I've sat back on this one, watching things develop, trying to come up with a hypothesis. Organised gangs on the rampage? Bored teens with nothing better to do and no sense of responsibility? Disenfranchised youths with no stake in society? Chancers? Copycat behaviour? Kids just out for the crack? Variations on all of these things? Probably.
But look, each year we are churning out these kids who have no academic skills and no skills in anything else. They hang around until May/June of Year 11 and then they're released into the world and don't have a clue what to do when they get there. They've been brought up on Playstation and YouTube. They're de-sensitised to learning. It's boring.
And don't blame the teachers. These kids are beyond their teachers. The teachers have been running around for five years trying to get them to produce work worthy of entry as coursework, often treading the finest of lines between helping and writing the work themselves. These kids are beyond their teachers because we have created an educational culture that focusses on the magical C Grade. Blame Government for this. The introduction of league tables caused schools to enter into this currency. They have no choice. Failure to adhere means failing school.
So each year a percentage of kids with no hope of gaining a C grade are put through the mill in the blind hope that somehow they might get one. And then they leave school and don't come back and nobody knows where they go, except to their bedrooms and their Playstations and to street corners and if they're lucky, into manual labour.
And it's going to get worse, because our Education Secretary has decided that we need our youngsters to follow more academic pathways in schools, so we're going to see yet more disenfranchised kids who couldn't manage academia churned out of the system with nothing. And you can't blame the teachers because they know these kids should be following a more vocational based curriculum but schools can't go down that route anymore because to do so will mean failing on the league tables.
We're about to hit 1,000,000 youth unemployed. And on the radio and TV and in the newspapers they're shocked and horrified and surprised that a few of these kids decided to go and take something for themselves?
Addendum: Thinking about the riots sparked an idea for a story which I drafted in one flurry of activity last week. Happy with it to a degree but it needs depth. I'll let it breathe a while...
