Has Britain lost its childhood?

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0:32The New Statesman

0:38Frank, Frank, Frank, cannot wait to see you in the New Statesman studio later. I think what we're going to talk about is probably the most, one of the most underappreciated, under-discussed aspects of society. And it's something that affects all of us because we all have childhoods. Are the kids all right? question mark. I think that's the conversation in a nutshell, isn't it? But I suspect we're going to talk about quite a bit more than that. Looking forward to it. See you soon.

1:13And you'd normally be hearing a voice note from our guest right about now. But Frank Cottrell Boyce doesn't have a smartphone. So you'll have to wait another minute or so to hear his voice, which sounds like liquid butter. He is the Children's Laureate, author of many books. His latest is A British Childhood, and so we spoke about childhood. But this interview is about so much more than that. It's about dignity and pride, empathy, joy. It's about the human experience, and it's about how we are failing children badly in Britain today, and that to fix that, we might need to do a little more than banning social media.

1:50I'm Oli Dugmore. This is The Exchange from the New Statesman. Enjoy the conversation. Frank your new book British Childhood tell me where did you go why did you want to write it why did I want to write it well it's sort of a very simple thing I'm a children's writer I went to a school you always get briefed when you go into a school about what not to say in this particular context you know some kids have had this trauma or whatever and the teacher this is a few years ago now the teacher said to me don't talk about summer and I thought do you mean summer holidays? Because I know some kids don't get summer holidays.

2:27She went, no, no, just the summer. They hate the summer. And it was because, and we talked a bit and she was saying like the school is their happy place. You know, it's where they feel secure. It's where life is predictable. It's where their mates are. It's where they get fed. And of course, kids are in a longer and longer school day because everyone's so busy. There's the breakfast clubs, after school clubs. I mean, you probably remember Marcus Rashford's campaign a few years ago that like to feed kids over the summer holidays. So the school had become their foundation, which now is obvious. You know, that's universal now, but it was quite a shock at the time.

3:04And I was thinking, you're a children's writer. Every classic children's story is what I did in my summer holidays. Your summer holidays is when you do your Ina Blyton. Your parents allow you to go off on Coniston Lake. you know if if duffers won't if not duffers won't drown um it's where you go and meet a dragon in cornwall or whatever so if you can't do what i did in my summer holidays anymore what stories can we tell and what stories more importantly like what stories are children telling us so as laureate you have access to all these different things and like growing out of that i became kind of aware

3:50that children are the brunt of like two big crises, COVID obviously, but much more importantly, I think austerity that really hit children hard. I came to be Laureate at the beginning of the new government. So I thought this is an opportunity to have a Laureate who's power facing because children are facing a systemic injustice, a huge systemic injustice. And so are teachers, by the way, because they're taking up all the slack of that. So I sort of set out to kind of gather evidence and use my laureate medal as like a kind of open sesame. So I went to all the places, because normally I'm like, you know, you're very specific if you're, you know, you're key stage two, come and do an assembly for, you know, and it's all lovely.

4:33It's all, you know, it's all a show. So I've been to all kinds of settings, mainly early year settings all over the country, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, everywhere. I've been to prisons, hospitals, all the kind of places I wouldn't normally go. Initially to gather evidence, but as the more evidence I gathered and the more I talked to politicians, the more it came to realise that, A, politics moves very slowly. Your political connections are very fragile. It's very like Hollywood. You know, you get suddenly close to a big name producer and then you open the paper and it's like, oh, he's a bit handsy, so he's gone, you know, or whatever.

5:14and everything he's ever touched is now tainted. Defence Secretary resigned, I think, 10 minutes before you walked in here. Is that right? Yeah. Oh, my God. So, you know, we got close to people and lost people. I mean, in a way, it's been very cheering from a political point of view, because if you speak to cross-party committees, you're talking about good people who are trying to get stuff done, but it just takes ages. And one of the things that kept coming back to me for all kinds of personal reasons as well is like, childhood is really fleeting and we've kind of lost a generation and we really really cannot afford to lose another one so i kind of turned back you know to looking at what what people are doing on the ground that works and trying to sing that and bring those people into connection with each other and just try you know i think site-specific solutions are the way forward really frank there's so much in that answer that i want to talk about sorry no no it's fine um we are going talk about childhood we're going to talk about reading i hope we're going to talk about neat and small subplot that listeners may not be aware of as well you had a hand to play in the opening ceremony of the 2012 olympic game so if we've got time i want to ask you about that as well okay but this it's funny you say that about the summer because the meme for so long i think has been you know children excited for their summer holidays parents slightly dreading it teachers probably a little bit excited to have a bit of a break yeah so if you'd say that that's not the actual state of affairs is quite confronting.

6:41But to dial in on what you said about the pandemic and austerity, I mean, what weaknesses in the system did those two structural events highlight? Yeah, I think that's a really great question, because I think any crisis, it illuminates the weak points, doesn't it? And I'm using austerity in the Alexis Ayle definition, which is the economic theory that the global financial collapse of 2008 was caused by us having too many libraries in Wolverhampton. Well, for listeners of the podcast, Frank, we had Mariana Mazzucato in the chair you're sat in very recently. And her point on that was, you know, the idea that a financial crisis initiated by bad private debt, that the answer to that, the solution to that would be to look at public debt.

