Helen Goulden OBE, Chief Executive Officer, the Young Foundation
Whether talking about the rise in long-term health conditions, rising crime, loss of social cohesion, climate change or child poverty, there are strong and sustained arguments that upfront investment in prevention pays off – socially, economically, environmentally. Yet the lack of investment in prevention and preparedness to tackle major risks to society (both acute and chronic) is an endemic problem across almost every public policy area. It transcends policy, and hence departmental, boundaries and herein lies the challenge.
The cross-party rhetoric of a more ‘mission led’ government points to the need for a recasting of government functions, hierarchies and silos to deliver on those missions, but this structural challenge has yet to find a grounding in reality. It is also a mindset, cultural and intellectual challenge and those coming into politics and the civil service – whether in two years or twenty years – need to be wired very differently: capable of thinking and acting swiftly in ever more complex and interwoven operating environments.
Part of that ‘re-wiring’ requires government to learn to work differently with citizens, communities and the wider VCSE sector as active partners in tackling challenges, be they acute or chronic; short or long term. The case for why this makes sense has been made a thousand times over. Many local councils and NHS Trusts know very well that they cannot solve deeply entrenched social challenges without social and civic partnerships, yet they often have little incentive, ring-fenced funding or political cover for directing investment toward strategies for prevention.
This grim reality stretches into preparedness and responses to disasters and crises. The ability to anticipate, prevent, withstand or recover from a crisis requires a strong civil society, equipped to work autonomously and in partnership with local and statutory providers. This was evident in the immediate and strong community mutual aid response during the Covid-19 pandemic and it is evident in almost every natural disaster response across the world. In a country where social fabric is already fraying in many communities, and where a crisis could be its undoing, this becomes even more important.
A society capable of withstanding crisis requires the presence of local, active citizens and community leaders capable of leading through complex, changing circumstances. It requires us to not just know, but act in the service of those who the most vulnerable during a crisis. It requires messages from government to be mediated if they are to be trusted and actions followed. Civil society organisations provide these key components. They are leading on the ground, attendant to our most vulnerable and – crucial in today’s fragmented society – are trusted. But do we have sufficient skills, in sufficient supply to fully realise the potential of civil society as a key actor in our preparedness? Arguably, not. And we need to apply the same mindset to building preparedness in community leaders as we do to any other skills or employment challenge. Not to do so introduces risk at a massive scale, and significant associated opportunity costs.
The Preparedness Pipeline
As the House of Lords The Ties That Bind report evidenced well in 2018, the teaching of citizenship in schools has fallen into a parlous state where ‘very few schools take Citizenship Education seriously and most secondary schools are failing their statutory duty to teach it. That it has become conflated with Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PHSE) education curriculum is telling. PHSE is focused on individual development, citizenship on the role that we take in society – and we are teaching our children to privilege one over the other. There are few schools who are teaching active, project-based citizenship, where young people build skills as community leaders and changemakers through working with and in their local communities. But where it does happen, the results can transformative- for children, their parents and their neighbourhoods.
If we are to grow a population who both take their role as active citizens and have the skills to navigate through highly volatile circumstances, we must open up opportunities to learn a whole range of relevant skills. Conflict resolution, community organising, de-escalation, collaborative problem solving, adaptability, communication, managing behaviours and emotions in oneself and others, situational awareness and so on are fundamental not just to leading through a crisis, but leading and living generally in today’s society and economy.
An institutional response
The UK Resilience Academy does not appear ready to address this civic skills and competency challenge, nor even to see the opportunity – leaping from the provision of skills for professionals and businesses to leaflet-dropping and a new website for the rest of the population. This is an oversight with profound impacts on our preparedness. Coupled with the limited visibility and everyday utility of Local Resilience Forums (searching for my own Local Forum was reminiscent of Arthur Dent looking for the plans to demolish his house in the basement toilet of a local authority planning department) we are some considerable distance from building preparedness in both the emerging generation, and in our neighbourhoods.
To do so requires two things. First, the moral and instrumental case for preparing communities demands that we create a distributed provision of training and support for those who are well-placed and have a desire to provide surge community capacity during a crisis. This kind of training – even accreditation – exists in other parts of the world and could be credibly built on the Community Leadership Academy, which already operates at a national scale.
Second, we must appreciate that resilience is built over years, not days. And it starts with education. Whether it is rethinking the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme, the National Citizen Service or the Citizenship curriculum – perhaps it is all three and more – building opportunities for young people to actively engage in developing preparedness and resilience-building skills inside the classroom, and out in their communities, has as many ‘peacetime’ as ‘wartime’ benefits. Who could argue that teaching our young people how to de-escalate heated arguments, build consensus and adapt swiftly to volatile circumstances could not be beneficial in a more polarised, geo-fractious and slightly terrifying world?
Given everything that we know about the 89 major risks facing the UK, it is a dereliction of public duty to confine preparedness of the UK population to leaflet dropping and information sharing. If we are to navigate through the eye of any coming storm, we will need more than bottled water to survive. We will need the mental, emotional and practical resilience skills to lead ourselves and others through it.