On Tuesday, Tower Hamlets will be named in a major report as the local authority area with Britain’s highest rate of child poverty. The Campaign to End Child Poverty has found that 52 per cent of children in Tower Hamlets live in child poverty, as defined by the Child Poverty Act. The measure is derived by looking at median average household incomes and after housing costs are taken into account.There is considered to be child poverty when household incomes are less than 60 per cent of this median.
Bethnal Green and Bow is the parliamentary constituency with Britain’s highest rate at 51 per cent; in Poplar and Limehouse, the rate is 48 per cent (which could be a statistical anomaly).
I mention these statistics because they provide some background to a very good article in today’s Sunday Times by Rushanara Ali, the MP for Bethnal Green and Bow.
Here it is:
We know that times are tough and the job market for young people is even tougher, with 1m of them unemployed. Since I was selected as a parliamentary candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow in Tower Hamlets, east London, in 2007, I have come across many young people, including graduates, desperately seeking work. Graduate unemployment in my constituency was then among the highest in the UK and remains high.
I was told by one parent: “I have three children who have degrees from good universities — but they are having trouble getting jobs.” This was a story that was too often repeated. When I met these young graduates, it quickly became clear that many were making basic mistakes in their job applications and, crucially, they lacked social networks and confidence — which was further diminishing with the knockback of rejection letters from employers.
What these young people were lacking was the “soft skills” required to make the transition from school and college to long-term employment.
My proposal therefore is the establishment of finishing schools that teach manners, communication and presentation — abilities that are fundamental to getting on in the world. Getting a job isn’t just about your grades — you also need to know how to put together a CV, how to dress for an interview and how to behave with employers. These are skills that schools and colleges too often fail to teach.
The model for my suggestion is a scheme that until recently was running in London. Fastlaners was an intensive two-week finishing school that provided a crash course in everything from voice training to teamwork, workplace etiquette to behaviour, posture and dress; employers provided robust feedback and taught graduates the tacit rules and “tricks of their trade” as well as acting as mentors.
The aim was to build graduates’ soft skills, to raise their confidence and self-esteem, to widen their networks and to increase their awareness of the labour market. Fastlaners also encouraged graduates to work with other graduates to provide peer-to-peer support and networks so they could share experiences of what works and what does not. The results were impressive, though sadly the scheme is no longer running because of cuts in charitable funding.
Such projects are particularly important for working-class children.
Social mobility declined in the 1980s and we will not know for many years whether it bounced back under Labour. I hate to say it but on Labour’s watch, while experts say there was some improvement, it will have been at best a modest turnaround.
Sandwiched between the glittering towers of Canary Wharf and the City and close to the Olympic village and the newly opened Westfield shopping centre in Stratford, my constituency should have thousands of job opportunities. And yet the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion recently found that 10% of 16-24-year-olds in Tower Hamlets are claiming jobseeker’s allowance — the highest proportion in the capital.
What is particularly shocking is that despite the rapid expansion in higher education, so little progress has been made. While some working-class children have broken through, those in the middle and upper-middle classes have maintained their dominance of the professions.
In the past few years this situation has worsened. Young people — including graduates — are not making the transition from education to work because there is a radical mismatch between what employers are looking for and the skills these would-be employees have.
For many of my constituents, they were the first generation in their families to go to university and, despite having done well in their formal education, they lack the social capital to help them make the transition into work.
These young people need pre-job-search training to help build the social support and networks that would give them the best possible chance of getting interviews. This support would be crucial in helping them to compete against their middle-class contemporaries — who have many of those resources through family and friends.
We must do better at providing what young people need to get good jobs. As the Fastlaners project demonstrates, this does not always mean long-term training and investment but instead can be accomplished with short, sharp, rapid training and work placements.
While formal education is incredibly important, we should not forget the other skills, experience and networks that help us all to do well and contribute more to society.
Trial by Jeory 
While I agree with much that is said I think teaching manners begins at home and should be thought by parents. As a regular user of the D6 everyday I see parents on the bus with their child sitting on the seat beside them. Never do they make the child get up and let an adult sit down. This is the very basics of manners. At finishing scholl stage it is too late to teach common sense manners , it should by then be second nature. When I was a child (and it’s not that long ago) If I didn’t offer my seat to an adult I was punished. It has done me no harm 🙂
The poverty statistics are shocking.
a lot of WE perhaps she should not be including us all as WE
Carole – do you really mean this?
I looked again at the article having read your comment. This is what i found with “we” highlighted as “WE”.
WE know that times are tough and the job market for young people is even tougher, with 1m of them unemployed.
Social mobility declined in the 1980s and WE will not know for many years whether it bounced back under Labour.
WE must do better at providing what young people need to get good jobs.
