David Willetts is President of the Resolution Foundation and a member of the House of Lords.
We are short of key skills, too many potential workers are out of the work-force, and as a result we are too dependent on migrant workers. Tackling these inter-locking issues is an economic and a political priority; it was the focus of my last column.
I’m returning to it as the Resolution Foundation has just produced a report which sheds new light on these issues for young people.
Our new report focusses on the problem of the increasing economic inactivity among 18-24 year old, particularly because of mental health problems. It used to be the case that older people were most prone to poor mental health.
Now, in an extraordinary reversal, it looks as if young people are the most prone to poor mental health of any age group: more than a third of 18-24 year olds report symptoms of a common mental disorder. This is another example of how it does look as if younger people are faring worse than older people.
One possible reaction is that they are just over-sensitive snowflakes and mental health is their latest excuse to skive off work. There certainly may be a greater willingness to talk about and report mental ill-health than in the past. Perhaps, too, we nowadays medicalise conditions that would in the past have just been regarded as part of the vicissitudes of life.
Nevertheless, there is also good evidence suggesting there is a real problem here.
The rise of unhappiness and mental health issues amongst young people tracks the extraordinary spread of social media over the past decade. It does look as if comparing oneself all the time with other people claiming to lead impossibly wonderful lives can be depressing; there is the endless competition and comparison with friends and schoolmates, with a host of bitchy comments which have moved from the school playground to a pervasive and continuous digital environment.
Then there are the effects of Covid lockdowns. School teachers report unusually serious problems of behaviour and mental health amongst children, especially the ones whose parents didn’t have a garden or much space at home who had a raw deal during Covid.
Lockdown prioritised health risks to the old over effects on the young. It was just the latest example of a balance in public policy which has long concerned me. We are beginning to see the long-term effects of this imbalance.
It is showing up in the benefits bill: the number of new claims from 18-24 year olds for a Personal Independence Payment has trebled to 23,000 since 2016. There are also now 190,000 young people who are not working because of mental ill-health, compared with about 90,000 in 2013. That is the background to the practical policy proposals in the Resolution Foundation’s recent report, We’ve Only Just Begun.
First there is a need for better mental health support at an early age in schools. Poor mental health affects a child’s ability to learn: they are much more likely to miss days of schooling, for example. This in turn affects their long term prospects.
There has long been a lively disagreement about whether we can expect schools to deal with wider health and social problems, or whether they should just focus on teaching.
But the evidence is that children with mental health problems do seek help in schools and we have to respond to that. This involves teachers and assistants getting more assistance and help in managing school children with greater risk of panic attacks or inability to concentrate on the task at hand.
Mental Health Support Teams are a very effective intervention and should be spread more widely. At the moment schools are more likely to have this provision than further education colleges. Yet the more vulnerable young people tend to be in colleges.
That is all part of the challenge of fair funding for further education, which is where many of the most vulnerable group, 16-18-year-olds, are to be found. Those who are studying in further education colleges are losing out relative to their contemporaries in school sixth forms.
FE is often presented as in competition with higher education. But many colleges prepare young people for higher education and, indeed, also provide, it validated by a local university. The real competitive pressure is on funding for 16-18-year-olds, where schools still do better.)
Particularly intense problems face the members of that age group resitting GCSEs. It is not clear that the way resits are currently required is yielding much further improvement in either maths or literacy. Instead, there is a depressing cycle of resitting and failing again whilst losing contact with friends and contemporaries who are moving on. More help for the young people trapped in GCSE resits would be yield real benefits.
Another area in need of attention is transition to adulthood. The DWP’s youth hubs, which provide coaching and help to access work in local youth centres and libraries, are another very effective intervention which could be spread more widely. But at present they are restricted to young people on means tested benefits; that criterion could be relaxed, so more young people who need help can get it.
Finally, we must learn from success in tackling other ill-health problems. Back pain is an important and encouraging example: employers and the NHS focussed on musculoskeletal disorders in key occupations, such as social care, where they were worst – and succeeded in bringing them down.
We can do the same with mental health. We need to do better. We owe it to our young people – for all of our sakes.