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The Sun
08-05-2025
- Politics
- The Sun
Pupils should be given military training to instil discipline, restore national pride and get them fitter, voters believe
PUPILS should be given military training to instil discipline, restore national pride and get them fitter, voters believe. More than half told pollsters they want to see the Combined Cadet Force operate in more schools, with fewer than one in ten against. The voluntary MoD scheme involves pupils being put through Armed Forces-style exercises, drills and trips. Only 268 state schools offer the initiative against 221 private schools. The New Britain Project, which ran the poll, said: "Britain's young people need more than just lessons. "They need pride, purpose, and real opportunities to lead. ' Cadets aren't a silver bullet, but they are a practical, proven way to rebuild confidence and belonging in our schools. 'It's time to make cadets a normal part of school life. "Not just something for a lucky few." Charles' niece wants to become first female royal since Queen to serve in the Armed Forces 1
Daily Mail
08-05-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
Britain's children should be given army-style training at school Cadet camps to improve standards of behaviour, think tank urges
More pupils should learn army-style discipline through school-based cadet schemes, a think thank has urged. The New Britain Project (TNBP) is calling for the number of schools offering the programme to double from 268 to 500 by 2029. Research shows Combined Cadet Force (CFF) units in schools can reinforce 'discipline' and 'standards of behaviour'. In addition, cadet participants have better attendance, aspiration, resilience and a greater sense of belonging. TNBP, a centre-Left think tank, said increasing cadet participation among pupils would likely have public backing. Its polling of 2,000 adults found 55 per cent back extending cadets into more schools, with just seven per cent opposed. And 60 per cent of those polled said they would encourage their child or someone they know to join the cadets. In addition, 62 per cent thought cadets help pupils feel a greater sense of 'national duty'. The CCF is a voluntary, school-based programme supported by the Ministry of Defence but its focus is not army recruitment. Pupils take part in structured, challenging activities aimed at building character – including fieldcraft, first aid, leadership tasks and expeditions. Research from Northampton University's Institute for Social Innovation and Impact (ISII) found one benefit of CCF is better behaviour in schools. The paper said: 'A significant minority of children do not have a homelife that imposes standards and discipline, or positive role models. 'For these children, being a member of a CCF contingent may be the first time they have been told that they cannot do something, but must behave in certain ways. 'For such children, the social impact of the CCF cannot be overstated.' TNBP said the case for expanding the CCF programme is 'stronger than ever' amid rising behaviour challenges in schools and high pupil absence. It has called on the Government to set a long-term ambition to make cadets a mainstream offer in state secondary schools, alongside music, sport, art and the Duke of Edinburgh's Award. Currently, only one in 13 state secondary schools currently offer cadets and around 80 schools stuck on a waiting list. The think tank's poll, conducted by More In Common, found 73 per cent of respondents thought cadets could improve pupil health, while 59 per cent said it would help mental health. Anna McShane, director of TNBP, said: 'The CCF isn't a silver bullet. It can't replace investment in teaching, mental health, or youth services. 'But it is a practical, proven tool, already in use in hundreds of schools, that could be scaled to support thousands more pupils, especially those who stand to benefit the most.'
