The austerity approach is damaging the capabilities of young people
A lot of the young people I work with aren’t planning to vote. When I question them on this, the answers are predictably understandable: no-one in power has listened to them before; no-one cares; what’s the point? These are young people who have grown up in austerity Britain. “Grown up” is too innocuous a phrase though; it doesn’t really get to the point. These young people are care-experienced, and the systemic structure around the transition that children in care must make into adulthood does not allow them the space or the time to “grow up” in the way afforded to other young people. In the way afforded to me: encouraged by my family to apply for university, I left home for the first time at 18. The “first” is crucial here, because in the ten years since, I have moved back in to my family home and then out again a further seven times, with the luck and privilege of a millennial ‘boomerang kid’.
Young people in care can begin their transition as early as 16. There is no boomerang for them, no safety net, no parental wallet to dip into. The earliness of this transition is a historical artefact: the Children and Young Persons Act of 1969 originally set the leaving care age at 18, to mimic the average age of young people leaving their familial home. It was the massive economic decline in the 1980s that lowered the age of leaving care to 16, as youth unemployment rose and care leavers — with shaky educational records from unstable placements — found themselves disproportionately affected, and insufficiently supported.
As a society, we have persistently and consistently failed our children in care. Most news stories featuring these young people will show life outcomes that are troublingly low across all sorts of matrices, including the prison, homeless, excluded and long-term unemployed populations, as well as a statistically significant likelihood of serious mental health issues. This has happened for decades and under different successive governments. It’s something that won’t be fixed immediately by a change in government. But something’s gotta give.
I don’t think the problem can be explained just by the tightening of purse strings. The austerity government of 2010–2016 meant that budgets were cut, funds dissolved, councils stretched. But it’s the assumptions that, in order to enact those policies, must have been behind those decisions — that preventative care isn’t important; that vulnerable young people shouldn’t have access to a safety net; that the correlation between quality of life and wellbeing is insignificant — that formed such an insidious part of austerity.
Often, policies can be introduced that are on the whole good things: they will inject much-needed money into a service, provision and/or issue; and they will have an ultimate outcome that reduces inequality. Take free school meals, for example: the problem of poorer students not getting enough food from home, and parents not being able to afford school meals, was directly addressed with this scheme. But what about when children are marked — either obviously or implicitly — as “free school meal kids”? What about parents having to declare and prove their low or non-existent income to the school? As political theorists Wolff and De-Shalit have commented, “the problem is often in the implementation rather than the policy itself”.
An example from the care sector is the recently introduced Care Leaver Covenant. On paper, it’s a great idea: a pledge, to be signed by any organisation, that acknowledges the unique barriers care leavers may face when entering adulthood, followed by organisation-specific pledges to support this transition. It has the potential to raise awareness of care leavers within the employment marketplace as well as in society more widely; to offer exciting, bespoke opportunities to care-experienced young people; and to make workplaces more diverse and inclusive. It was with great ceremony, then, that the Conservative party launched this scheme. But policy implementations such as these must be looked at within the context of other policies, and the political ecology in which they are being introduced. The Coalition and subsequent Tory governments were masters in contradiction: the Tories increased statutory support for care leavers from 18 to 25, at the same time as they drastically cut funding from both universal youth services and leaving care services. I was told by a Local Authority leaving care team manager that they hadn’t yet told their care leavers that they could access support for longer, because they had no capacity to deal with the potential influx of cases. Theresa May strongly promoted her wellbeing agenda, at the same time as rejecting a key recommendation from the Education Select Committee that all children upon entering care should be assessed for mental health needs.
And so, young people making their transition out of care are currently doing so in a landscape characterised by disorder, incoherence, and insufficiency. As one young person I work with questioned, how does the Government think that care leavers will be able to engage in an employment opportunity if they are still waiting to access critical mental health support? How will they sustain such opportunities if there has been little to no systematic investment in building up social and communication skills and resilience? How will they be able to feel confident in their abilities, their unique strengths and talents (which, by the way, come in spades) if all around them the narrative regarding care leavers is one of failure and deficit?
It is evident that we need a radical rethink of how we support young people in and leaving care. Certainly, positive change is likely to come from significant monetary investment. But what is also needed is an investment in the way in which central Government thinks about, talks about, and implements their policies. The Labour Party’s manifesto pledges that their government would commission a review of the care system. I can’t help thinking that this acknowledgement — that systemic support is and has been imperfect and insufficient — might pose a challenge to the idea of no political party listening to those on the frontline of austerity. If the Tories have shown us anything, it is that approach is as important as outcome, and failure to see that is failure to live up to the active responsibility of ‘care’.
