I spoken before about the problems we have with antisocial behaviour on the estate I represent - mostly, but not wholly, caused by young people. So I’m really pleased to report that as of 31st July, there will be a brand new dispersal order covering the two focuses of trouble - the Oval and environs, and Iffley Lock. It seems draconian, giving the police the right to disperse any group of more than two people between noon and 6am, but it’s necessary to help residents on the estate feel safe again. They’ve put up with abuse, criminal damage, underage drinking, noise and intimidation at all hours for years, and it’s not fair.

We had a fair old job convincing senior police officers of the extent of the trouble, though the local community team knew all too well; we also had to overcome the opposition of the Lib Dem portfolio holder, who made her ambivalence clear in the minutes of the last full council in answer to my question (link to minutes helpfully unfindable in the dreadful city council website, sorry). The large photo of said portfolio holder chatting happily with police officer about dispersal order illustrating an otherwise excellent article in the Oxford Mail is slightly galling, though.

So I’m really glad that it’s come off at last, and looking forward to the full implementation of the order. It’s a real tangible success for the first weeks of neighbourhood policing, showing that the police listened to residents’ concerns and acted on them. Of course, it’s only half the solution - the stick, if you will. The carrot is getting the county council to fund increased opening hours for the youth club, to give the dispersed kids somewhere to disperse to, and I reckon that will be harder.

Just cos I’m posting about councilloring (or counselling, as one letter to me had it last week), though, doesn’t make this a councillor-blog!

I see today’s Oxford Mail has picked up on the county council’s disgraceful behaviour in relation to youth services. What happens is this: they wait for the city council to despair at the low level of provision, fund some playschemes in our most deprived areas, and then think to themselves, “oh well, now we don’t need to fund anything in Blackbird Leys, Rose Hill, Barton or Wood Farm, the most deprived areas in the entire county, as the city council is already doing it, despite it not being their primary responsibility. If we funded anything there, that would be double provision, and we can’t do that!” And then the portfolio holder has the cheek to take the credit for two Labour government ring-fenced funds for youth activities, which if they could the county council would spend on something else. Huh!

Interesting research from the JRF today about young women with few prospects choosing to become teenage parents. You can understand it, really. Many young women growing up in deprived areas see getting pregnant as the option that demonstrates that they are adults in a world where the usual trappings of adulthood such as getting a car, moving out of home and earning a decent wage are unavailable to them; a baby provides unconditional love to young women who may never have had that before; and being a mother is a real impetus to make a go of your life, to get an education or a job, and to get your own place.

But there is a flaw in the research, one that Beverley Hughes picks up:

But Beverley Hughes, minister for children, families and young people said: “This is an unfortunate study which, on the basis of a very small and carefully selected sample, suggests that teenage pregnancy can be a positive option for some young people. We reject that view completely.
“There is overwhelming evidence that, overall, teenage parenthood leads to poorer outcomes both for teenage mothers and their children.
“Our Teenage Pregnancy Strategy focuses on preventing teenage pregnancies and since its introduction conception rates for under-18s have fallen to their lowest level in 20 years.”

The way that you access teenage parents to do research like this is through the agencies that support them (e.g. LEA specialist teenage mums’ schools, Sure Start Plus, voluntary organisations like YWCA and Barnardo’s). If these agencies are doing their jobs, then the young women have more confidence and better self-esteem as a result of that intervention, and by getting pregnant have accessed a far greater level of support than they would have when they were just any old young women growing up in a deprived area. With this greater level of support and increased motivation now they have someone to care about besides themselves, is it any wonder they feel positive about being a teenage mum? And as Beverley Hughes correctly identifies, the priority is to reduce teenage pregnancy as the long-term results are profound and expensive, whatever the immediate positive effects for individual young women and men.

I also have a problem with the discourse of planned/unplanned pregnancy in this context. Planned/unplanned assumes young women have agency, that they can choose what happens to them, that pregnancies are either accidents or overtly desired. In fact, for these young women, pregnancy will be one more in a string of things that just happens to them, over which they have little control.

So says the Daily Mail and most other papers today, reporting on a new study from Bournemouth University. Except apparently (and this didn’t get reported) they’re not as bad as their parents (from the National Children’s Bureau media digest, not online):

Findings published in a new book, Breaking the cycle of educational alienation, claim that girls are now more badly behaved than boys when it comes to taking drugs, drinking alcohol and having underage sex. However, both are actually better behaved than their parents were 20 years ago.

