At our ‘Mental Health in Schools Working Group’ at the end of the Summer, a member referenced an article that had suggested the ‘X Factor’ culture of encouraging young people to think they can be anything they want to be can have a deleterious effect on their mental health.

This inspired much debate.  It got me thinking about the nature of aspiration in general and about the lack of a consistent approach to careers education across our school system.

Our local authority still maintains CONNEXIONS as a traded service and we are about to renegotiate our buy in for this year. When working with groups of children who are often in crisis, as we do at the Royal Free Hospital School, planning is often short-term or focused on smaller achievable goals. It is often tempting to avoid talk of the longer-term future.

I suppose we believe that by doing this we are somehow lessening the impact of their current situation or at least not exacerbating it. It is sometimes tempting to fall back on the staging post provided by GCSEs and A Levels (“You can decide after that”).

Long-term options? 

We are all comfortable asking an infant:  “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

The answer may be variously “fireman”, “astronaut”, “spiderman”…

Why are we generally much less comfortable asking the same question of an adolescent?

Why would we be even a little wary of those who are confident enough to assert “Flight Attendant” or “Police Dog Handler”?

Working in a hospital setting you are struck by the layers of service that make up the institution. Some 12 year olds might assert that they would like to be a doctor or a surgeon as a career but very few would mention being a research scientist: is this because this kind of work tends to be hidden away or is it more that the value of it is never really explained to them?

It feels right and proper that young people with low self-esteem should be concentrating on working on their core beliefs about themselves, but it does not mean we should be distracted from developing their core values.

A high proportion of the young people we work with say that they want to work in mental health. They have seen the value of this work. How do we sell the value of research science in a similar way? Why sell them the qualifications but not a future? Meanwhile, Simon Cowell does a very good job of selling an alternative future. 

Alex Yates is headteacher at The Royal Free Hospital Children’s School in London. ​

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