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I don’t join in the criticism of David Cameron’s idea of setting up annual summer camps for 16-year-olds (clumsily called the National Citizen Scheme). His plan is that from next year all school leavers, whatever their backgrounds, will have the chance to attend a two-month camp and join in local community activities.
It seems to me that anything which will grab the attention of school leavers and possibly encourage them to go on to other things afterwards can only be a good thing.
For a while, I was involved in the youth justice system. As someone separate from what they perceived to represent ‘authority’, I interviewed hundreds of youngsters and was surprised that I was in many cases the first person to have taken an interest in them. Very few of them had opened up and discussed with anyone outside officialdom their likes and dislikes, their ambitions, their worries and the reasons why they happened to end up in the circumstances in which I found them. In most cases, this was a police cell.
Though there were a minority of youngsters that were probably well on the road to adult criminality and unlikely to be saved from this, the vast majority had ambitions which were thwarted by their personal circumstances, say by the current boyfriend of a separated mother, peer pressure (a very powerful force affecting youngsters), lack of education, lack of money, their petty criminal record and so on. These latter were a sorry lot and I was personally sad that there was no non-institutional way of helping them.
Not all youngsters are able to join organisations such as the Scouts, the Boys Brigade, cadet forces, and others like them. There may be many reasons for this; adverse peer pressure, lack of opportunity, different religious or ethnic backgrounds, etc., or maybe even rejection by the organisations themselves.
So anything which youngsters in general can see as an opportunity to join with their mates and do something for two months can only be positive. Summer camps are certainly worth the try and, who knows, the experience may change their attitudes and help them along the way to becoming useful members of society.
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I don’t join in the criticism of David Cameron’s idea of setting up annual summer camps for 16-year-olds (clumsily called the National Citizen Scheme). His plan is that from next year all school leavers, whatever their backgrounds, will have the chance to attend a two-month camp and join in local community activities.
It seems to me that anything which will grab the attention of school leavers and possibly encourage them to go on to other things afterwards can only be a good thing.
For a while, I was involved in the youth justice system. As someone separate from what they perceived to represent ‘authority’, I interviewed hundreds of youngsters and was surprised that I was in many cases the first person to have taken an interest in them. Very few of them had opened up and discussed with anyone outside officialdom their likes and dislikes, their ambitions, their worries and the reasons why they happened to end up in the circumstances in which I found them. In most cases, this was a police cell.
Though there were a minority of youngsters that were probably well on the road to adult criminality and unlikely to be saved from this, the vast majority had ambitions which were thwarted by their personal circumstances, say by the current boyfriend of a separated mother, peer pressure (a very powerful force affecting youngsters), lack of education, lack of money, their petty criminal record and so on. These latter were a sorry lot and I was personally sad that there was no non-institutional way of helping them.
Not all youngsters are able to join organisations such as the Scouts, the Boys Brigade, cadet forces, and others like them. There may be many reasons for this; adverse peer pressure, lack of opportunity, different religious or ethnic backgrounds, etc., or maybe even rejection by the organisations themselves.
So anything which youngsters in general can see as an opportunity to join with their mates and do something for two months can only be positive. Summer camps are certainly worth the try and, who knows, the experience may change their attitudes and help them along the way to becoming useful members of society.
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