Aspirations and attainment in deprived communities, produced with the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the Department for Communities and Local Government, identified ‘community characteristics’ associated with low aspirations. It said 11-14 years was a crucial age, during which ‘young people form solid aspirations that inform their future life choices and outcomes’. The report said parents were the most important influence on children in this respect, but that young people and their parents were also influenced by those around them and places where they live. White boys had the lowest educational aspirations, and attainment among this group was rising more slowly than in most other ethnic groups, the report said. ‘Many young people wanted to follow the life and career choices of the people around them. In some cases, their awareness of options appeared to be limited by a lack of diverse role models.’ The analysis identified extended schools as a way of providing ‘community learning and capacity building’, and social marketing techniques and participatory budgeting as helping involve and mobilise communities. Professor Ann Buchanan, director of the centre for research into parenting and children at Oxford University, told Public Finance that the report seemed ‘to be going in the right direction’. She said policy had in the past been preoccupied by ‘structural change, forgetting about psychological factors’. Her own work in this area had reinforced the idea that ‘a child is not a piece of plasticine; he or she will interact with their environment’. She said it was crucial to have a mixture of aspirations in a school to help raise overall attainment and welcomed the focus on 11 to 14-year-olds. She added: ‘You need career planning at the beginning of secondary school. You’ve got to give them the idea… that doing boring old English might lead somewhere. You’ve got to give kids a bridge into the world.’
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