From the chapter ‘Children society fails most‘
Sir Stephen O’Brien CBE, Co-founder and Vice-President of Business in the Community
The Rowntree, Wedgewood and Cadbury families and many of our Victorian business leaders had strongly developed ideas about caring for their workforces. Behind their thinking often lay a religious (and specifically non-conformist) Christian faith. It matched the energy and creativity of contemporary social pioneers such as Lord Shaftesbury. This extraordinary reforming aristocrat had come to see that there could be no route out of deep working-class poverty without education and without a reduction in the legally permitted working hours of children to ten hours a day. He became the founder of the Ragged School Union, establishing free schools in destitute areas of London for children. There is a wonderful re-creation of Lord Shaftesbury’s Ragged Schools, as they became known, in a museum in Copperfield Road, Tower Hamlets. In reality, it took another century, and the Butler Act of 1944, to provide education of a breath and standard that we can recognise today. But it remains unequal and patchy in its outcomes. Especially so for young people who have grown up in the care system.
Thirty-three per cent of care-experienced youngsters find themselves homeless between 6 and 24 months after leaving local authority care,[i] and as Barry Goldson revealed in 2008, children who had been in care accounted for 49 per cent of the 11,672 under-21-year-olds in contact with the criminal justice system.[ii] The public sector has tried to redress this but has made negligible impact. It is time to go back to employers and see if they can crack the problem.
There is a centuries-old plaque in the Great Hall at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield, London, which commemorates the names and contributions of many business leaders and other forward-looking social reformers such as Thomas Coram. It reminds us that philanthropy was certainly a characteristic of the way in which much business was enacted two or three centuries ago. As an early example of what is now wide-spread practice, the great 18th-century artist, William Hogarth, who was not well off, made his contribution to the hospital through what we would now call a ’gift in-kind’: he painted a huge canvas to decorate the staircase entrance to the Great Hall and the Board room, which is still there for us to enjoy today.
Much more recently, the last decades of the 20th century saw an explosion of corporate engagement in the community at the same time as so many of the traditional large employers – in ship building, steel and coal mining – declined and the impact decimated their local communities. Heirs of the Victorians, like Sir Alastair Pilkington, Chair of the Lancashire family firm of glass makers, found that they were forced to lay off large numbers of vulnerable employees. Sir Alastair thought that ‘something had to be done’ in order to keep the motivation of those remaining workers whose family and neighbours were losing their jobs. This ‘something’ turned out to be the creation of a national network of Local Enterprise Agencies supporting redundant employees to acquire new skills and create their own small businesses. Encouraged by the Thatcher government and the leadership of The Prince of Wales, many of the leading corporates offered their support in the form of cash, contracts and ‘gifts in kind’ to the movement, with charities such as Business in the Community created.[iii] The realisation was that strengthening the local community was good for business because you would sell more of your goods or services into communities that were prospering.
Those business leaders of the 1980s have left us now, and their successors have mostly delegated their community support efforts to specialist departments managing a mixture of charitable giving and corporate social responsibility (CSR). In practice this has often led on to ensuring that the annual report to shareholders includes a catalogue of their company’s ‘generous’ contributions to wider society while glossing over a failure to ‘own up’ to real shortcomings, let alone considering the overall impact of a company’s activities on major issues such as global warming.
But this is now coming full circle. The new understanding is that charitable giving and CSR, while clearly worthwhile in themselves, do not change longstanding social issues that have defied resolution over the past century or so.
This takes us back to Lord Shaftesbury and our current failure to support, train and offer worthwhile careers to so many of the youngsters growing up in local authority care. At any one point there are about 103,000 children growing up in care.[iv] According to a recent PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) report, we spend approaching £9 billion of public money on this group every year,[v] but fail to offer them genuine opportunities to enjoy satisfying careers, let alone enabling them to avoid interaction with the criminal justice system. In 2012, for example, it was estimated that 24 per cent of those in the criminal justice system had grown up in care.[vi] This is sobering when you realise that 1 per cent of the entire population have been in care. But very many of them have, of necessity, developed all the self-resilience and creativity that so often emerges from being outside the mainstream and fighting the system. In other words, given a chance, they have the potential to be extremely valuable members of the workforce.
