I see huge issues of underclimbing. Sometimes, people’s lives are so chaotic and fractured. I have siblings who are younger than me who are homeless. They refuse to go into the drug dens that we call “homeless shelters”. They are in their 20s like me—oh, I am 30 now. Well, they are of a similar age to me but their lives are so chaotically removed. They are my siblings, yet I have the audacity to sit and speak at a parliamentary table knowing that I have two brothers who are dealing with mental health issues. They have become the more obvious products from my mother’s and father’s roots. They are not even claiming benefits such as jobseekers allowance because they do not know where to start.
There is a fundamental dehumanisation that happens with what we call, sometimes ironically, the social security system, whether that is watching mum get her benefits, family allowance or child support, and going to the chemist for the prescription—that is the structure of the week. I see that with my brothers now—they are so disengaged. There are people who have helped them to take steps forward, but they were not at school from the age of 12 onwards.
I liken living in poverty to sitting on a chair that has had three of its legs removed: every part of you is tensed in order to keep balanced; the slightest movement, wind or meander and you will go. Yes, school should be the core hub, but if you are living in poverty you will not be able to think about playing with glitter to create a nice piece of poetry or whatever. When you are surviving, how can you think about thriving, culture or creativity? Why would you think of yourself in the asset model, rather than thinking about the deficits that everyone knows you for? There is something about how we inject a sense of humanity and dignity into social security.
There is one simple—perhaps not simple, but, to me, obvious—way to do that. The people who receive services look and sound nothing like the people running them, and there is a big class and social norms difference, down to accents and backgrounds. There is a barrier to overcome because those people feel different.
I talk about youth work and I get very annoyed when the terms “school” and “education” are used interchangeably, as they are very different. School is one critical hub of education. There is an exciting opportunity for Scotland to take stock of where we are in reality. We ask teachers who are overworked, stressed and under many pressures to fight poverty; instil financial literacy and budget skills; understand the pressures of mum and dad; help young people understand their benefits rights post school and think about their future career options; and overcome their mental health problems—probably the largest presenting need that I see at our services—as well as chronic lack of self-confidence and huge issues around anger management. That is a bit like asking the optician to fix your toothache.
We have had two national youth work strategies in Scotland and the third is coming up. I have not been involved in the internal conversation, and I would like this committee to think about how to apply pressure for a truly innovative national youth work strategy—perhaps it will be third time lucky. We need to truly recognise the myriad menu of pathways for young people because, for the bottom 20th percentile, sending them to the classroom, with its rules and focus on academic attainment, is a bit like sending them to the optician when they say that they have toothache.
How do we recognise what should be called not “alternative” education but “non-school” education pathways, which many of us run? Alongside school, there is an opportunity to recognise youth work as being for re-engagement and employability, and not just about going to have a custard cream after school, having a game of pool or collecting badges. It should be about accredited achievement as well as formal attainment.
There is an opportunity to see that one size fails most, but I do not see that happening. I see a lot of places that are called “supportive learning”, which, ironically, are very unsupportive and not much learning goes on. They are in the dark corridors at the top of schools—I say that from an experience in the past two weeks. It broke my heart, because I work with young people and I love them as much as I want to help them. I think that that is important—it was what I needed at that age. I hate to say it, but I compared that place to a cat and dog home where a puppy is desperate to get out of a cage. I sometimes see the issues that young people face, but they are in a rigid system that cannot help them and that sometimes exacerbates their problems—and it should not be for them to do. We need to recognise that there is a whole coalition of people ready to empower young people in whatever form they come in.
We talk about young people as if they are all the same, but we know that a classroom has a range of different issues and that a youth work service has a range of provision. Through the new youth work strategy, we need to recognise the alternative school down at Spartans and the work of Helm in Dundee. It would be good to see ownership from the committee. You should push it and say that it would be good to do something truly innovative that shows that we understand that, if school is not working, we can work with it much earlier to signpost young people effectively so that they can get the qualifications, confidence or job that they need to live their lives.