Inclusive Schooling and Youth Participation: Bedrock for a thriving education and skills ecosystem 

Findings from a study by researchers at King’s College London and the Edge Foundation suggest that tackling widespread school alienation by addressing its root causes is an essential precondition for a flourishing education and skills system. 

The Government recently published its long-awaited National Youth Strategy (NYS) for England. The broad thrust of the Strategy’s analysis and commitments as well as much of the detail chime with the findings of Young Lives, Young Futures – a major UKRI-funded study that for the last six years has been exploring the school-to-work transitions of young people who don’t go to university. However, there are some additional insights from this study that it will be important for policymakers to take on board if the success of the Strategy’s ambitious education, skills and youth participation agendas is to be assured.

The National Youth Strategy

The NYS is far-reaching, reflecting a welcome recognition of the long-standing neglect of young people, which has resulted in far too many of them feeling unsupported and unable to access youth services, fulfilling recreational activities and high-quality education, training and work. The strategy, which has been co-constructed with young people, embodies the important recognition that young people are experts of their own lives – that, echoing one of the core principles of the disability movement, there should be no decisions about them without them.

The Strategy’s recommendations include:

• Centring young people’s perspectives by committing to co-produce policies with them.
• Decentralising funding, decision making and delivery to enable policies affecting young people to be made closer to where they are lived and felt.
• More joined-up working across government and civil society organisations.
• Major investments in tackling child poverty and homelessness, rebuilding youth services, providing meaningful enrichment activities for young people, and supporting them to access improved education, guidance, apprenticeship and work opportunities. 
• Supporting schools to foster belonging, address bullying and develop a broader and more inclusive curriculum.

All these policies and commitments are to be warmly welcomed and echo many of the recommendations of our research. But their benefits are unlikely to materialise if the root causes of the problems to be addressed are not adequately attended to. In this case in particular, there is a real danger that the new initiatives are simply layered over existing policies that pull services in opposite directions.

An ecosystems perspective

We know from the long history of failed VET policies that tinkering with one part of the education and skills ecosystem without attending to the interrelationships between the different parts is destined to failure. Our research suggests that several changes to this ecosystem are required if the NYS is to be successful in meeting its aims. In addition to ensuring the adequate funding of non-graduate education and training pathways, these include: 

• Fundamentally rethinking the way schools are held accountable.
• Tackling the pervasiveness of poor employment practices which make work unattractive and unsustainable for too many young people.
• Dismantling the barriers that disproportionately prevent young people living in high-deprivation areas, those with SEND and young people from racially minoritised backgrounds from accessing apprenticeships and/or stable employment. 

This is the first of a series of articles focused on these three areas in which we draw on our findings to illuminate some of the key issues at stake and how they might best be addressed. Here we focus on the need to rethink England’s approach to school accountability.

Belonging and wellbeing

Our research participants who were studying in FE colleges and alternative provision were generally much more positive about the sense of belonging and wellbeing they experienced in these settings than the same young people had been about their school experiences.

Many reported feeling hugely stressed at school by the intense and relentless pressure on them to prepare for content-heavy exams, by a curriculum that was misaligned with their more creative and practical interests and by what they saw as didactic teaching methods dominated by rote learning. Several described these things as taking a toll on their mental wellbeing and suggested there should be more recognition of the pressure young people are under and more opportunities for creative learning. They received a strong message at school that academic routes and approaches to learning are more valued than practical and creative ones. 

Although participants’ views about the educational quality of their time in FE varied, one notable finding was a relatively favourable evaluation of the levels of belonging and wellbeing experienced in FE settings. For example, Brooke, 17, enjoyed aspects of school and wanted to do well, but told us she understood the academic content better when it was put into a practical context. As a result, she was flourishing in college, where her course involved mostly practical, hands-on learning, after a school career in which she had felt frustrated by the passivity of classroom learning. She told us, ‘I enjoyed [school] but I feel like, I don’t know, I just didn’t want to sit there all the time and copy off a whiteboard, like I wanted to do it to help me learn… and obviously in college, that’s what we do, so it helps me learn better’. 

Struggles with classroom learning at school were not confined to those who found school academically challenging. For example, Jared, 17, was an academically high-attaining student who struggled to stay focused in school. He was thriving doing a T Level at college, which involved a lot of practical, applied learning as well as a work experience component: ‘I love [the T Level course] … I never knew something like this could actually exist … because it’s pretty, like, hands-on… it’s practical work’. 

Many of the young people we spoke with also appreciated the greater flexibility in college compared to school. Not having to attend college for long, fixed and highly structured days, as had been the case at school, was liberating for them, making them feel less boxed in. Young people who spent time in alternative education settings or FE colleges, where class sizes are generally smaller, often described feeling more listened to, supported by and connected with their teachers in ways that positively impacted their engagement with education. 