While formal education is incredibly important, WE should not forget the other skills, experience and networks that help us all to do well and contribute more to society.
I’m afraid I don’t understand the problem with the use of “we”. Maybe explain a bit more? Which bit did you not agree with and wanted to be disassociated from and why?
Personally I don’t find any of her “we” comments controversial or something I disagree with. I disagree with some of the other things she says in the article – but not these statements.
A labour minister talking about the need to teach soft skills? What a surprise. Given that the percentage of kids passing GCSE’s and A-levels in solid academic subjects dropped by a massive amount during the Labour parliament years, I’d have thought it was high time for a labour MP to drop that tired, sad old line.
As Darren said, manners and social politeness should be taught at home, not at school. Teachers are not to make up for the deficiencies of parents. And yes, manners and social norms are very closely related to culture and expectations. And thanks to Labour pedalling the ‘multicultural is good’ line for the last decade and a half, we now have rafts of young people who have no notion of how to behave in the worlds of UK commerce and industry, and who will therefore fail to fit in and fail to find jobs. It is therefore no surprise to find this problem is at it’s worst in the most ‘multicultural’ areas. The NEET statistics are dramatically much worse for the Bangladeshi and Somali kids than for those from – say – ethnically Chinese or Indian groups, or any other group who integrate, learn to speak good English, work hard and attempt to break down their ghettos.
If Ms. Ali cared for her constituents she would present them with some hard and unpalatable truths. Articles like this embed the existing problems further still, and and continue to fail to solve them (at huge expense to the country.) I am genuinely disappointed to see a contemporary of mine, who worked very hard to get where she is now, miss the point so spectacularly.
Tim.
There are also plenty of graduate children of middle class parents who are also out of work! This isn’t a class issue – it’s called a recession!
What employers are looking for are young people who can read, write and communicate well, have a reasonable degree of common sense and know how to find things out for themselves, work hard, are polite and have the right attitude to work. Plus an appreciation that success does not arrive overnight or without a lot of effort. None of that relates to class.
I also really don’t get how a finishing school is going to deliver any of that in two weeks. These are outlooks and characteristics that are habits and habits are certainly not learned or ingrained in two weeks.
A partnership between schools and parents should deliver most of what a young parent needs to succeed BEFORE they leave school. If both schools and parents think it’s important and worth making the effort…….
Where the parents lack the right type of experiences or skills to pass on to their children, the schools are capable of filling the gap.
What helps the schools do their job well are parents who impress upon their children the right sort of values and habits that help a children succeed.
What also helps the schools and parents are people from local community businesses who help fill in the gaps. These are not people who need paying!
Also I can think of quite a few people I know from a working class background who would be very insulted to hear anybody suggesting that working class parents are unable to do their bit to help their kids – particularly in relation to the work ethic and behaviour.
One final thought – the world has also changed very significantly in the last 25 years. Are the experiences and networks of ANY parents still relevant today?
Of course, many Tower Hamlets secondary schools now offer an excellent standard of teaching and learning (simply compare their GCSE results to some of the outer London boroughs). Given these levels of child poverty and other indices of depravation this is truly amazing, and a testament to the hard work of the pupils, families and teachers. However, it was achieved under record years of investment under the then Labour government and council – we wait to see what the Tory led coalition and Lutfur Rahman will do.
I’ve always rather thought that the advantage of going away to university – other than receiving an education to a degree in a subject – was that you learnt these life-skills, and built up a social network.
Rushanara went to Mulberry School for Girls (in Whitechapel), Tower Hamlets College and then on to read PPE at St John’s College, Oxford. The trouble in Tower Hamlets is that whilst many young people do go on to further and higher education, unlike Rushanara many never leave their home and for some that means never leaving their ghetto. Consequently, they never mix with people from other backgrounds, maintain low aspirations and fail to develop the skills that employers require.
Furthermore, the fact that learning to spell and write properly seems to matter a lot less to the education establishment than it does to prospective employers is another major issue – but more so if you come from a household where English is not the first language.
Flash Harry,
Excellent points. My only question would be the notion of ‘great GSCE results achieved through record investment under labour’. What has this investment produced in terms of useful results (i.e. kids who have strong employment prospects); very little, as is evidenced by the abysmal figures mentioned in Ms. Ali’s article. Given this end result, I’d question the usefulness of the investment.
Clearly there is something wrong. And perhaps it’s simply this: large families of poor social type, whose parents have little or no English and are entirely reliant on benefits, tend to produce children who have poor social skills and who end up being entirely reliant on benefits. If you import third-world people en masse you end up with third-world living standards, third world employment and prosperity and third-world politics, all of which Tower Hamlets have in spades.
