Girls digging
Producing well-rounded young people with character is a struggle. Samantha Laurie explores a new scheme which gives parents a hand
The goal of a good school, said the first headmaster of Stowe, JF Roxburgh, is to produce young men who are “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck”. Time may have changed the specifics, but the key ingredients of character remain the same: courage, resilience, perseverance, confidence, compassion, ability to communicate, reliability, capacity to learn, politeness and self-control.
That such qualities appear to be in freefall has become a common lament of British universities and employers. The finger of blame points variously at everything from overanxious, over-compensatory parenting to the sterility of exam-driven schooling. It’s an issue that taxes those from all corners of society.
“One of the most important things we do at Eton,” headmaster Tony Little told his audience of grammar schoolboys in Kingston recently, “is to contrive situations where boys can fail. I am as exercised by the golden schoolboy who has found it too easy as I am by the 18-year-old leaving here shaky on confidence.”
Little’s resilience-building tips amount to leadership opportunities, with a good deal of sport and drama. Beyond the playing fields of Eton, where virtual assurance of academic success (82 offers from Oxbridge last year) provides a buffer against real failure, Little’s advice can sound a tad hollow. But it turns the spotlight onto an argument fast gaining political ground: that we should be devising ways of teaching character to young people.
It is the thinking behind a programme that will roll out to 50,000 teenagers this summer. The National Citizen Service was conceived by David Cameron as a modern version of national service, designed to foster the same sense of responsibility and common purpose, but through volunteering. It shot up the priority list two years ago, when London’s streets were set ablaze by teenaged rioters bored, disengaged and jobless.
This summer, 16- and 17-year-olds living in Surrey and London boroughs can enrol on the Challenge, a three-week scheme that consists of two residential stays – one at an outdoor pursuit centre, the other in university accommodation – and culminates in a community volunteering project that students devise and then deliver after the summer.
Each group is hand-picked so as to mix teenagers from different ethnic, social and income backgrounds. They learn a skill such as drama, photography, music or sport and then use it in their community. Last year, Surrey youngsters performed plays for the elderly, coached sports to kids, hosted a party for Mencap and gardened at a homeless centre.
It’s an impressive scheme: cheap (just £35); popular (9 out of 10 former participants said they would recommend it); and effective (almost half of those involved have stayed in community based social action). Across most of London, places have gone quickly. But in Surrey, uptake has been slower, perhaps because the scheme competes with other ‘character-building’ activities set up by parents.
Detractors argue that it is little more than a CV-enhancing summer camp for middle-class kids, and a costly affront at a time when youth service budgets have been savaged across the UK. Each place costs the state £1,364, and Cameron’s plan to roll it out to 600,000 of England’s 16-year-olds seems some way off. As it stands, it is neither universal nor compulsory.
But its beauty lies in the idea that character is formed by giving back to society and through genuine engagement with those from different backgrounds.
Intergenerational volunteering is the rubric of schemes such as Skillway in Godalming, where a group of volunteers – many retired tradespeople – impart hands-on training in motor mechanics, woodwork and metalwork to disaffected youths and a real sense of what employers want: gumption, reliability, punctuality, self-motivation and respect.
But genuinely mixed peer groups are rare. Research tells us that those from less privileged backgrounds are more likely to take one instance of failure as an indication of total life chances. Equally, the offspring of the affluent are more likely to approach the workplace with a pick-up-after-me complacency. If the NCS can foster common ground through the concept of service to others, instilling a sense of purpose and belonging, it will be doing more than most to inculcate the character traits and social cohesion so sorely needed.