The Guardian
19-04-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
You are descending into populist frustration. Thank you for continuing to hold
Question: what are the eight most annoying words in the English language? Answer: 'Your call is important to us … please hold.' But when you have turned into a gibbering wreck after 10 minutes of your valuable time have ticked away – intermittently punctuated by assurances that, while your tormentor is 'experiencing high call volumes at the moment', nevertheless your call is still important to him/her/it – you can take comfort in the thought that you are not alone. In fact, you belong to the majority of sentient beings in an industrial society like ours. Thanks to a useful piece of market research, we now have an idea of the numbers of victims of this industrial practice – at least in the UK. A survey commissioned by the New Britain Project thinktank found that the average Briton spends between 28 and 41 minutes every week coping with inefficient customer service systems, and that nearly four-fifths of them are frustrated by 'the wasted time, the unnecessary friction, and the quiet resignation that has become part of daily interactions with both public and private services'. The survey found that booking NHS or GP appointments was the most frustrating experience, but contacting local council services, energy suppliers, train companies, broadband suppliers, insurance firms and banks were also high on the annoyance scale. The demographics of sufferers are interesting. Predictably, middle-aged people (35-44) are the most frustrated, but younger people (18-34) also spend a lot of time 'on hold'. And, intriguingly, Reform UK supporters seem significantly more frustrated than supporters of other parties – especially when it comes to contacting NHS and council services. This last finding is perhaps the most significant message provided by the survey. It suggests that call fatigue has a political dimension. At any rate, the thinktank that commissioned the survey thinks so. 'Voters are increasingly fed up with a system that wastes their time,' it says. 'The danger is that this frustration is no longer just background noise, it's now shaping political behaviour. This isn't just annoying, it's political. If ministers don't fix the systems people deal with every day, they risk losing voters to parties that want to tear the whole system down.' There's something in that. Most voters are not interested in politics. They couldn't give a toss about whether GDP figures are up or down; nor are they exercised about the difference between a recession and a depression. But they do care passionately about some things that are rarely discussed by inhabitants of the Westminster bubble. One is being kept on hold for five minutes while trying to get a GP appointment more than a month ahead. Another is the state of the country's roads – especially in urban areas where streets are increasingly coming to resemble dried riverbeds. These are public-sector problems for which governments and local authorities have responsibility. But the New Britain Project needs to acknowledge that the 'on hold' problem is also (perhaps mostly) an excrescence of the private sector. It's a creation of a corporate mindset that is happy to sell products or services to people but wants to have as little as possible to do with them afterwards. For many senior executives, customer service is a tiresome and expensive business which involves employing people to deal with the public. The reflex corporate response to this challenge was to outsource the task to call centres, initially located in the UK but later in lower-wage economies overseas. As internet use increased, though, customer service functions were increasingly delegated to websites with which customers could interact. In some contexts – where care and expertise has gone into the design of the site's interface – this has worked reasonably well. But even when it's done properly, there are always cases where the available options provided to the user do not match the complexity of his or her requirements. Car insurance sites, for example, are generally fine if you're trying to do a straightforward transaction: get a quote; renew a policy; make a claim; register a change of address. But if you have an inquiry that doesn't fall into these categories then in the end you will have to make a phone call. And then you wind up listening to appalling muzak while being assured that your call is important. Sadly, the New Britain Project has no proposals for how the private sector could reduce the levels of quiet desperation to which its practices reduce people. But it does have suggestions about what the public sector could do. These include: creating an open-source, centrally supported website platform ( for local authorities, along the lines of reforming and coordinating local authority procurement of IT services so that there is real competition for the work; mandating common data standards across public services; and making the NHS app and the default digital front door for GP services. All sensible ideas. But don't try phoning the New Britain Project about them. Their website doesn't give their number. Here comes the authoritarian coup Really sobering assessment by Noah Smith of what's happening in the US. Next stop: revolution Sci-fi writer Charlie Stross wonders in a blogpost whether the US is moving into a 'pre-revolutionary' crisis. Crisis, which crisis? When the polycrisis hits the omnishambles, what comes next? Intriguing title of a sharp essay by Henry Farrell on Programmable Mutter.