7:26There's already a gap between those two things. And use public money. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the economics of it. the facts of it on the floor are quite startling so just i haven't got the figures to hand they are in the book but i spent a lot of time in two schools that are at the top of county lake county road in walton in liverpool which is where they burnt the library during the farage riots do you remember they burnt a library spell up and i've been involved in both those schools quite closely and that was like the kids i know were in that right do i think maybe i don't know so i went and talked to Peter Bull, who was the chaplain of Alsop, which is also a huge school, which is right.

8:09It's like a hundred yards from Svello. And it's, yeah, it's just, I think it's likely the biggest school on Merseyside. And he was talking about how that school, I mean, this is true of all schools, but particularly he was talking from his own point of view that that school existed within and infrastructure of other services for kids. So he talks about the numbers of youth workers in the area, the numbers of youth clubs in the area. And then he talked to me about what there are now as opposed to what there were 10 years ago, 20 years ago. It's a total collapse. I don't have the fingers to hand, but it was like, you know, if you were a kid growing up at the top of Walton Road in deprivation, you would still have recourse to table tennis clubs, parish clubs, blah, blah, blah.

8:54social workers what they call social I can't remember what the technical term is but those guys who would wander around and find kids in the street and go oh you look at a loose end do you want to play footy you know and they'd organise a football tournament it's gone it's just completely gone the residing the remaining numbers are really really tiny I think the phrase you use is the Alamo of services so the school becomes the Alamo of services the school is everything and it can't be everything and it shouldn't be everything because kids are not some kids are not comfortable in schools. So that's where it really hit, I think.

9:27But I've also forgotten what you asked me. No, I asked you about how, yes, austerity and the pandemic, the sort of the weaknesses that they identified that were pre-existing. So obviously, yeah, you're absolutely right to identify that austerity creates this pressure. So what does it show? Yeah. Okay. So those services, such as youth services, they're not ring-fenced, those money. So they're the first things to go. Libraries, youth clubs, all that stuff, they're the first thing to go. And surely what we've learned is that they were essential, because they are where community is made and community is resilience.

10:03You know, community is where... So the top of bottom road, there's quite a lot of asylum seekers housed there. Where they would normally have met the community and formed alliances and become, and stabilized as a community, that's all gone. Those spaces are gone. You know, trusted buildings, trusted places, spaces, trusted people, they're all gone. You know, so when people talk about the loss of trust, I think in the political conversation, that's sometimes an abstract or a moral quality. But actually trust just exists in structure, you know, in buildings, in meetings, in timetables. And those places where trust grows and trust is active have literally been removed.

10:49I think that's a really astute point because so often that conversation about trust or I would say sort of the atomized nature of society, usually people point to, and this is not to say that the social media companies haven't had a role to play in this because I think they absolutely have. but actually there's I guess like a push and pull factors if you like that there is this digital world that possibly isolates and even ostracizes people from their community but the other side is the fact okay isolated from what because if all of those things that were used to be third spaces places that people would meet play whatever it is if they're gone it's there's two sides to that coin basically yeah 100 and I think I'm really worried about the debate around the digital because it seems to me that's uh that's a great scapegoat for not talking about what else has gone on and also it's up to a large extent kid blaming so oh they're always scrolling it's like really what do you want them to do you took everything else away what do you want them to do um and it's and it kind of removes the spotlight from things that can be fixed you know that's the other thing like how i don't know it's a big question how do you fix the digital world i I don't know.

12:01But like the stuff here that you can do that, you know, makes a difference. And I think that's to the extent that this book is optimistic, which I hope it was really optimistic and full of hope. It is like the stuff we can do and we should just do it. You know, one of the things that really worries me is that we're sort of as a society, we're bemoaning the escapism of this generation of children without really interrogating what it is that they might be wanting to escape from. yeah and okay so if the material reality of these children's lives is not a positive one and so they're turning to this place that yes absolutely has its problems by no i'm not some sort of um you know shill for a big tech company but i'm really reticent to say well let's take that away from them as well because then okay well where do they turn at that point you've exhausted i mean imagine the pandemic without quite it's concert that that would be like a universal nervous breakdown wouldn't it yeah but also i completely disagree that on a societal level that that that truism that that's become axiomatic that they're over protected in the real world and and not protected at all online no one protected our kids in the real world no one did not as a group maybe an individual parent yes but as a society we just fucked off our kids basically they're invisible there's no conversation about them there's just no conversation about all this stuff that austerity did and the COVID did.

13:24It happened to kids, first and foremost. They were at the sharp end of both those things. Where is the conversation about that? There is none. They're not overprotected in the real world. They're just completely written off. I mean, keep going. Tell me more about that. It's music to my ears. I've spoken a lot here and elsewhere about the actual experience, primarily for younger adults, older children during the pandemic. But people sort of don't, I think, fully consider the fact that the paradigm of children, particularly at that age, sort of 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, it is you must pass these exams because if you don't, you won't be able to do the next set of exams.

