More than 1,000 Leeds teenagers ‘lost’ in the system may be in need of support

Just over six per cent of 16 to 18 year-olds in the city – 1,035 in total – have no education, work or unemployment records on the city council’s database. It means that teenagers potentially in need of state support are not receiving it, while it is feared some may have been sucked into a life of crime. The local authority said it was determined to find out exactly where those young people are.

Potential factors thought to be behind the figures include a rise in home schooling, where there is little regulation, and the abolition of the teenage support service Connexions, city councillors were told on Wednesday. The issue was raised in a report going before Leeds City Council’s children and young people scrutiny board.

The council’s director of children’s services, Julie Longworth, said tackling the issue “remains an obsession for us”. She told councillors: “We do have more work do on this. We’re looking at more than 1,000 children here and that’s of a concern to us.”

An additional 719 young people aged between 16 and 18 are known not to be in education, employment or training, but their status is at least known to the system.

Conservative councillor Amanda Carter said early intervention was key to stopping more youngsters slipping through the net. She told the board: “We know from evidence that if these kids don’t get an education, their only opportunity after school is to turn to criminality. You can’t get them out of that then. It’s prison and it’s a cycle. Those kids are lost and we have to get them back.”

However, the Labour administration’s executive member for education, Coun Jonathan Pryor, said not every young person whose status is unknown would be in trouble. He told the board: “A lot of those children who are ‘not knowns’ will be in a perfectly good place. When I was younger I moved from one educational establishment to another, so for a short period I’d have fallen into that category. That didn’t mean I was on a path to criminality. We want to find out where these children are and what they’re doing, but it doesn’t mean that all of those children are going to need a significant amount of help.”

Coun Pryor said the then coalition government’s decision to close the Connexions service in 2012 had contributed to the problem. The state-funded agency was replaced by a new nationwide careers service, though some local councils still use the Connexions name to deliver that type of support. Coun Pryor said: “Connexions was a fantastic way of helping young people into careers, of monitoring where children and young people were and making sure they were on the right tracks. It’s been made a lot more difficult since then and what we’re seeing, 10 years on, is the negative impact on that. It’s a much harder job now.”