Young people drop out of school when no one seems to care. Labour's plans could change lives

On the evening of 1 September 2020, the night before schools reopened after six months of lockdown, I was visiting a 13-year-old called Conor* at home.

At the time, I was working as a therapeutic wellbeing practitioner at Football Beyond Borders, supporting young people to reintegrate back into school after the first Covid lockdown. That evening, I asked Conor whether he was excited about returning to school the next day.

“No, absolutely not,” he said. “I’ve been off for six months and no one at school has shown they care about me. So when I go back tomorrow, I’m going to show that I don’t care about them.”

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Conor was a bright, empathetic boy from an Irish Traveller family, brimming with curiosity, intelligence and warmth. I knew teachers at his south London school had been in regular contact during lockdown, so I gently challenged him.

“Yes,” he replied. “They’ve been hassling me every week about my learning. They just want to know how my learning is going. But they don’t care how I am.”

Conor did go back to school the next day. But he attended fewer than 40 days for the rest of Year 9. Within a week he had been suspended for five days, beginning a familiar cycle: absence, short return, exclusion. By the end of secondary school in 2023, he left without passing his GCSEs.

Conor was one of the two-thirds of Traveller, White British, Black Caribbean and mixed White and Black Caribbean boys eligible for free school meals who failed English and maths GCSEs that year.

His story matters because it is not exceptional. It is a story of what happens when a system becomes fluent in monitoring academic progress but illiterate in developing relationships.

And it is precisely why the government’s commitment to expanding access to trusted adults through the 10-Year national youth strategy is so important.

This strategy does two things that government policy too often fails to do. First, it listens. More than 14,000 young people were asked what matters to them. The answer was strikingly consistent: above all else, young people want an adult who cares about them, who notices them, and who they can go to when things are falling apart.

Second, the strategy builds on an increasingly robust evidence base showing that trusted adult relationships are not a “nice to have”, but one of the most powerful protective factors in a young person’s life.

Much of this evidence has emerged through attempts to understand why some children exposed to significant adversity still go on to thrive. The landmark 2015 report from Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child reviewed decades of research across neuroscience, psychology, sociology, molecular biology and epigenetics.

Its conclusion was unequivocal: “The single most common finding is that children who end up doing well have had at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive parent, caregiver, or other adult.”

A few years later, clinical psychologists working with the ChildTrauma Academy analysed the case files of 3,523 children and went further still. They found that relational health was more predictive of outcomes than the number or timing of adverse childhood experiences.

In other words: what is happening in a young person’s relationships now matters more than what happened to them in the past.

For schools in particular, this finding is profound. Across every domain of brain functioning – regulatory, sensory, relational and cognitive – the study found that the strongest predictor of healthy development was not trauma history, but the quality of current relationships.

Conor did not disengage from school because he lacked ability. He disengaged because he felt unseen and uncared for. He felt like he didn’t belong in school. Yet despite this growing consensus, our political and public systems remain stubbornly misaligned with what we know young people need.

This is partly because relational neglect is hard to argue against. No one stands up and says they don’t believe relationships matter. But scratch the surface, and the absence becomes glaring.

During the pandemic, national debate fixated on “learning loss”. Almost no attention was paid to what young people like Conor were describing: relational loss. The sudden disappearance of adults who noticed them, checked in, showed up consistently.

This blind spot is written into the official record. Ofsted’s 2022 ‘education recovery in schools’ report runs to nearly 6,000 words. “Learning” appears 40 times. “Behaviour” eight times. “Relationships” – once, and only in reference to schools’ relationships with parents.

The School Inspection Handbook, governing inspections from 2019 to 2025, is even starker. Across nearly 47,000 words, the quality of children’s relationships are mentioned once (‘Relationships’ as the title of the subject RSHE gets 19 mentions). By contrast, “behaviour” appears 114 times.

What we measure signals what we value. And what we value determines where time, money and attention flow.

Since 2010, the area of the children and young people’s workforce most severely cut has been youth work – the profession most explicitly built around long-term, trusted relationships. Local authority spending on youth services in England and Wales has fallen by 73%.

In schools, the savings made when budgets tighten tend to fall on the very roles and experiences where relationships are formed: teaching assistants, arts and sport, trips, enrichment. The adults who stay after the bell. The spaces where young people feel they belong.

Most of the time, this impact of a slow decline in a young person’s relationships happens quietly. But occasionally the consequences become impossible to ignore.

In 2017, Croydon experienced such a moment. In the space of four weeks, three teenage boys died in separate incidents: a moped crash, a stabbing, and ingesting a highly toxic substance. All three had been known to Children’s Services before the age of two. None reached their 18th birthday.

In response, the Croydon Safeguarding Board undertook a thematic review of the 60 adolescents aged 14 to 19 who were of greatest concern to police, youth offending and children’s services.

The findings were devastating. While the review was ongoing, two more young people from the same cohort were stabbed to death. Five lives lost. All preventable.

More than half of the 60 had been known to services before the age of five. The system had been present – but not constant. Support was characterised by short-term, reactive interventions, delivered by revolving professionals, none of which changed long-term outcomes.

The report captured the core failure with painful clarity: very few of these young people had the opportunity to develop a meaningful relationship with a key professional.

The number of social workers involved in individual lives ranged from three to sixteen. None of the young people had the same social worker for more than 18 months.

With no stable adults to attach to, many sought belonging elsewhere. Seventy-six per cent of the boys were affiliated with gangs. Fifty-seven per cent of the girls had experienced child sexual exploitation.

These were not “hard to reach” teenagers. They were easy to lose in systems relentlessly focused on delivering short term interventions, and completely unable to provide young people with consistent, long term relationships.

The young people in Croydon sit at the sharpest end of a spectrum. But the forces that shaped their lives are the same ones affecting hundreds of thousands of young people across the country.

Of the Croydon group, seventy-two per cent were persistently absent from school. Seventy per cent had at least one CAMHS referral. They struggled with belonging, mental health, and trust – experiences shared by far more young people than we are comfortable acknowledging.

Research from the Youth Endowment Fund estimates that 600,000 young people in England have no trusted adult outside their family. Within that, around 90,000 have no trusted adult at all.

Conor was never involved in gangs. He never appeared in a safeguarding review. But he shared something fundamental with those young people in Croydon: the absence of an adult who made him feel that he mattered.

When he said, “They don’t care how I am,” he was not making a rhetorical point. He was explaining, with devastating precision, why he was about to disengage.

This is why the focus of the national youth strategy matters so deeply. And it is why the work must begin now.

Because this is not about parachuting adults in when crisis hits – brief, expensive interventions delivered too late and withdrawn too soon. It is about building a country that prioritises the number and quality of relationships in young people’s lives as a matter of public policy and national interest.

A trusted adult guarantee is not a programme. It is a shift in values. From reaction to prevention. From transaction to relationship. From asking “How are your grades?” to asking “How are you?”

If Conor had experienced school as a place where at least one adult consistently noticed him, checked in, stayed alongside him – the outcome might have been different. Not guaranteed. But possible.

And possibility is what relationships create.

That is why trusted adults matter. Not because they solve everything. But because without them, nothing else works.

*Name of the young person changed for confidentiality and safeguarding.

Jack Reynolds is chief executive of Football Beyond Borders.

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