14:05And if you don't do that, you won't be able to go to university. If you don't go to university, you won't get a job. And that is like basically the structure of the education you receive to them. Then the whole thing to basically fall apart, A, either at the hands of an algorithm or B, to the point where the teachers were. and I'm not saying, you know, bad faith here, but basically deciding the grades based on maybe some coursework or maybe just a bit of stick my finger in the air. I think you might have got a B mate. Off you go. That happens. If you're at university in Manchester, they literally put cages up.

14:31My daughter was in that cohort. Right. Okay. Can you imagine? Exactly. She said it. She put it really brilliantly. She said, you know, there was no reduction in fees. She said, basically, I did a theology degree. I paid 9 ,000 quid a year for a podcast. This is it. You know. and she's going to be paying that back the rest of her life. Okay, you're thousands of pounds in debt. This thing that we told you was super important, you won't be able to get a job. Turns out you can just do it on Zoom. All of these exams we told you were super important. Turns out we can get a computer to do that for you.

14:59You think, okay, are we that surprised when they then disengage from society afterwards? When we tell them that the key part of their university experience was absorbing some information. It's like, well, you cut and paste that, mate. The key part of your university experience is meeting people, synergy, all the things that are supposed to be accidental. that turn out to be essential. Yeah, no, 100%. I think that, you know, for me, that part of the university experience, the... No, that's the only bit that counts. I don't remember anything about the content of my degree, but I am married to someone that I met.

15:31Me too. You know, and my confidence comes from there and the activities that I did, I put plays on. Yeah. You know, I, like... It's so funny to hear you say that. I mean, I barely went to my lectures. I was a student journalist. Here I am now. I met my wife. It's all of those parts of my life that weren't actually the education. I mean, I still wrote my essays, all the rest of it. I got a degree at the end of it. But I placed so much more value on getting a part-time job, romantic partners. I feel like that is as much a part of it. And so often the conversation about education from that age all the way down to early years is not a holistic one.

16:06The early years doesn't talk about play as much as I think it probably should do. And at that later stage, again, is a very academic one and not one actually about the social development that happens alongside university. Yeah, 100%. And the accidental end. Yeah. So that, I mean, just to go back... We're agreeing on everything here, Frank. We're going to find some different material. To kids and... So I think we've used the digital as a way of talking about everything that's wrong and blaming everything on the digital. Yeah. And it's therefore absolved us from talking about what's really wrong.

16:35So I read the... Well, I met some as well, the Children's Commissioners report on the riots. And I give you what I know how underprotected kids are. in real life. Read that, the report on the riots. They were feral, wandering around and that kind of, I don't know if I should say this or not. I'm a huge admirer of Jack Thorne. I think he's the best writer. Fucking hated adolescence because what a lie. It's just a lie. That's not what happens. That is not how it happened. Tell me more about that. So if you go through the report on the riots, the kids involved in like bad behaviour in the riots, Yes, Rachel D'Souza interviews them about their relationship with the digital.

17:17They're poor kids. They don't have free Wi-Fi. You know, they use the digital to go, are you going fishing? Do you want to play footy? Where are you? They just WhatsApp each other. None of them knew about the riots. None of them knew that. None of them was in any, I mean, literally none of them knew anything about the wider context of those riots. They just know they hate the busies and some people were throwing bricks at busies. So they turned themselves in. Where the digital comes in is that other people, grownups, who are apparently overprotecting our kids, were videoing them and putting them online.

17:55And so cops were coming around in force to arrest kids. Some kids were turning themselves in and being told by lawyers who, you know, because we overprotect our kids online, just cop a plea, you'll get off early. You'll get off easy. And loads of them had completely good cases about not. Then loads of them, I'm sorry I'm so bad at figures, but the rage is real, right? Yeah, I can tell. Loads of them were put on remand and got custodials for their remand. So they're in jail, right? And at the end of their remand, they come to trial, they get let off. Just like, they didn't need to be in jail at all, but once you're in, that's it, it's over.

18:35Do you know what I mean? It's like, if you're in jail, that any experience that you have when you're 14, 15, 16 is colossal, right? And it stays with you for the rest of your life, right? It's like first love, your first album, your first sentence, you're stuck with that. That is like a big bearing on your life. There was no need for any... Why would any minor ever get a custodial for remand? That's insane. It's completely insane. Short of actual murder. What the hell? this is so important and interesting and just a footnote as well for listeners i always think by the way in the course of a conversation citing specific data for me that's the that that happens in an essay you can write about it read the book if you want if you want the detail right we're having a conversation about it and i don't want us to get lost down and well we can't find the figures about this so don't worry about that at all as far as those custodial sentences go So the kind of orthodox thinking or at least sort of macro level national media and politics is widespread civil unrest.