Professor Colin Pritchard of Bournemouth University, said “The good news and, perhaps, unexpected is that the 2005 youngsters we studied have less problematic behaviour than those in the 1985 cohort and even with the problematic behaviour, drugs, drink and sex, this is still a minority activity”.

Prof Pritchard and Richard Williams, social inclusion coordinator for the university, repeated a survey along the south coast that was conducted in 1985 involving Year 10 and 11 secondary students. The results were used to contrast today’s behaviour with that of their parents 20 years ago.

Prof Pritchard said “One thing we found among teenagers of all backgrounds was that those who said they liked school were the least likely to binge drink, take drugs or otherwise engage in bad behaviour. That is a challenge to schools and parents to make sure pupils are interested”.

Did a double take when I saw the front cover of the Times while buying my coffee this morning:

Town halls to take over “coasting” schools

Schools that are “coasting” or failing to stretch pupils to their potential will be given just 15 days to make improvements spelt out in “warning notices” issued by councils. Failure to respond will trigger intervention by town hall hit squads with powers to take control of a school’s budget and appoint new governors. [...] Local authorities will have powers to compel a school to join a federation so that it can be run by a more successful neighbour. [...]

The powers effectively overturn years of policy from both Conservative and Labour governments, which have successively cut the powers of local authorities to intervene in the running of schools.

Interesting. The Times says it is about Mr Blair and Ms Kelly trying to win back Labour MPs unhappy with the creation of independent trust schools in the Education Bill. I can see how it might, but it still seems odd to take power from LEAs with one hand and give it with another… Oh well, at least this probably means we won’t have to watch Labour MPs shuffle through the same voting lobby as Tories now. That’ll blow Mr Cameron’s cosy “consensus”.

Of course I’m disappointed that we missed the target of getting children out of poverty. Of course we should have hit it, and would have hit it if we’d paid more attention to lifting families with disabled children and large families out of poverty. From CPAG:

in 2004/05:

2.4 million GB children lived in poverty on a ‘before housing costs’ basis – a fall of 700,000 or 23 per cent since 1998/99 (100,000 short of the 25 per cent target).

3.4 million GB children lived in poverty on an ‘after housing costs’ basis – a fall of 700,000 or 17 per cent since 1998/99 (300,000 short of the 25 per cent target).

But how dare the Lib Dems and Tories come along and start wagging the finger - have they forgotten their opposition to rises to the minimum wage and the extension of tax credits, the very policies getting some - not all, not enough - families off the breadline?

Gordon Brown on putting the Youth Matters proposals into effect:

Chancellor Gordon Brown wants to give 13-19 year-olds up to £25 a month to keep them “off the streets”, as part of a crackdown on anti-social behaviour.
But youngsters who repeatedly misbehave will have their cards withdrawn.
“The hardcore will not get it. This is for the decent, well-behaved young people,” the chancellor told the BBC.

As I said before it was published:

less good, a system of credits, awarded for school performance and volunteering, which can be topped up by parents, and which young people can use to “pay” for activities. I am sceptical, because it will be less likely to benefit disadvantaged young people, who aren’t as likely to do well at school or volunteer, but who need the support of positive activities even more than middle-class kids. [...]
Our learning from the way childcare has been rolled out is that private providers only operate in better-off areas, despite government encouragement, and that unless childcare in poor areas is heavily subsidised, it’s not viable for private providers. I’d hate to see a situation where choice for young people in North Oxford got better whilst young people on Rose Hill and Wood Farm missed out because there was no money to be made.

Whilst I get that you don’t reward bad behaviour from young people, I don’t see how excluding young people who misbehave from youth facilities is likely to improve their behaviour…

Despite working for a youth charity, I’ve never been particularly engaged by the usefulness of giving 16 year-olds the vote. But this, in today’s Guardian, may just make me change my mind:

in the 2005 election, national turnout was 61%, compared with 37% among 18- to 24-year-olds, down 2% from 2001… But a more detailed examination seems to indicate that if you give young people the vote early, then their democratic engagement will increase. Treat them like citizens and they will act as such. Research by YouGov and the Social Market Foundation into how people develop voting habits has found that those who are old enough to vote while still at school are more likely to vote again than those who have to wait until their 20s for their first chance. In the 2001 election, for example, turnout among 27-year-olds was 49%, compared with 65% among 28-year-olds who had been old enough to vote in the 1992 election.