Telegraph
07-04-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Gen Z needs to learn the valuable life lessons of having a job
A first job is rarely thrilling. From my late teens to early 20s , my experiences ranged from serving slices of ham in a supermarket, handing out club-night flyers on the street, spritz-ing perfume in a department store and working in a dreary office on an isolated business park. The jobs were a means to an end, paying for my travelling after university, a tacky sixth-form holiday, an extra £1 vodka Red Bull on a Thursday night out in Watford. But these jobs also came with important life lessons, and sometimes were even quite a lot of fun. There's a lot to be said for a humdrum job at the start of adulthood. For example, it's unlikely The Office sitcom would exist if Ricky Gervais hadn't drawn on his own memories of stale corporate life. But these experiences seem to be fading away. Three in five young people who are neither learning nor working have ever had a paid job, according to figures published last week by the Learning and Work Institute. Most of those not in education, employment or training (Neets) are also not even looking. As rates of mental ill-health and inactivity soar among young people, enough hasn't been said about the benefits of working a mundane job early in life. A screen-obsessed generation picking an idle life over work will look back with regret. Even if they don't realise it yet, avoiding adulthood means missing out not only on important interactions and opportunities but also on life's more uncomfortable-but-necessary moments, such as dealing with criticism. That's not to say that people should put up with nasty, unpleasant bosses picking on them, but that some constructive feedback and debate is part and parcel of working life. Bosses are getting frustrated with younger workers who they feel don't get it. Alex Mahon, the chief executive of Channel 4, said a few years ago that young people were coming into the workforce with no capacity for opinions that differ from their own. Former Manchester United manager Erik ten Hag claimed this year that modern footballers struggle to cope with criticism. 'The generation that I grew up in had much thicker skin. You could be much more direct,' he said. While it's no bad thing if old-school managers learn to use a little sugar-coating, there are limits. Not having a paid job until much later into adulthood (and not studying either) means that life can become an online echo chamber with no structure, and as we know, that bubble can quickly become a dangerous one. More than half of parents said their children would be happier if social media did not exist, according to research by More in Common and the New Britain Project for the National Education Union. As life becomes more inward and online, looking outward can look like a scarier and scarier prospect. Having skipped those banal early jobs and perhaps spent some time as a Neet, those who do enter the workforce later on can then show an intolerance to discomfort or difference. A London law firm that pays its graduates £180,000 a year recently advertised for a so-called support lawyer as it said Gen Z staff need 'more hand-holding' to get through the working day. Lawyers posting on legal blog RollOnFriday, which first reported the job advert, complained that Gen Z trainees were refusing to accept criticism and were complaining to HR when told they were wrong. I don't agree with the stereotype that Gen Z are a bunch of snowflakes – there are clearly mental health challenges affecting this age group, which have been fuelled not only by Covid but also the rise of social media. But among healthy young adults who are able to work but are not looking to do so, the benefits of a job have clearly been undersold. Meeting new people (which importantly includes ones who are not like-minded), gaining structure, learning from feedback, working out what you do or don't want to do in life – the list of benefits is endless and long-lasting. Yet there are countless studies explaining why Gen Z might want to snub the grind. Many will think why leave the house for some dreary shifts with a jobsworth boss, especially if saving feels pointless as a growing number give up on the prospect of home ownership. After all, just 10pc of British workers say they are actively engaged in work, according to a poll by Gallup – not exactly good PR for employment. Some of that disconnect will be down to a complete lack of career guidance. Research published by the London Interdisciplinary School last week found that 23pc of 18 to 24-year-olds do not believe that there is a degree suitable for their desired career, while 45pc of 25 to 34-year-old graduates said they felt shocked by their lack of readiness for real-life challenges once they started working. If more Neets took on odd jobs, they could figure out from an earlier age what it is they want from a career. Others might have watched parents or older siblings get dragged into a rat race that they simply don't fancy being part of. According to a survey by Santander UK, 76pc of those born after 1996 do not want to work for someone else. But all entrepreneurs need to learn from somewhere, and they certainly need to be able to take on criticism in order to master their craft. Work can be the ticket out for those who feel stuck in a rut, but accepting feedback and a bit of friction needs to be a part of that. A first job won't be a dream come true, but it's certainly not a young person's dream to feel trapped at home all day.