19:38We have to respond in an authoritarian manner. Completely. To shut it down. And actually the prime minister himself when he was director of public prosecutions during the London riots, that was his approach. And so replicated it in this instance. But I think what you're saying is actually quite a valid counterpoint to that. I mean, I totally get the clampdown thing. Yeah. I don't understand how it could ever apply to minors. You know, they're kids. We're talking 14, 15, 16-year-olds here. And perhaps the most heart-shattering thing for me, because these are places that I walk down every day, there was a kid in the Children's Commissioner's Report who didn't get a custodial and got community service right away, go and work in the Oxlum shop on, it's not the Oxlum shop, it's the Help the Aged shop, I think.

20:27on County Road. And her interview with him is like, I bloody love this. It's fantastic. Everyone's really polite to me. I say hello, they say hello. I feel really helpful. I feel really useful. What the hell? Why do you not know that? Why would you put kids in a juvenile detention setup? It's just crazy. It's such an important point. I also feel like there's a subplot to this, and it's not to diminish or distract from what we're talking about, very important case of the children. But if those other services are gone, that means then, does it not, that the teacher is acting as the nutritionist, the care worker.

21:11Toothbrusher, laundrette, schools with laundrettes. Did you know that was a thing? That's a big thing. And a whole etiquette around that of like, you know, because kids are, because you have to choose between food poverty and hygiene poverty. Like it's wild. I've got a stat here from your laureate campaign that nearly half of children were arriving at school never having been read to and that some were actually trying to swipe the pages of physical books as if they were touch screened. Can you talk to me a little bit about reading specifically? Yeah, OK. So I came, I'm obviously on the Children's Laureate.

21:44It's a reading thing and I'm working with Book Trust. So my entry to this was that stat about reading. And that's why I've been quite focused on early years. and it seems to me completely obvious that if your first experience of a book is cuddled up on a couch with someone who loves you that's a very very different thing from your first experience of a book being a piece of tech you don't know how it works and you you've got a mountain to climb so like any kid who's been read to has got this huge invisible privilege anyone who hasn't has got this massive they're basically arriving as second class citizens and that was my kind of starting point why is that happening it'll be like everyone will say oh it's the digital blah blah blah but I had this damascene kind of moment where I was talking to someone in St.

22:30Francis Sales Primary School who said to me I was talking about bedtime stories to her and she said well there's kids in this class don't have beds mate what's a bedtime story if you haven't got a bed and I got into kind of looking into furniture poverty then as well and she said this amazing thing she went no one is going to dream about going through the wardrobe to none if they haven't got a wardrobe You know, there are kids in my class that their clothes are in bin bags because they're going to be moved on and they're sleeping on those bin bags, which is like crazy. So I started to talk about, think that like, I think underlying all this, all of it is the housing crisis.

23:09I think that's the key. I mean, it's nothing I can do about that. But like the housing crisis, I came into it from that conversation about how many kids are in housing insecurity and what that means educationally and in terms of, you know, the way you live. And the stats on that, you know, if you move house more than three or four times in this course of your primary career, it's very hard to have a successful, you know, to be successful academically. but underlying that as well underlying that thing about like not getting a bedtime story it's because everyone is really busy because there's no such thing as if you own a house it's almost always a two parent income so the other thing that's been degraded across the board for everybody is what home is I'm not saying like this needs to be a home maker and a home worker but like everybody's working full time jobs and there's no option for that then that concept of home has been degraded as well and it's full of busyness and you know preoccupation so it's like i think the housing thing is you know that's a massive if you're gonna if you ask me what utopia would be it would be somewhere where if someone did a decent job they would be able to afford a decent house like is that weird no no frank it's not Yes.

24:32No, it's not. And I look, I can wax lyrical about this. And primarily I've approached it in the past from the perspective of people who are trying to get onto the housing ladder. Right. Because once upon a time in the sort of golden golden era, ancient history now, the 20th century, the average house price was about four times average earnings. That was the ratio. And now we are at a point where the average house price is eight times average earnings. And the last time that that was the case, we hadn't invented cars. You know, property was the reserve of a wealthy elite. And that is a situation we're in now.

25:06And again, to echo your point, I'm absolutely not in any way calling for some sort of like, you know, stereotypical gender roles situation here. But once upon a time, one income put a roof over a family's head and put food on the table. And that is no longer the case. And gave choices. There's no choice. You know, that's the big thing. It's taking choice away. And I just, I am also a ginormous advocate that the housing theory of everything, right, which is that if people live in secure, safe, reliable housing, the outcomes that you would see across education, crime, I think it's such an uplift for society.

25:44But I've always thought about it, to be candid with you, from the frame of people who were in a similar situation to myself who were trying to get on the housing ladder. And actually, perhaps a better frame is the one that you're providing here, which is that the young children that also need all of those exact same things, if they don't have it, what are the long tail consequences of the rest of their adult life? And presumably they are incredibly far reaching. And it's partly because we are obsessed with property. Yeah. Because you don't have to own it. I think it's probably cheaper to live in New York where rental regulation is so strong that even though that's supposed to be like the capital of free market cutthroat enterprise, actually rental controls are much stronger in New York than they are in Vienna.

