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For years evidence has been mounting to show that when children
transfer from primary to secondary school, academic achievement
falters. It is in this period that the performance gap widens
and the behaviour of a growing minority of children deteriorates.
The British Household Panel Survey charts the rise in alcohol
consumption, smoking and contact with drug users, as children
enter their teens. Boys are almost three times as likely as
girls to say they have committed vandalism in the past year.
They are also far more likely to have been suspended from
school.
After transferring to secondary school the proportion of
both girls and boys expecting to leave school as soon as possible
rises sharply - a classic sign of unhappiness or loss of motivation.
But while girls steadily recover so that by the age of 15
only 6% expect to leave at 16, boys do not - three times as
many boys as girls say they intend to drop out at 16.
While girls and boys from unskilled families have roughly
equal expectation, girls with professional, managerial and
skilled parents are far more likely than their male peers
to expect to stay on.
Middle class boys are much more disaffected than middle-class
girls - a fact that helps to explain why young women are now
beginning to outperform men at university.
The annual British Household Panel Survey began in 1991.
It tracks the progress of the lives of over 10,000 adults
and 1,000 children living in 5,500 households across the United
Kingdom. It is funded by the Economic and Social Research
Council and conducted by the Institute for Social and Economic
Research at Essex University.
By Dr Jonathon Scales, a sociologist at Essex University,
and Rachel Taplin, project manager at Braintree District Council.
(TES, 23 February 2001)
In December 1999 the charity Communities that Care published
A Guide to Promising Approaches that highlights the
approaches that work best with deprived and disaffected young
people.
A wide spectrum of approaches have been tried to tackle
such problems as educational underachievement, disaffection
and truancy, teenage pregnancy, youth violence and crime ranging
from pre-natal services to youth mentoring.
The guide aims to identify which approach has been shown
to work. It lists some which have been effective and produces
the evidence for that success. In areas where little evaluation
has taken place including many youth work and regeneration
intiatives it indicates what is considered to be good practice
by those in the field.
Education-related initiatives such as family literacy schemes
and after-school clubs dominate the guide.
The guide's author, David Utting, commented that the charity
depended on a holistic approach tackling several problems
in parallel. The guide is endorsed by the government's social
exclusion unit.
The guide lists programmes which have proved effective with
young people, divided into four sections:
- Families: prenatal services, family support using home
visitors, detection and treatment of post-natal depression,
screening for delayed language development, parent support,
handling childr4en's behaviour.
- Schools: High-Scope nursery practice, family literacy,
Reading Recovery, literacy hour, Cognitive Acceleration
through Science Education anti-bullying, family links.
- Youth: after-school clubs, mentoring, youth employment
with education, peer-led community programmes.
- Community: community policing, Communities that Care,
housing management initiatives.
(TES, 17 December 1999)
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