How we got into this mess and how we start to get out of it
Imagine the scene.
Civil war has broken out. Soldiers arrived in your village. You feared for the safety of your children. You left in a convoy, hoping against hope that it might be soon to return. A month later you are in a refugee camp along with 30,000 other people. You are surviving on one meal a day. There is no school for your children.
You feel the unending pain of leaving home; the shock of suddenly having no status other than that of a displaced person, reliant on others for life’s essentials.
Somehow you are able to move on from the refugee camp. You head for a another country where you may be safer, where your education and abilities may be seen as useful.
Now there are fresh humiliations. Interrogation by the officials of the ‘welcoming’ country. A long wait for asylum status. Crowded accommodation. Inability to go out and use the skills that you have to earn a living or contribute to the community. A welcome from some; hostility from others.
At the recent ‘Revitalising Democracy’ Forum in Caux, Switzerland I heard three people tell similar stories of their experiences as refugees. Muna Ismail, put it like this
I found after my arrival in the UK that the whole narrative was changing. We were being othered, blamed. Not welcomed in many places.
Less than a fortnight after hearing her story, I was back in the UK and hearing about an orgy of othering, blaming and intimidation by a few hundred violent and ignorant British citizens. They were making that familiar accusation – which turned out to be false - that senseless violence must be the fault of some foreigner with a different background and different religion. The individual responsible for the Southport stabbings was not Moslem and not an asylum seeker, but the misleading rumours on social media offered a good excuse to riot and threaten people who were in some way different.
Beyond the necessary short term responses by police, government and communities, how is such mindless violence to be prevented in the longer term?
To me it boils down to three things. First the flaws in our system of compulsory education which leave us unable to produce fully formed adult citizens.
The second is about empathy and shared experience.
The third is about abundance rather than scarcity thinking about migrants and their contribution.
Designed rejection – the values in our education system
An education system which is designed to fail around 40% of the people going through it is likely to create discontented young adults looking for someone to blame.
Consider the difference between the UK and, say, Switzerland. In the UK we are focused on equipping half the population with degrees. In Switzerland the focus is on identifying multiple routes by which young people will find gainful employment whatever their academic grading.
Our school and assessment system is based on the idea that successful students gain the right grades and go on to university. It offers little to those who fail to achieve this. In Switzerland around two thirds of pupils opt for an apprenticeship. In the UK around 50% of school leavers go to university.
The Swiss system allocates students according to their grades and ensures that the great majority who do not go to university continue in a well-designed and balanced apprenticeship programme which combines further study with workplace and softer skills. This better equips them to be effective and capable adults. It also requires them to complete a period of national service, either in the military or in a civilian alternative.
In the UK at the end of compulsory schooling one in five young people aged between 16 and 24 are on their own - not in in education, employment or training.
That figure rises to 37% of young people coming from households with income of £15,000 or less. And it rises again to 50% of young people with learning difficulties. In Switzerland in 2021 the youth unemployment rate was 2.5%
There are already numerous initiatives which serve to offset the biases and deficiencies in our UK approach. Industrial Cadets is one admirable example. Young Enterprise is another. Tomorrow’s
Company has just completed its own successful pilot with 14 – 15 year-olds. The UK government needs to nurture these approaches as part of a fresh approach to the secondary education experience ensuring that we nurture more successes especially among the most disadvantaged.
Empathy and Shared Experience
It is very hard to preach hatred against a whole ethnic or religious group when you have suffered and endured alongside them. A key to greater social harmony is that young people work, and learn and serve others in teamwork with those they would not normally meet. In many countries this takes the form of national service. In ‘Count us In’ a paper produced in 1984 shortly after the Brixton riots, some of us argued for a national community service scheme that would offer all young people an experience of contributing to the wellbeing of their country, while meeting fellow citizens from backgrounds they had not previously encountered. Rishi Sunak’s General Election call for national service may not have been well considered or costed, but the UK urgently needs to ensure that young adults of different social, ethnic and faith backgrounds are confronted with challenges they have to meet together as a team.[1]
Abundance rather than scarcity thinking
This brings us back to Muna Ismail.
Having succeeded in her asylum application, Muna took every opportunity to complete her education. She and others were determined to make a positive contribution to the
How about we be re-builders of communities both in our new home and also even in the country of our origins. Could we be global changemakers?
Her activities led her to Initiatives of Change, the UK arm of the global organisation which hosted the Caux conference. She started to turn negative stories into positive ones. She is now Programme Manager of Refugees as Re-Builders (RRB) in the UK.
RRB now trains and supports refugee changemakers. Its equips refugees with skills that they can use to get people and neighbourhoods talking to each other and working together. Its programmes have been assured by the Institute for Leadership and Management at City and Guilds. Its philosophy is rooted in abundance thinking. As Muna puts it:
'We want to look at the economics of the person coming in rather than the fear. These people are a force for good.'
How refreshing. And how prophetic. The amount of migration we have seen so far is tiny compared with what is coming our way as I have argued before.
It is legitimate for government to control the flow of numbers in any one year, and to insist that we build up the skills of people born here. It is illogical and self-destructive to see any group of asylum seekers or migrants merely as costs, who are to be contained in hostels and denied the chance to do what Muna has done, when so many are longing to step out and contribute.
The new UK government faces its first true test. It needs to apply joined up thinking in three ways. Rebalance secondary education; mobilise the contribution of every young adult in a shared experience of service; and inject abundance thinking into every aspect of migration policy. That’s the route back to a less hateful and more harmonious society.
Mark Goyder is the Founder of Tomorrow’s Company and Senior Advisor to the Board Intelligence Think Tank. He is the co-author, with Ong Boon Hwee, of Entrusted – Stewardship For Responsible Wealth Creation, published by World Scientific.
[1] The paper is held in the Tawney Society archive (Box 28) maintained by the University of Essex https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/8a872957-5586-34dc-9080-ae7197dc6b24. A fuller account of the logic behind the proposal is maintained in a 1988 RSA Lecture by Mark Goyder which can be found here. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41374484