26:25In Austria, I think something like 90 % of the housing is council housing. Yeah. Well, I mean, see, I grew up in an era when council housing was not remedial. You know, it wasn't like you failed into council housing. A lot of them down, Queens Drive in Liverpool. well, the beautiful council houses with fabulous gardens and lovely communities that we all sold off and didn't recycle the money from, you know. We've lost so much. Yeah, and so, like, to pick up your point about framing it from the point of view of children, I think one of the things I find really scary about the broader political conversation is that the future is an abstract.

27:02You know, it's like we talk about the future and it's like Elon Musk and, you know, blah, blah, blah. Where is that going? Like, it's not abstract the future. future's got names you know if you go to a family center or you go to a play group ask the kids their names that's the future you know and they're growing up really really fast the future is coming at you at speed you know i had a grandchild at the beginning of my lordship two years ago you know and two years ago that two years and a few weeks ago that child was an aquatic creature now that child is walking around my house playing with language saying you know do you like your mum on toast like it's that fast you know you you blink and it's here the future's coming at you we've already lost a generation this is really urgent childhood is really fleeting we've screwed one generation already can't screw it and they're gonna screw their kids already you know so you can't do it twice i don't think i just i've got pictures my my daughter is that age as well she's to in a couple of weeks time and it just foregrounds it for me in such a way i'm always really hesitant to talk about it talk about it as well because before i had kids whenever the conversation turned in that direction it's just like a switch in my head as i oh that's not me why am i interested and all of a sudden you have one and it becomes the most relevant and important thing in your life i think it has the potential i think it hasn't been for me but it can be quite like a radicalizing conservative force i think because all of a sudden you know you care really quite deeply about its crime rates or the state of the local school in a way that obviously Well the parents Yeah Because you're trying to negotiate payments with a pushchair Why isn't there a drop curb here?

28:36Yeah exactly I'm going to get onto the council and become the person I hate Yeah on curb parking Stay with us we're going to take a short break we will be back after this

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29:53Talk to me about the sort of neurological impact for babies in particular. Oh, that was kind of reading and seeing. Yeah, so that was another way in that. Because I thought the solution was definitely early years, you know, that I should be looking. I'm not by any means a writer who writes for early years. I write sometimes a very niche thing now. I write chapter books for middle grade children, you know, they don't not have the illustrator or anything like that but i kind of had this thing that if you're going to make a difference it would be early years because that's when the die is cast you know the cake that's when the cake's baked um so i had this i mean absolutely joyous thing of going to visit professor sam was who runs what was then called the east london baby lab it's now got some kind of fancy academic name but it was the baby lab then and his uh his thing was what so the science of the neurology of babies that's a new science like hardly anybody did any work on it because it's so hard to measure and therefore because babies wriggle around a lot and they're very unpredictable and you can't tell them where to look and all this stuff so you couldn't get results and therefore you can get funded and this is why well into the 1970s we used to operate on babies with no anesthetic right so now you can with all the digital stuff that we've got nice thing about the digital and he um he talks about how the fact that a baby's brain is messy you know babies have no filter about what they take in everything might be important so if you map what's happening in a baby's brain it's just chaotic but then if you if if someone who the baby loves reads to the baby with a picture book you can see it slowed down there's other ways for this to happen but this is something that's embedded in the culture and very cheap the baby's brain completely slows down.

31:43And it's this beautiful thing because he has these monitors with both brains on, you watch them come into sync and heartbeats come into sync and breathing patterns come into sync. So you're watching proper bonding happening at like a cellular level in that moment, which is an amazing thing to see. And the science of it is, it's so, I mean, for instance, he talks about how slowly babies process things because when you watch a baby, it's so mercurial and so fast and you kind of think it's thinking as quick as you but it's really not so whereas you're processing images that like well you know you're doing 25 a second that's how you can watch a movie um babies it's like it takes like five seconds to process one image so when you play pee poe with a baby it's like oh he's literally gone it's like i just go pee oh he's completely gone and then poe it's like jeez that guy i remember him from somewhere you know and life is like really staccato and it's strobing it's like they're living in a stroboscope you can see it in the eyes when they're when they're looking at something they sort of go there and then they follow way after something something's moved along i mean talk talk to me about those books then that shaped your i mean i'd like to hear more about your childhood i mean you mentioned being a grandfather maybe we can talk about that as well but tell me about the books that shaped you what was your childhood like i mean i loved my childhood it was fantastic um we lived with my gran um in a two-bedroom flat in kirkdale which is central liverpool and um it was cramped you know my mum and my dad and me and my brother had one bedroom and my gran had the other bedroom so we spent a lot of time i think my mum spent a lot of time in the library because it was just across the road and it was exactly what we're talking about trusted public space all her sisters lived in the surrounding street she had a lot of sisters so that she would bump into them in there and it was like a nice place to go where she wasn't in under the thumb or in the gift of her mother-in-law, you know?

