What should the government’s priorities be for children?

I was asked this week what I thought the government’s priorities should be for under 18s. This was my answer. What would you have said?

(As the son of a vicar and an ex-management consultant, there are – of course – five points all beginning with the same letter.)

• Supported families: No relationship is more important to a child than with the adult members of their family. In my years running residential camps, I never met a teenager whose relationship with the person bringing them up (whether their mother, their father or their grandparent) didn’t set the tramlines for how they saw themselves and the wider world. When I was at the Department for Education I asked to see what correlated most with a child doing well at school. A good relationship with your family mattered more than almost anything. But no adult, or pair of adults, can bring up a child alone. We all need some support.
• School attendance: The pandemic has reminded us that being in school matters. It had become fashionable to think of school as solely a cause of anxiety, stress and unhappiness for our children. The last year has been a corrective to this. Especially for our most vulnerable children, school is a vitally important safe place to be. It can be a place where they are noticed, fed, cared for and taught. And yet more than 1 in 10 of our children miss more than 1 in 10 of their lessons. We need to keep our children in school.
• Skills for a living wage: Are Dutch children cleverer than our children? 9 out of 10 Dutch children achieve the equivalent of A-levels. Here in the UK, just 6 out of 10 do. I think our children are just as bright, capable and curious. What then is going on? The truth is that half our children do broadly fine. Those who take the academic path broadly match their Dutch peers. But we serially let down those who take the technical route. In the Netherlands, these children are given three years to master a trade, passing a technical qualification equivalent to A-levels in difficulty. Here in the UK, our children doing technical courses are given just two years and spend most of that on GCSE level learning. We need to change this urgently.*
• Strong networks: The truth is that ‘it is not just what you know, but who you know’. The middle-classes (like me) have networks and connections that their children benefit from. They meet Doctors, Lawyers, Construction Managers, Plumbers and all sorts of people doing well-paid jobs. Who you meet and spend time with defines what sort of jobs you believe ‘people like you’ do. It also affects your empathy and understanding of others – critical to our democracy and our society. We must do more to give all of our children a wider set of networks. That is why National Citizen Service is so important and also why I wrote Fractured.
• Second chance: Sometimes things go wrong. Over 60,000 children are arrested in the UK every year. That’s more than 150 a day. Half of these children don’t end up in court. They are released with a caution or without charge. However, far too many will be back. This moment becomes a step on a journey towards a life in and out of prison. A child being arrested is a tragedy and an opportunity. It is a chance to turn things round for the good of that child, their family and all of us. Few pieces of knowledge are more valuable than knowing the most effective way to make that change happen That’s why in my day-job, the Youth Endowment Fund has just launched a £20m fund to find the best ways to give these children a second chance.

That’s my list. What’s yours?