I take issue strongly with the opening argument about poverty. We are told that ‘child poverty when household incomes are less than 60 per cent of the median.’ On this basis, the only way to escape child poverty is to ensure that everyone’s income is within a narrow band, and if anyone falls below this band, they are impoverished – regardless of how much wealth they have, or the local cost of living. Defining poverty in relative terms is deeply flawed and puts the shadow of irrelevancy firmly over any argument to address it.
True poverty is going to bed hungry, and waking up more so. True poverty is suffering from a cheaply-cured disease, but not having the money to do anything about it. True poverty is lacking a roof over your heads, or literally freezing to death in cold weather. How many of LBTH’s ‘impoverished children’ are in this situation, given our generous benefits system that pays, pays and pays again. Housing, tax credits, ‘living allowance’, education, healthcare … claim all this lot and claim to be ‘poor’ – don’t make me laugh.
Tim.
My impression, with more than anecdote, is the cash, black and grey economies are far healthier than poverty indicators show. I read most of the major literature on macro economy assessment of blackmarkets (which are few, as it’s a career dead end, politically) though that kind would not show fine enough detail. In the last 5 years, data mining, or what is now capitalized Big Data, has become a affordable tool I can use in a very small business. So, let’s look. Let’s build x-refs between insured property such as motor vehicles, insurance and warranty claims on household goods, link that back to household statistics (not census, which is always fluffed, deliberately or otherwise, but correlated personal accounts, and make some reasonable assumptions too by going through the records at Companies House) and let’s see if there are any anomalies. Outrageous anomalies would be sufficient for a warrant to unveil the underlying identifiers.
I strongly disagree with privacy invasion, especially with electronic data, but IBM recently gained patents on how to do fine grained analyses of vast data sets without personal information leaking. Other comparable patents and initiatives exist. But, if you had the data, this could be done by a staff of three or four, on a shoestring.
But it is also my experience, that it is not immigrant populations (1st, second or third gen) by any means who are at the forefront of ghettoisation in LBTH. Rather, if anything, the profligacy of loans created – at least also – a white English middle class of landlords with a entitlement chip on their shoulder. The already educated and salaried had a strong advantage in leading this trend. Despite public housing stock being sold at gift rates, and unrealistically low – negative – interest rates as subsidy (so that is both major parties in my bad books, and any others for failing to call out) this is a largely educated, largely salaried professional demographic. Instead of creating businesses, they – in some instances I have seen – trampled their way out of their modest public accommodations, said see ya, wouldn’t want to be ya, moved to nicer neighborhoods, and thumb their nose whilst leaving their slum let dwellings to rot. Some I know could teach LBTH a thing or two about fiddling the books.
So, it’s a multi – factional decline, each party at the begging bowl and tearing at the others’ throats. It took at least two generations to get into this mess.
In the above quoted article, two points strike me as dangerous fallacies:
The extended City does not cater to individual rights. Whilst many there may appear abhorrent, the work ethics are extraordinarily high. The City also traditionally has expected people to find their way in under their own steam. There really are lots of ways, if you look (this internet thing, if not libraries) assuming basic literacy and numeracy, which ought to be instilled far earlier than a young person can legally work.
The new shopping center at Stratford, is merely a last ditch attempt to pick the ill educated classes pockets. It is not a beacon, and anyone arguing the side of improving living conditions for the poor or borderline poor, has no place citing it as a positive example.
In reference to the “Fastlaners” project: without mention of ongoing results, the claim has no validity. Many trades take years to become accomplished in, whether manual / craft work or trading in the city. I sense it is a puppet sock, to argue the promulgators can achieve success (for their definition of success) whilst at the same time pursuing ill educated, divisive, abhorrent, politics; Judas to whom they claim to succor, and built out of further subsidy (to hapless employers) to attain the (not quoted) numbers.
A lot of the comments seem to be missing the point of Rushnara’s article – she is talking about graduates, including those who are said to have gone to ‘good universities’ (to quote the parents).
So all the comments about parents on benefits producing low-achieving/unintegrated/poorly educated children surely does not apply.
My issue with her concept of ‘finishing schools’ for graduates is that a genuinely good university will have a careers service which should have information on the soft skills that graduates need and will provide the milk round of graduate jobs. So why are these graduates not getting the skills from a service that is already set up to provide what’s needed?
Unless, of course, the parents (and graduates) don’t realise what a ‘good’ university actually is. How anybody can spend 3-4 years at a good university and not come away with good social networks and an understanding of how to get a job I don’t know.
But also, as somebody else has pointed out, this is not a problem that is limited to Tower Hamlets. There are few ‘graduate’ jobs (by which I mean those that genuinely require a degree) and some young people have unrealistic expectations of what a degree actually gets you.
eastendersscriptwriterscouldn’tmakeitup,
actually, the bar in many professions has moved to an advanced degree in a hard science or a PhD. Both, for quite a few jobs I see aimed at young 20 somethings.