33:40So there was all that. So like books were normalized and it was, you know, I don't remember particularly what books. I know that we read Where the Wild Things Are because that's really, really stayed with me. But yeah, so the power of that, but maybe a better example is that I went with a GP who is a friend of mine who'd been listening to this stuff that I'd been talking about, about Sam Was and decided to start a group with some of the young mums in his practice. And we chose, because you were asking about the power of books. So on the way over, he was saying, like, some of these are going to say they can't read.

34:20I mean, some of them can't read, but none of them will be, they've all had really bad experiences at school. Nobody likes to read aloud, really. so we went and he went you're gonna get 20 minutes but let's let's see what's what happens and i took dear zoo right because you don't have to read this it's one sentence it's like i wrote to the zoo to send me a pet and they sent me a series of very inappropriate animals basically it's a book about frustration it's like what is wrong with this zoo i don't think get it in what world would i want an elephant the elephant in the room is that you're really stupid right so um so i said like you don't need to read this you just need to know one sentence and do these noises and that was amazing that was an amazing session it's like one of the most remarkable things that happened all year because we did it and i ended up wriggling around on the floor pretending to be a snake and all the rest of it but i watched the mum's confidence go through the roof about a book do you know i mean it's like i did this aiming at the kids but in fact it was like oh we can do this and it'll it'll be great you know so they're they're so the power of a great storybook is is extraordinary a because it provides the format for what sam was talking about to happen but also because it's what to go back to what we're talking about this is about connection you know we were talking about communities being disconnected but this is about fostering a really intimate connection between a child and a its parent or whoever loves that child which I've seen then replicated in very different settings and kinship care foster care that you use that reading moment to to bond together we've got this really really powerful tool that can fix stuff and we should be using it I have this like it's almost intergenerational actually because my dad gave me a whole box of the books it's a large time my dad gave me a whole box of books that he read to me and my sister when we were children and so i now read them with my daughter and when i sort of said to you what books did you read when you were a child and these these books that i wouldn't have read i couldn't have remember recalled them until i opened them and started to read them and it's like i know this story i know what happens here and to your point about the ease of reading i was um i will not never ever eat a tomato charlie and lola to my daughter and she can't read it she's only two right but there's that there's a page where the words are accompanied by an image of the food and so we read the sentence then i point at the things and she says them out loud yeah it's like she cannot read but she's participating in the process right and and there is this i can almost feel it's quite grounding like the the previous my dad doing it with me and my sister and there's this extraordinary connection that exists i mean one of my daughters has just moved in with her family back into our house for for a while and and i watch her reading books like that to her daughter and they're literally she's literally taking them from the shelf where they were left when we read them to her do you know they've not moved i'm thinking that's that's so powerful how many how many kids have you got i've got seven i've got seven grandchildren as well busy okay and what's the gap between your youngest child and your eldest?

37:40Oh, quite big. The gap between my youngest child and my eldest grandchild is only four years. Oh, wow. There have always been children and they've always had those stories. I'll tell you something, a really practical thing. As a dad, when you've got a baby, you love playing with that baby, but you really know what to do. But having that picture book with flaps or whatever, that gives you a scenario to have that child on your knee and do something with it because you're not going to, you know, because you're a dad and you don't really know what to do at that time. I think even on that level, it's fantastic.

38:15You must have a perspective as well on how parenting's changed then. Having parented your own, well, maybe not, but your own children at different stages and now the grandchildren have almost followed quite, well, pretty seamlessly from your own kids. Yeah, I mean, I kind of like, I don't know, maybe we're a nightmare. I don't know. We kind of parent on your own. You find your own way of parenting, don't you? I know we've got a lot of unwelcome advice because we were doing it wrong and i'm hoping that we're not passing it on that's inevitable isn't it um let's talk about neat's obviously big national media story recently a growing problem and appears to be trending in a direction that's getting bigger and bigger so this people who are not in employment education or formal training um i think listeners will probably be able to join the dots between what we've been talking about in the first half of our conversation and this possibly being um one of the outcomes of it But to start off with, can I just invite your thoughts and commentary on that number, what's happening and indeed whether it does connect to the things that we've been talking about so far.

39:16I think definitely. Well, first of all, one of the things I keep going on about is real time, you know, because the like needs somehow are in a different category from children. it's like no needs for kids like a few weeks ago you know and these are like some of some of those younger needs they'll have been at school during COVID won't they that's only just happened to them so I to me it's that urgency thing about like this is not a separate category that what you did during COVID and during austerity and the lack of conversation around that this is the price you paid for that you took your eye off the ball and now you're surprised it's crashing through the window you know there's a over-representation of uh young men in those figures yeah could you tell me a little bit about what you encountered speaking to young men boys when you're writing a british childhood what was what was their experience like well i think that we we've kind of covered this a little bit in the times that there's there's so little space for them to do stuff you know that that is clubs and things were especially especially for non-school shaped kids whatever gender there are I think that the places where you could find yourself physical places or places within the curriculum where you could find yourself if you weren't thinking a lot in the same way as other kids so music sports art they're the things where people can find because we've now resorted to this kind of utilitarian view of things, this kind of Benthamite view of things, because they don't, apparently, don't count in the workplace.