The Guardian
07-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
It's the age of regret: gen Z grew up glued to their screens, and missed the joy of being human
It's the love-hate relationship that defined a generation. We think we know all about teenagers and the phones to which they're so umbilically tied: sleeping with them under the pillow, panicking at the prospect of ever being denied wifi, so glued to the screen that they're oblivious to the world unfolding around them. Yet the first generation to have never really known a life without social media – the drug that primarily keeps them coming back to their phones for more – is now grown up enough to reflect on what it may have done to them, and the answers are almost enough to break your heart. Two-thirds of 16- to 24-year-olds think social media does more harm than good and three-quarters want tougher regulation to protect younger people from it, according to polling for the New Britain Project, a thinktank founded by a former teacher, Anna McShane. Half think they spent too much time on it when they were younger, with regret highest among those who started using social media youngest. And most tellingly of all, four in five say they'd keep their own children away from it for as long as they could if they became parents. This isn't how anyone talks about something they love, but how you look back on a relationship that was in retrospect making you miserable. Though the focus groups she conducted confirmed that parents were desperate for help weaning children off screens, what's refreshing about McShane's research is that it suggests the generations aren't as locked in combat as they sometimes feel; that increasingly, we're all on the same side. Gen Z, it turns out, don't need more lectures from their (often equally addicted) elders about getting off that bloody phone. If anything, they may have something to teach us. This Friday, parliament will vote on the Labour MP (and former teacher) Josh MacAlister's private member's bill on safer phone use, expected to be backed by the government but only after being notably watered down. Though MacAlister originally favoured raising the legal limit for accessing social media from 13 to 16, the bill now only commits ministers to reporting back in a year's time on the case for doing so, plus conducting further research and publishing fresh guidance on children's screen time. With X's CEO, Elon Musk, virtually embedded in the White House, some will suspect ministers of ducking a confrontation with American tech giants. But there are other reasons not to rush in, at least until the complex new Online Safety Act due to come into force this spring has settled down, and ministers have had a chance to learn from similar bans being introduced in Australia and Norway. Rather cheeringly, however, it seems in the meantime gen Z are taking things into their own hands. A generation of kids who grew up online, spent lockdown in their bedrooms, and all too often started their first jobs dialling remotely into Zoom meetings, now seems to be actively trying to teach itself to socialise the analogue way. Nightclubs and gig venues from Manchester to Ibiza to Berlin have started asking punters to put stickers over their phone cameras, encouraging them not to film on the dancefloor but just to lose themselves in the moment like their parents got to do. Meanwhile an explosion of gen Z running clubs, reading groups, in-person singles parties for people exhausted by dating apps, and 'digital detox' events where phones are left outside the door, reflect a palpable and touching new hunger for old-fashioned face-to-face connection. The 25-year-old writer Adele Zeynep Walton founded Logging Off Club, which organises real life social meet-ups for people trying to wean themselves off their phones, after a chance conversation during a 25th birthday weekend away with friends. All of them, it turned out, were worried about their screen time and were secretly trying to cut it down, but felt self-conscious talking about it. At Logging Off Club events, she says cheerfully, 'we take people's phones off them at the door and put them in a bucket'. It's like ripping away a comfort blanket at first, but it makes people talk to each other rather than hiding behind a screen. At one event she organised jointly with City Daze, another social club that organises phone-free walks round London, attendees were even given cue cards to help them start conversations. What seems to be building up among younger women in particular isn't just a backlash against the kind of toxic content, bullying or political disinformation rampant in their online lives, but a feeling that spending so much time on their phones has deprived them of something human and important. Walton is starting to think about where she might want to settle down in the next few years, only to realise that she feels curiously unrooted from any real-life community: though she's been talking for years online to people she has never met, she doesn't even know her physical neighbours' names. Her generation has, she says, 'been sold that lie of connection' by the big platforms but are finding the pseudo-communities offered there ultimately unsatisfying, leaving them wanting more. Her book about all of this, Logging Off, is published in June and though it's hard to read as a parent without thinking guiltily that society has been asleep at the wheel here, there's something oddly uplifting about watching gen Z start to try to rebuild the lives they clearly feel they've been missing. The US sociologist Robert D Putnam is best known for describing the downs in his classic Bowling Alone, which argued that society became more fragmented, polarised and distrusting over the second half of the 20th century as Americans retreated from collective activities – from team sports to churchgoing – that once knitted them together. But in his more recent book, The Upswing, written with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, Putnam goes back another half a century to explore how that sociable state of bowling together originally came about. It was, he argues, also in part a reaction to a period of loneliness and isolation, but this time caused by people moving from close-knit rural and small town America to bigger towns and cities where there were jobs and opportunities, but where they had few ties. What followed was a mushrooming of social clubs, from rotary clubs and scout groups to unions, that brought them together; though they didn't know it, in retrospect their members were building the beginning of an upswing. The moral of the story, for those daring to be hopeful? That once societies get far enough down the path of isolation, sometimes the only way left is up. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