School alienation and early education leaving

Unfortunately, however, many young people don’t get an opportunity to attend college, because they have been so badly put off education by their school experiences, while post-16 alternative education placements are scarce. As a result, they make the decision to leave education as soon as they can. Currently, 8% of 16-18 year olds are not in education, training or employment with training. While the reasons are complex, our research suggests that alienation from schools is a major contributing factor.

45% of the nationally representative sample of over 10,000 15-16 year olds who participated in the first wave of our Your Life, Your Future survey told us they didn’t enjoy school. This percentage is too high but was even higher for those who told us they were very unlikely to go to university, only a third of whom said they enjoyed school compared to more than two-thirds of those who said they were very likely to go to university. 

Young people from low-income households and those with SEND were also respectively less likely than their higher income, non-SEND peers to say they enjoyed school or that they received encouragement from their teachers.

Many of the young people we spoke with conveyed a strong sense of feeling unheard and unseen at school – lacking any meaningful say in shaping their own learning experiences and even opportunities to express how they felt. Young people from low-income and minoritised ethnic backgrounds, those who identify as LGBTQ+, young people with SEND and those who reported lower levels of mental health and wellbeing were the least likely to feel noticed or listened to by their teachers and to feel that their schools respected and valued diversity.

Many also experienced discrimination at school. Over 20% of racially minoritised young people reported unfair treatment or bullying from peers due to their skin colour or ethnicity. 45% of those identifying as LGB and 39% identifying as trans reported having experienced unfair treatment or bullying related to their sexual orientation and trans status respectively. Nearly one in four young people reported unfair treatment from peers based on their appearance.

Tackling the root causes of school alienation

Given these worrying findings, the Government’s acknowledgement of the need for schools to become more inclusive places is a welcome step in the right direction. For these reasons, its solutions – to provide a new framework to drive improvements in students’ experiences and sense of belonging, and to broaden the curriculum – contain some promising aspects. However, this approach is fundamentally inadequate because what is being missed are the root causes of schools being such alienating, uninspiring places for so many young people. 

Our research suggests that, so long as high-stakes school accountability metrics such as Progress 8 remain in place, schools will continue to be incentivised to prioritise their metrics performance over meaningful learning or pastoral care. This means that the space for schools to develop and implement policies and curricula that would make them more inclusive and responsive to young people’s diverse interests – and result in more young people being motivated to enter further education – will continue to be squeezed.

England’s high-stakes metrics-based accountability system and crowded curriculum don’t only stifle young people’s creativity and voices but also those of their teachers. For teachers to be able to properly respond to their students’ needs, they must be enabled to exercise their professionalism. This must include being given the space, time and opportunity to work collaboratively with students and other relevant stakeholders – including colleagues working in FE – to co-create a curriculum and inclusion policies that are tailored to the specific local contexts they are working in. This would be more in keeping with the participatory spirit of the NYS than what is currently being proposed. Simply tinkering with Progress 8 and bolting on a new school experience and belonging framework and new curriculum content as part of an expanded sex and relationships or PSHE curriculum risks exacerbating the overcrowding of the curriculum and imposing yet another set of top-down initiatives on an already overburdened workforce which is experiencing a major crisis of recruitment and retention. 

For schools to become more authentically inclusive places in which young people feel a genuine sense of belonging, they need to be included in governance processes that enable them – alongside their teachers – to have a meaningful say in shaping both the content and conditions of their learning. Only an overhaul of school accountability policy alongside a slimmed down, more flexible National Curriculum will enable the fundamental cultural change that is required to enable these kinds of processes to flourish. 

So what can be done?

Clearly the accountability system cannot be changed overnight but as a starting point we suggest opening opportunities for a volunteer sample of local authorities and multi-academy trusts to pilot alternative, more developmental and participatory approaches, building on insights from existing models and grounded in intelligent accountability principles. The lessons from these pilots could then be used to inform wider system-level change.

In keeping with the principle that policy decisions should be made closest to where they are lived and felt, we suggest that front-line responsibility for school accountability should be devolved to local authorities and trusts with the role of Ofsted reconfigured as an assessor of the quality of these devolved accountability processes. This could include, for example, ensuring that all key stakeholders, not least young people in schools, have a meaningful say in the process and that robust systems of critical self- and external peer-review are in place. Through reducing the pressure of exams, allowing young people to study topics they are passionate about, and building more participatory approaches to school accountability, these policy changes would enable the development of more inclusive school curricula and cultures in which both student and staff wellbeing is taken seriously. Ultimately, we suggest, they would lead, not only to improved school experiences, but also to more young people going on to further education and training, and to young people being better equipped to make valuable social and economic contributions and lead happier, more fulfilling lives.

By Sharon Gewirtz, Professor of Education at King’s College London and project-lead of the Young Lives Young Futures study.

The research was conducted by a team of researchers at King’s College London and the Edge Foundation and  supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council under grant number ES/S015752/1.