40:56They don't count. It was like, nobody knows, A, nobody knows what's going to work in the workplace. Nobody. Nobody has a clue what the work is going to look like, even in 10 years' time, right? So you should be preparing people for life. You should be preparing them to be resilient, because nobody does anything innovative if they don't feel self-confident. So we've shone away those things. And I think that we are really paying a price for that, you know, because you've become adaptable if you find a sense in yourself. And obviously part of the needs problem is that work itself has changed. But people are not going to jump off the tram line and try something different if they don't know who they are, you know.

41:39It's really interesting because I think you're right. The frame of this problem is broadly either an economic one or to be more acutely political sometimes is kind of a welfarist angle to it, right, about the cost of the benefits or the sickness benefits that we're paying to people who aren't working. But actually, almost from first principles, there is, I think, a pretty valid counter-argument that is that that is not the correct way to even understand the problem in and of itself. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think it is that thing about...

42:15if you're preparing if your view of education is to prepare kids for work that'll work if you know what work is but we don't know what work is going to be and therefore you need to be preparing kids for life because we just don't know how that's going to play out you know there's so many unknowns and it's that kind of anyway go on no no no absolutely state the best case what should education prepare our children for when someone leaves the other side of that system, what does that person look like? I think... I don't want to sound trite, but I want to say happiness because happiness is the source of resilience and that you've discovered something about yourself in there that you find out what you like doing.

42:59I think that's not a small thing. That is not a small thing. So just going back to... I'm going to talk about LSOP again because that used to have a lot of vocational opportunities within the school as well. They used to have, before the kind of Govites, we need, you know, academic rigor idea, there were lots of opportunities to do other things within that school. They've gone, you know, and Peter Bull, I'm referencing, he's the chaplain, and I can quote him because I know he's just retired, so it doesn't matter. You're on the record now, pal. He says, we've got this, like, can't, what is it? Can't learn, we've got this can't learn curriculum.

43:37you know what it doesn't suit everybody do you know i mean it's like yeah so you need space within the curriculum for people to discover what they're what they are good at and to take that forward and that if you know what you're good at you can be happy because happy sounds so trike it sounds like cheery it's not about that it's i mean in a kind of aristotelian sense of like centered because that's that makes you able to innovate and do new stuff and if you don't have that within you and take knocks you know what one thing we do know about the coming work it's going to be hard on a lot of people you know i have so little time for people that seek to minimize that the emotional spectrum of both existence and indeed when we talk about politics right and think that's not a conversation that is one that's also about the power of narrative and joy and pride and love.

44:34And I think it's partly because these powerful positions of power in our society are largely now occupied by the comms professionals or lawyers or economists, and I think we're poorer for that. But it's a broader thing as well, and there's a degree of possibly sexism in it that to be a man in power means that to talk about loving someone or something is an indication of weakness. But I just think we are so much poorer for that that huge component part of our existence to just flitter away from consideration. It's so important. Moving towards the end of our time together, Frank, and I mentioned at the top the opening ceremony to the 2012 Olympic Games.

45:17I'd like to talk to you a little bit about that before. You know that was a really long time ago, right? Yeah. Oh, well, let's sack it in then. Okay, that's great. A really long time ago, and I still think when people are asked about their conception of this country, when actually you say to someone, a moment they're proud of, or they felt like they were part of this bigger thing, a lot of people point to that ceremony and they talk about it. So before we talk about it a bit more, I mean, tell me your involvement in it. What did it mean to you? How did you impact on it? Well, Danny Boyd asked me to do it.

45:54I think Danny was the first appointment. Then he got a very small team around him. It was very small. It was, the person who should be mentioned every time is Mark Tilsley, who's the designer, who is the guy who came up with the idea for the Queen German out of the helicopter, and he's an absolute genius. Rick Smith from Underworld, who was in a musical event. And Sutterat Lalab, who is the costume person. They were kind of the core, I think. God, I hope we haven't left anybody else. Non-exhaustive lift. Non-exhaustive lift. And the job was to be the writer in the room, whatever that meant so at some point it meant writing letters or writing media guides and other points it meant trying to forge a narrative out of all these ideas you know so it was all those different things it was fun because i think it was kind of a vision of britain but even even the you know nhs suffragettes many other things but actually the way that you mention it now is like a very long time ago i wonder if that frame is that it's almost a kind of historical document that it's uh oh yeah definitely well and what kind of historical document yeah like maybe like the field of the cloth of gold or something like that because it's not an account you know people keep saying to me oh that's what we were it's like no it wasn't it was really contested you know it was like what you could be or this is the best of you it's not what britain was like it was you know everyone first of all one thing that britain was definitely like is negative so like we were getting bad press right after the thing had started.

