When school is not the answer

Continually tell someone they’re a failure and they’ll believe it to be true.

Young people with behavioural difficulties get excluded, labelled as trouble, and moved on. What gets missed is how often they are the brightest people in the room. The energy that makes a fifteen-year-old unmanageable in a classroom of thirty is the same energy that, pointed somewhere useful, builds things.

I know because I was that fifteen-year-old.

Why I am not anti-school

I want to be clear about this, because it is easy to misread. I think schools are extraordinary and I think most teachers are doing a job I could not do. I encourage every young person I meet to take their education seriously.

But some young people cannot learn the way school teaches, and pretending otherwise costs us all of them. Good Alternative Provision is not a lower standard. It is a different route to the same place.

What I do

I support the Alternative Provision setting run by MA Equestrian in Northamptonshire, my daughter’s business, which works with vulnerable young people using horses and land-based work as the way in. I am involved in its development, its safeguarding, and its recruitment rather than its day-to-day delivery.

I trained as a coach with Grit, the charity working with young people at risk of falling out of education, their families, and the systems around them.

I hold an enhanced DBS certificate with a children’s barred list check and I am on the DBS Update Service.

Where the policy is heading

Non-school Alternative Provision has spent years in an odd position, widely used and lightly regulated. That is changing, and in my view for the better.

The government has published voluntary national standards for non-school AP and stated its intention to legislate to make them mandatory when parliamentary time allows, with local authorities publishing lists of approved providers. The 2026 schools white paper explicitly recognises that high-quality non-school AP can re-engage children and improve attendance when it forms part of a planned approach rather than a last resort.

For good providers this is welcome. Regulation is not the enemy of small settings, it is what separates them from the bad ones.

The number that should bother everyone

Between January and March 2026, 1,012,000 young people aged 16 to 24 in the UK were not in education, employment or training. That is 13.5%, and the first time the figure has passed a million since 2013. Of those, 39% were unemployed and actively looking. The rest were not looking at all.

The second group is the one I care about. Someone who has stopped looking has usually stopped believing there is any point, and that belief was formed a long time before they turned eighteen.

Working together

If you commission Alternative Provision, run a school looking for a partner, or work in this space and want to compare notes, get in touch.