by Ben Hughes

Created on: February 16, 2008

Write your article heWorking in the school I do, I can only think that raising the school leaving age from 16 to 18 is a huge mistake and will lower attendance, motivation and achievement.

ATTENDANCE

With a huge attendance problem already, why would forcing pupils to stay on at school for another two years be a good idea? The school I currently work at is in a very deprived area of the country, where pupils don't put a priority on their education and many parents are unsupportive. Some will take a day off school for a dentist's appointment or will pick and choose which lessons they want to go to.

This is a secondary school which takes pupils up to 16 years of age, so why would raising the age to 18 help them? They don't want to be there and some of my GCSE classes already have pupils who have been withdrawn because of poor attendance. Forcing them to stay in education for another two years will only help compound this problem.

MOTIVATION

The pupils who come to my school have a very poor attitude to learning; they lack interest, motivation and passion for anything outside their immediate lives. They don't see their education leading to anything useful in life and the only motivation they have to make them turn up to school, or college as it's increasingly being called, is the fact that it's one day closer to them leaving.

Along with their parents they don't want a good job but hope they will get one; they want the money but don't want to work for it; and the dole, or claiming benefits, is preferable for them because it means they don't have to work for it.

Making it mandatory for them to stay at school until 18 will only make this forced motivation in education even worse.

ACHIEVEMENT

The consequences for this lower attendance and poor motivation is a lack of achievement. If you make someone do what they don't want to do in a place they don't want to be, you'll end up having a rebellion and trying to contain an group of rowdy 18-year-olds will be much more difficult than a discontented class of 16-year-olds.

So who will be blamed for this lack of achievement? The Government won't accept responsibility for what they would see as lowering the dependence on the state and trying to increase the education of the nation. The ones with both the responsibility for educating and likely to fail in doing so would be the teachers, as always.

All in all it seems to be a bad idea, unless there are huge carrots to entice and big rewards at the end and if there are more choices than the simple academic route which puts so many people off. But if so many people are being educated at a higher level, this will continue to erode the educational standards in the country. And as there are currently so many critics of all levels of education, with too many exams, SATS and everything else going on at all stages of pupils' lives, why would pushing through more of them at a higher level really help?

It makes me think the sooner I can get out of education, the better.
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