The picture isn’t totally gloomy, and there are examples of individuals who have broken through the barriers and made their way to university and leading positions in our society. Examples would be Baroness Lola Young, who is now in the House of Lords and chairs the All-Party Committee on Local Authority Looked After Children; or Air Vice-Marshall Christopher Luck, who leads the wonderful work of the Shaw Trust; or Lady Joyce Acher, who has played a huge role in the development of her local community in Surrey.
So, in this instance, after decades of policy initiatives, changing outcomes for the better for care experienced youngsters is beyond the effective reach of central or local government. It requires business initiatives and leadership based on seeking real commercial advantage rather than charity. There are two programmes ready to go to take this forward. The first is an intensive residential confidence building and training programme developed by the Adab Trust for those who are furthest from being employment ready. The second is an effective brokerage system opening the doors for the many effective third sector training organisations that have inadequate access to the leaders of our corporates.
As the technology entrepreneur and charismatic Lord-Lieutenant of London, Sir Ken Olisa, is purported to have said: ‘There is huge talent just waiting to be harnessed and trained to build dynamic businesses and make existing businesses more profitable – we neglect this to our own disadvantage.’
So the call is for leaders of business, and indeed all employers, to see that they could transform and enhance the life prospects and career satisfaction of our care leavers. There is nothing very new in this. As Sonia Blandford noted in her book, Born to Fail?, even the Confederation of British Industry believes that business has a responsibility to ensure that neither background nor postcode should define someone’s life chances’. To do this they will need to look carefully at, and be prepared to change, some of their recruitment practices while offering ongoing support, encouragement and mentoring to their recruits.
Businesses need not be on their own in this. A characteristic of so many youngsters emerging from care is a lack of a network of support and of personal confidence.[vii] Of course it is not for everyone, but we know that involvement in sport and the arts can build confidence and teamwork like almost nothing else. For example, in London, great sports clubs such as West Ham United, Tottenham Hotspur, The Boxing Academy, Saracens Rugby Club and Essex County Cricket Club, and really effective youth clubs such as Onside and the Osmani Centre, are all delighted to work with employers to build a new generation of confident young care leavers. It won’t happen if left to the public sector on its own, but surely the task of offering fulfilling work to such a small group, most of whom would be real assets, cannot be beyond the leadership of employers.
Notes
[i] Stein, M. (2006) ‘Research review: Young people leaving care’, Children and Family Social Work, 11(3): 273–9.
[ii] Children in Care Working Group (2008) Couldn’t Care Less: A Policy Report, London: The Centre for Social Justice, www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/CouldntCareLess.pdf, p 18. [Original source: Goldson, B. (ed) (2008) Dictionary of Youth Justice, p 64.]
[iii] Grayson, D. (2007) Business-led Corporate Responsibility Coalitions: Learning from the Example of Business in the Community in the UK – An Insider’s Perspective, London, Cranfield and Harvard, MA: Business in the Community, Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility and the Kennedy School of Government.
[iv] PWC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) and Homes for Good (2021) The Investment of a Lifetime: Delivering Better Outcomes for Children in Care, www.pwc.co.uk/government-public-sector/assets/documents/investment-of-lifetime-delivering-better-children-care-outcomes.pdf
[v] PWC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) and Homes for Good (2021) The Investment of a Lifetime: Delivering Better Outcomes for Children in Care, www.pwc.co.uk/government-public-sector/assets/documents/investment-of-lifetime-delivering-better-children-care-outcomes.pdf
[vi] Williams, K., Papadopoulou, V. and Booth, N. (2012) Prisoners’ Childhood and Family Backgrounds: Results from the Surveying Prisoner Crime Reduction (SPCR) Longitudinal Cohort Study of Prisoners, Ministry of Justice Research Series 4/12, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/278837/prisoners-childhood-family-backgrounds.pdf
[vii] Ofsted (2022) ‘Ready or Not’: Care Leavers’ Views on Preparing to Leave Care, www.gov.uk/government/publications/ready-or-not-care-leavers-views-of-preparing-to-leave-care/ready-or-not-care-leavers-views-of-preparing-to-leave-care