I have no idea what constitutes “good universities”, because the social engineering to create the modern university system happened at about the time i was wandering that academic path, and took a gamble the wholesale devaluation would make it worth dropping out.
The thing is, with “academic” schools, they preselect to the extent, to quote one of my teachers his job was “to bloody well un – educate you and make you slightly normal”. [sic, as he’d never have mangled his grammar] a point well taken on board by me.
A part of this, surely, was rebellion against the absolute no-return discrimination of the 11 plus, something so ingrained in the age group of adult younger educators in the 70s, even as Common Entrance was fed in (and wholesale ignored by selective schools) that tangible fear of exams was transmitted to pupils.
Before that, the sciences barred you from what was considered high education. The Greats or no top line uni place. In one example, until the 70s, a year of classics, at 13, got you thrown up to the blue unis. Maybe we are still dealing with those flaws, but not recognizing our own miscalculations.
This is something i may have a personal block to understand, because it is too close to me personally. But if i were to pick one thing, local authority trivialization of libraries, and the incursion of wave after wave of professions who are paid to mollycoddle children have to be dismantled. (and I was taught – awfully, at a tender age – maths by a expelled ex ILEA teacher, who clued us up as to all that. No, not a bad teacher, but knew diddly maths!)
Set this against what created Gregory’s Girl, or The Wall, clearly there was real trauma causing visceral responses to gratuitously harsh schooling. I remember some kids landing where i went to prep, chucked out by a barely reconstituted borstal.
Regarding your last comment, because it ought to be parsed out in full, but that would require several paras: I agree overall, and you reflect my first observation. But what is a graduate job? As I understood it, from before the uni proliferation, that was an entry level position. If you paid attention to interviews and personal hygiene, maybe at a large stable firm. So, I agree again, expectations are too high.
But try to get a job without a degree – any job – and what happens to your loans? (those also came in just after i deliberately flunked, thinking bum deal) The economy is perverted, and so nett wage deflation occurred, well the market is now saturated – how do you trust the tests? – because who financed those loans gained nigh perpetual tithes against the debtors, and yet there was more business to be made on longer term debt: mortgages.
So the yield curve to a banker started looking amazing: long term debt, secured totally, against rising (inflated) asset values and the whole thing kept extended by real relative wage deflation.
I would argue as well, that any 3 year degree is all about soft skills. If you wanted to cram the actual learning, it would be greatly foreshortened. But I figured you could also pad things out with some after work drinking 😉
The law does not permit me to place an advert with the stipulations which might interest me to hire. Cue infernal interview processes. Hiring cost approaches a year’s salary. I’d rather take the gamble straight up.
Is that the “soft” skills people learn? Have a look through some of the computing fora, where young and to my mind talented job seekers go, and hear how complex is that path. Whole other industry. Is pandering to that a “soft skill”? Costing the employer and paying a sub-society of people manipulating random pseudo-scientific data points, HR and agencies?
As for writing CV’s, this is just endless loop between employment discrimination, questionable use of qualifications, and the industry I mentioned above. Teaches people to game the system. Do not want that ethic.
I’d love it to cut through all this rot. But shearing off the grubby coat, and paying it all from Babel to grave, is exactly what has discarded many generations of capital. All on a whim. We shall have to learn to live on ether.
Maybe it’s Ted mixing up child poverty and graduate achievement by kids from poor backgrounds?
It would certainly be nice to see Rushanara actually addressing issues about measures to alleviate child poverty in Tower Hamlets and to enable them to develop networks with families from different backgrounds.
Such as why facilities and services for under fives living in crowded conditions and in homes without a garden are being cut by LBTH. I can’t think of anything which is more likely to help a child do well in later life than investing in them before the age of 5.
An interesting observation EESWCMII, and I suspect you have answered your own question. Is it likely that Ms Ali left St John’s not knowing who to put together a CV, how to dress or how to speak to potential employers? Not really, no.
More likely that the parents see the likes of University of East London or South Bank Uni as being “good”, whereas the degrees they offer are of extremely limited value in the marketplace. LBTH kid therefore hits the job market at age 21 having never lived away from home, in possession of few social skills that have value outside their ghetto, with a degree that employers will not value. Is it any wonder that they don’t get jobs?
The causes of this problem are surely many. Not least being the Blairite/New Labour notion that half our school leavers should go on to do a degree, while reducing the quality of the education they are offered.
Tim.
Presumably there is a connection between child poverty and high birth rates? I am not a statistician but it seems likely to be at least partly the cause….