You may have seen on the TV over the last week or so, politicians from various parties getting together for their annual conferences.
I did the unthinkable and watched parts of the Labour one on the telly.
Away from my programmes on radio I work with young people from under privileged backgrounds on raising their aspirations. For the first time in a long time I found myself nodding along with what a politician was saying, and the man in question was Ed Miliband! I know, SHOCK!
He highlighted the injustice of bright children who are full of potential, but held back by low aspirations. Too many working-class British communities are blighted by low expectations for their children.
Politicians often fail to see the benefit of raising hopes for the future in the young. Increasing the cost of a university education by the people who received their own university education for free has left these kids on the scrap heap and the simmering monster of youthful unrest, like we saw in the recent riots, will only grow.
I spoke at a school recently highlighting environment as a key excuse that people use for failure. My primary school sat in the middle of one of the roughest estates in Blackburn. It was so rough that my mother took my sister out of the school when she found out there was a child in my sister’s class dealing cocaine. The kid was 9 years of age!
I had four proper mates at primary school. We all lived in and around the same area. We were all academically equal when it came to performance in class. Out of the 5 of us, I am the only one not to serve any time in prison to this date.
What was the difference between us? Ambition!
That ambition was given to me by my parents. From an early age it was evident to me that if you want something, you work hard to get it. Without embarrassing him, my Dad didn’t have the greatest of childhoods. He spent the majority of it in a children’s home. If anyone had an excuse to be bitter with the world it was him. However, luckily for me he decided that despite the shitty hand he had been dealt in life he was going to be the person responsible for making it a whole lot better. His desire to make sure his children never missed a meal and always had a warm bed to sleep in inspired my thought process and made me believe that if a man with no academic education who used to worry about where he was going to sleep of a night can make shit happen, imagine what I can do!
Sadly not everyone is blessed with parents like mine.
They have parents whose own mother and father had no aspirations for them and now have no expectation of academic success for their offspring. I’ve lost count of the number of young people I’ve met who not only have low ambitions for themselves, but also for their peers.
I spoke to a young 16 year old girl in April this year who was a straight A* student. In August she collected her GCSE results and as predicted she acquired 12 A* passes. She had many interests including science and various technologies. We explored the career possibilities for her to pursue once she left secondary education. We spoke of various routes in the medical profession. Her excitement was a joy to see as for the first time in her life someone had opened up a whole new world to her and gave her the belief that these types of jobs were easily in her reach with a little bit of hard graft.
Imagine how disheartened I was to learn that she is now studying to become a hairdresser, a job that her Mum, her aunty and her older sister have all had on their CV at some point in their life. No offence to hairdressers by the way but this kid could have been a surgeon!
This culture of aiming low and expecting little ruins the lives of thousands of bright British children. In my opinion the school system needs to change because parents wont. Let our teachers become inspirational leaders rather than crowd control merchants who have to ‘dot I’s and cross t’s’ with ridiculous amounts of legislation bestowed upon them by government officials who last went to a school when Michael Jackson was firstly alive and secondly black! Stop teaching our kids to pass exams. Put some fire in their bellies. Make them winners!
Mr Miliband, you talked the talk, if we give you a chance, can you walk the walk?
2 Responses to Make them winners! – 5/10/11
You make a really good point Adam, but I think Mr Milliband is enjoying the opportunity afforded by being in opposition i.e. you can say what you like, knowing you’ll never be asked to make it happen. It’s a card the Liberal Democrats traded on for years, until being taken into government as the Tories +1.
These themes were similar to those that swept New Labour to power in ’97, and whilst they stayed true to opening up opportunities for all, they also created new problems, the main one being supply and demand of the correctly trained people to the demands of the workplace.
I too had great encouragement from parents throughout school, and it was clear direction from them that led me to go from school, to college and then to University. I studied a degree that I didn’t appreciate at the time in IT & Telecommunications, and by hook or by crook, I managed to scrape a 2:1. I studied at Lancaster because my brother studied there, nothing to do with the academic strength or the University or the employability of the degree being studied.
I felt the whole careers advice from school, college and University was pants. I had little idea what I wanted to do before my degree, and too many kids now do degrees as matter of course, with no idea what they want to get out of it.
As it is, after several years beyond graduation of applying for available jobs, I realised I needed to make the most of my degree and began developing websites, learning from books to piece together the bits of my degree concerned with this.
After 5 years, I still have ambition to go further but no idea where I want to end up. If my career was to end tomorrow, I would pick something else up but who knows what.
The importance of role models, and varied work/voluntary experience beyond the parents is so important, because otherwise a child’s scope on the world is limited to the view of their parents.
The other thing that is hard for kids from areas such as Blackburn to accept is that to follow their dreams they may have to leave the area, perhaps only in the short term but probably forever. This is scary for some 15 year old kids picking their A Level options.
By adam, On October 5, 2011 at 2:41 pm
I think like David Cameron has said all along is that kids need good role models in life so its important that this government looks at the real issues of family breakdown and try to address them. I dont think the riots had anything to do with a generation ‘ignored’ and most of these young people involved were driven by materialism. Im sure most of these people involved were not trashing shops and peoples businesses because they were lacking ambition. Mr Milliband has no leg to stand on because his party made it too easy for people to get away from actually going out and trying to get a career. They stripped all ambition away from them by allowing them to live on a welfare system that accepted laziness and a welfare system that was simply not set up to put these people back onto a road to employment or opportunity.
By adam, On October 6, 2011 at 10:00 am