Caz
Last Chance Saloon
Joined: 23 Apr 2006
Posts: 836
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 Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 4:40 pm Post subject: Academy Schools |
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An interview with Diana Whitmore. Stunning, and shocking.
http://www.epolitix.com/interviews/interview-detail/newsarticle/diana- whitmore-teens-and-toddlers/
| Quote: | Diana Whitmore - Teens and Toddlers
Monday 28th January 2008 at 12:12 AM
Diana Whitmore, chief executive of Teens and Toddlers, speaks to ePolitix.com about teenage pregnancy prevention.
Question: Can you tell us about what the Teens and Toddlers programme is and why it is running in the UK?
Diana Whitmore: Teens and Toddlers was founded by Laura Huxley in the United States. Laura is the widow of the famous English writer Aldous Huxley, who wrote the classic texts 'Brave New World' and 'Island'.
Aldous and Laura dedicated their life to what they termed the 'exploration of the possible human being'; today we would call that human potential. As a result of their lifetime's work, Laura envisioned that human beings have the best possibility of fully living and actualising their potential if they have a healthy early childhood and healthy parenting and she took that all the way to conception.
When a couple conceive a child they should prepare for it and make sure they are ready to be parents. She called it 'conscious conception' and 'love before the beginning' - which took Laura's thinking and vision to the place where conscious conception rarely happens, which is teenage pregnancy. With most teenagers, pregnancy is the result of ignorance, unconsciousness and disadvantage.
America has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the world and England has the second highest, so Laura conceived of Teens and Toddlers as a way of preventing teenage pregnancy, of preventing children from being damaged and of giving them the best possible start in life.
What emerged for us, in England, when Teens and Toddlers was independently evaluated, is that the outcomes of Teens and Toddlers is much bigger than teenage pregnancy prevention.
The Department for Children, Schools and Families endorses Teens and Toddlers as a youth development programme as well, which raises self-esteem, aspiration and educational attainment in young people. If you think of our programme as a youth development programme you can see that teenage pregnancy is only a symptom of a larger social issue, which has to do with exclusion and disadvantage. So we are tackling a wider issue than teenage pregnancy.
Question: What has the programme achieved so far?
Diana Whitmore: We were funded by the Department of Health to develop a sustainability replication programme for delivery outside London in order to make Teens and Toddlers a sustainable offering and for local authorities to embed it in their youth services.
We have developed the Teens and Toddlers sustainability replication programme which this month will be in place in 15 local authorities across England. These local authorities are: Tameside, Manchester, Redcar-Cleveland, Northumberland, Maidstone and Dartford, Kent, Sutton, Walsall, Birmingham, Harlow, Essex, Brent, Southwark, Islington, Greenwich, Haringey, Northampton, NE Lincolnshire and Camden.
With the sustainability replication programme, we enter a local authority and train local youth workers in their community to deliver the Teens and Toddlers project in order to mainstream and embed it into their targeted youth services.
In over 15 local authorities we are training about 125 Teens and Toddlers facilitators and so far we have worked with over 1,500 young people. We are rapidly expanding to become a national programme, whilst as a charity as we started in the middle of 2001.
Question: Do you have plans to extend the programme to more local authorities?
Diana Whitmore: Yes, we are quickly becoming a national programme and would really like to deliver it in all deprived areas in England. Ideally, Teens and Toddlers should be offered to all teenagers, not just those most at risk.
We have also had a lot of interest in the programme in Scotland and long-term plans are to launch a Scottish branch of Teens and Toddlers.
Question: The UK has the worst record for teenage pregnancy in Europe, what effect does this have on our society?
Diana Whitmore: One teenage pregnancy for the first five years of a child's life costs the government £61,000. If you look at the teenage pregnancy rate in England you can then see that we are spending millions and millions on social services for teenage parents.
There have been studies that show children of teenage parents have many more health problems, that they are more likely to become disadvantaged themselves, they also tend to become teenage parents themselves. A teenage mum will have a child that will eventually become a teenage mum, that will have a child that will eventually become a teenage mum - it is a generational pattern.
Also, there is often a second teenage pregnancy from a disadvantaged young person which doubles the problem. We are beginning to hear evidence that in some areas when the child is two to three years old, some teenage mothers are putting their toddlers up for adoption because they cannot cope, which brings yet another set of social problems.
Question: How does having a baby affect a young person's life?
Diana Whitmore: It is important to look at the reasons why young girls get pregnant. We frame this in a very positive way, rather than making the teenager bad and wrong because she has made a mistake. A young girl who lives in disadvantaged circumstances, perhaps her parents are in prison, or alcoholics, or drug dealers, or prostitutes, are at great risk of social exclusion.
