A new law being introduced later this year which will raise the compulsory school leaving age, may also bring down the country’s teenage pregnancy rate, according to research.
At the moment, the rate is said to be causing concern for politicians of all parties, as it is twice that of France and more than double that of Germany, so the research will be welcome news.
The law, which comes in this summer, was drawn up in 2007 by the then Labour government in response to concerns that too many young people between the ages of 16 and 18 were neither in education, training, nor work.
It is the first time that the compulsory school leaving age will have been raised in more than 40 years; the last time was in 1972, when the mandatory school leaving aged was raised from 15 to 16.
Research by the department of economics at the University of London’s Royal Holloway College shows that the 1972 change to the school leaving age led to a 7 per cent decline in the likelihood of young women giving birth before the age of 20.
While it found that the impact was even larger for younger age groups, with pregnancy in women aged 16 or under falling by 17 per cent. The researchers therefore extrapolate that a similar rise in the school leaving age this year will have a similar effect.
Apparently, the main effect of keeping young people in school leads to an “incarceration effect”, which translates into them having less free time to engage in sexual activity.
Similar studies also made similar links between a fall in juvenile crime and raising the school leaving age, so there may be a fall in the crime rate from the summer as well.