47:26So Giles Curran filed a piece saying it was, you know, what did he say? Pump Rock Teletubbies. And then changed his mind like quarter of an hour. So he wrote this beautiful piece actually saying, you know, if you're reading this in this part of the country, it's a great review, but it had already gone to Scotland as a bad review. You know, it's like, so it was that late that people thought it was going to be rubbish. I always remember getting, reading letters in the newspaper saying things like, we're going to be humiliated on the global stage. I'm so glad it's happening in London. Signed, Paul from Leeds.

47:59You know, just that whole thing. So it was contested. It wasn't. So it was like a vision rather than a count. And you had to get her to get in the ballot. Is that right? You were watching it with everyone else. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. They told us we would get, we had to pay for them. But they told us that we had to apply in the ballot, but they could guarantee that we would get four tickets. So my kids saw them in rehearsals. How was it then, sat there watching it as a part of everybody? For me, I felt it great. Everybody else in that team was still working. But as a writer, you kind of bail out relatively early.

48:33So for me, it was just dead exciting. Tense, you know, like you're kind of holding your breath. Even then, people were watching things on phones. So I can remember leaning over the seat to try and read what people were texting each other. You know, but that, yeah. If I could just, yeah, I think people do, some people will say, right, that that's that moment and the games themselves and whatever it was, that Super Saturday when we got like three or four gold medals and this flurry and I remember where I was when that happened and it just being like this incredible moment. Some people will say that that's sort of the last time they felt that the country was great, that it was something they were really, really proud of.

49:15I don't know maybe do you agree with that sentiment? How do you think about the country then and where it is now? Because I'm conscious what we've spoken about so far, there's been a negative tone to our conversation Yeah, I mean and I try to avoid that all the time and I hope the book feels more hopeful there's a lot of anger in the book but the book is really an account of people who are doing good work which I think is like a very similar experience to the Olympics that you know outside there was this negative conversation going on. Inside the stadium it was like a mini utopia because everyone was a volunteer, everyone was stepping up to the plate for something they believed in, whether that was my mates, loyalty, community, the NHS, whatever it was.

49:58And there are more of those people in this country than you think they are, I think. And one of the problems I have as a person of the left is that I think the left keeps agreeing with the right that the country is a mess. You know, it's broken and it's irredeemable. And it's like, I usually remember Mark Steele saying this, like saying, you know, the Labour Party stands up and goes, everything's crap, everything's terrible, come to my party. It's like, well, no. You know, it's like, I don't think it is a bad country. I think it's an amazing country. They think it can be better and terrible things are happening.

50:33I've seen a lot of really terrible things. I've also seen a lot of amazing things, you know. and I think maybe start by fertilising what's good, you know, looking at what's good saying, this is good that's happening here. Let's enable it. Let's empower it. Let's reproduce it. Let's bring it to scale rather than going around going, Elon Musk is killing us all. You know, it's like, what the hell? You can't do anything about that, mate. You know, it's like pessimism is such a self-indulgence. You know, it's so self-indulgent. you've spoken to a lot of children i mean i'll give you an opportunity here speaking about amazing things what's an amazing thing either recently or perhaps one of your favorites that a child has told you or you've learned from from speaking to one oh gosh where does that even begin do you know what i think as a general thing and i can't see how anybody doesn't notice this for all that's gone wrong in schools and for all the conversation around neurodiversity and something School after school I go into, especially primary schools, kids that I know in my generation would have been really pushed to the margin by teachers and basically left out like tethered goats on the playground for predator kids to destroy.

51:50They're front and centre time and time and time again. Not always, obviously. You know, I'm not saying it's not difficult if you're different. But time and time again in schools, I see kids who are different being really treasured and applauded. especially i end up doing loads of like prize night speeches and the kids that you see struggling up those steps for one reason or other whether for psychological reasons or physical reasons time and time again you hear them cheer to the rafters and that that just didn't happen when i was a kid you know i think that's an important thing yeah it's a beautiful thing a couple more shorter questions and i'll let you get on your way frank um back in the rain i know sorry Stayed on here forever.

52:32One children's book every politician in Britain should read before they take office. Oh, wow. That's so good. Thank you, Catherine. Yeah. Well, I could talk for hours about that. He's only saying that because it's raining outside. Yeah, I know. For a really specific reason, I'm going to say the railway children because I feel very strongly about kids whose parents are in prison. And you may think the Railway Children's like a really kind of middle class version of that. But what it captures brilliantly is that sense of kids having to become grownups to step up to the plate and how stressful that is.

53:15So the Bobby character in that, you know, the reason that you will be reduced to tears if I now say, Daddy, oh, my daddy. I'm gone. is that's the sound of a kid giving her childhood back, you know, because he comes home. She's had to be daddy all the way through. I think that's amazing. So, yeah, I would think prisons, we're crap, but, you know, prisons are a terrible place at the moment. You know, we're very bad at prisons and particularly bad at prisoners' families. So I think, because I want to be specific all the time, I'm going to say that. Frank, I'm so grateful you came in to have this conversation that we had in the room together.

53:54whether it's been moving, fascinating. I'm so grateful. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having us. It was great. Really loved it. You too. That was Frank Cottrell-Boyce. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Exchange. We will be back next week.

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