For starters, as a teenager, if you have a baby you go to the top of the list for a council flat. It is a way for a young woman to get out of some dire home-life situations. Not only that, I believe that for a young woman who has no aspiration for the future, becoming a mother gives her an identity and a role that is respected by society.
It also, most importantly, gives her a sense of meaning, a purpose in her life. Those are some of the motivations for young women not being careful or practising safe sex. The reality, however, ends up being very different. Teenage parents tend to end up in a council flat, alone, not able to go out to work or continue their education.
Question: As a youth development programme, there is often mention of social disadvantage and lack of aspiration being the cause for many teenage pregnancies. Is this a more important reason than poor sex education?
Diana Whitmore: I think it is a combination of the two. We can say, and many including the DCSF would agree, that teenage pregnancy is a symptom of wider social exclusion issues. For example, research shows that middle class girls will terminate teenage pregnancies and those more disadvantaged will keep the baby. So already, the impact on society is huge.
Question: In your opinion, what should schools be doing for young people to help reduce the risk of getting pregnant?
Diana Whitmore: Schools can do a lot. In government circles, there is a great debate about whether sex education should be made mandatory or not in schools.
There is a lot of controversy around it, largely because of faith schools, and so far government has been unwilling to make it mandatory. Schools could do an enormous amount if teachers who are delivering sex and relationship education are properly trained.
In our study of what young people think of sex and relationship education, young people felt the subject was too biological and they desperately wanted to talk about things like love, how to be in a relationship and how to say no when you don't want to have sex - more of the psycho-social issues of sex and relationship.
However, many teachers don't feel comfortable delivering this material and with better training, schools could do a lot more to help.
Question: How can local communities benefit from the programme?
Diana Whitmore: They can benefit in two ways. Firstly, when our teens go into nurseries and children's centres to mentor small children, we ask the nursery to assign each teenager to a small child who has some kind of special needs and would benefit from 40 hours of one-on-one mentoring.
Perhaps surprisingly, our teens do unbelievably good work with the children and do make an enormous difference for that small child. We have done an evaluation study of the impact of the teens mentoring small children which showed a statistically significant positive outcome.
Equally, the positive relationship that forms with the small child builds the teenager's self esteem remarkably and they have a new and positive experience of themselves. They experience that they have something to contribute, that they can make a difference and that they can be a part of their community.
So communities are benefiting tremendously from the re-engagement with young people and, as well, our young people earn an accredited national award in interpersonal skills that gives them the confidence and aspiration to go on to further education or training.
Question: Do you have a good relationship with government?
Diana Whitmore: We have been endorsed by the prime minister's strategy unit, which came into examine us very closely. We have been endorsed by the social exclusion unit, by the Department of Health and the DCSF.
Government has circulated information about our programme to all teenage pregnancy co-ordinators nationally. So we have had a good endorsement relationship from central government, but unfortunately, no funding.
For funding, COUI UK can usually match funding to local authorities who choose to buy into the Teens and Toddlers sustainability replication programme. Teens and Toddlers will contribute a percentage and local government a percentage, so we are partially funded by local government to bring the programme into a new area.
Question: In 1999, ministers set a target to halve conception in under-18s by 2010, do you think enough is being done by Parliament and Whitehall to achieve this goal?
Diana Whitmore: The DCSF has done an incredible amount of research into what is necessary to tackle the problem. They have done what they call a 'deep dive' study of local authorities where the teenage pregnancy rate was going down. They looked at what was being done to achieve this success and used them as a model for local authorities where the rate was going up or being maintained.
They concluded that a youth development programme is necessary to really crack the problem. By the time that filters down to local government, it is not always implemented and sometimes there is the issue of funding - funding that is needed to implement the findings of central government at a local level.
However, for the most part the government is working really hard on this issue and I have a lot of respect for them.
Question: If teenage pregnancy is linked so closely to social background, do you think there should be a minister for poverty whose job it is to bring more and more families and children out of poverty?
Diana Whitmore: There is a minister for social exclusion and I would say the same thing about this as I would about a minister for poverty. When we label something so negatively, we are feeding energy to the negative. What at about a minister for social inclusion and a minister for abundance? I would like to put a positive spin on things rather than labelling it as something negative we have to work our way out of.
Question: Do you have any final comments on the way forward?
Diana Whitmore: Teens and Toddlers, and other programmes like ours, need to be implemented long-term as part of sustainable, embedded and targeted youth services in all hotspot areas and that just isn't happening.
The bottom line is all teenagers would benefit from youth development work, and I think we all need to work harder to get these kinds of programmes delivered in a sustainable way all over England. |
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