Interesting that if this trend holds, it’s lkely that my year group, born in 1979-80, are much less likely to vote than those a few months older. I was a precocious kid, which is unlikely to surprise you, and I was furious at being seven months too young to vote in 1997.

They’re continuing to fall, despite what the newspapers would have us believe.

Between 2003 and 2004, the under 18 conception rate fell by 1.4%. The total fall in teenage pregnancies between 1998 and 2004 is now 11.1%, and the total fall in conceptions for under 16s since 1998 is 15.2%.

Unlike ministers, I don’t believe that becoming a teenage mum makes you a failure, but reducing unwanted teenage conceptions is a really good thing, and I’m pleased that the strategy of increasing sex and relationships education, access to contraceptive services and advertising about safer sex are having an effect.

Update: The Telegraph misses the point entirely, hanging its entire doom and gloom piece on seven - SEVEN - more pregnancies amongst under 14s in 2004 than 2003.

So, this is now the book review blog. I spent some time in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in autumn 2004, as part of a Labour team working for Kerry Edwards. Since then I’ve kept an interested eye on goings-on in the city and the state, with the hope of returning there soon. I even occasionally cast a wistful eye at the masters programmes at the University of Pennsylvania, and sigh as I accept it’s not going to happen - responsibilities and ambitions here, and no chance of getting the sort of overdraft any sort of degree at an Ivy League demands. So I content myself with reading some Philly-based blogs (such as Albert’s) and hoping to return for a holiday, even if it’s just another working holiday. Recently I saw on the Oxblog a post about a young reporter for the Philadelphia Enquirer who had taken a year off journalism to teach twelve-year-olds at the bottom-ranked school in the city. She’d written her experiences up in The Emergency Teacher; my copy arrived on Thursday from Amazon.

As Christina Asquith herself says:

I had never taught before. At 25, I had just finished a two-year internship as a newspaper reporter with The Philadelphia Inquirer, and was considering my next step when this article appeared: “The city still short 1,200 new teachers.” I applied, and six weeks later found myself in a classroom at Julia de Burgos Bilingual Middle Magnet School, facing 33 students—without a clue what to do.

“The Emergency Teacher” is the true story of the ten months that followed. It is my personal journey, from a privileged upbringing to the concrete ghettos of the heroin ravaged “Badlands” of North Philly. It tells the story of a year inside the Philadelphia School System, a $1.6 billion effort that fails to give thousands of students even a teacher, program or single lesson, and then churns them on to the next grade. It is the lessons I learn, as I reach out to students like Ronny, who struggles on the cusp between learning to read or dropping out forever; Vanessa, a class queen whose beauty offers her an easy route to money that threatens her dreams of being a writer; Big Bird, a resilient 13 year old who must leap over endless obstacles to get into high school, and Jovani, a mentally troubled 13-year old, so mishandled by the school system that he has turned against it. These are students most consider too tough to teach. [...]

From the first day of school, I find the hopes and dreams that inspired me into the classroom are challenged by these realities of the job, and the unwillingness of the administration to stand up for what is right if it means risking their jobs. Mine is the challenge of all new teachers, of which there are tens of thousands each year. I study the rising phenomenon of untrained teachers; and explore the quintessential question of my generation: Can one person truly make a difference against a system as poisoned by politics, bureaucracy and societal ills as our nation’s inner city public schools? What does it even mean to make a difference?

Whilst I’m not sure this book was as tightly-written as it could perhaps have been, the story of Christina’s year in a dilapidated building, thrown into teaching without training, curriculum, teaching schedule or peer support, was gripping. I was incredulous at the administrative failure of the city’s education system and the school management, where any progress was thwarted by a lack of funding produced when education is the sole responsibility of local taxpayers in the ninth poorest city in the US, and antiquated and communalist employment practices that even I, trade unionist and daughter of an NUT member, could see preserved the careers of appalling teachers.

Raised in the tradition of the Hollywood movie where the teacher enters a scene of poverty and deprivation, whether of the body or the spirit - you know the archetype: new teacher on the block; opening misunderstandings or stumble; minor stumble resolved; trust is built; major misunderstanding or stumble; great effort but for the moment it appears that all is lost; determination and mutual trust unite to produce achievement and happy endings all round - I thought this book would be Dangerous Minds, taken out of wherever-it-was-set, with no Coolio soundtrack, but the same trumphant end. Instead (and I’m sorry to give away the ending), Christina is defeated by the system and whilst some of the children, two years later at 14, move on to high school, others have dropped out to work for their families or to start families of their own.