Let's double the number of cadets

Being in the cadets is the antidote to lots of contemporary problems. Lets enable more kids to benefit.

I have been doing a bunch of stuff in the constituency on facilities for youth and sports groups. So I ended up meeting the (lovely) people who run Market Harborough Sea Cadets. They are looking for a new place to operate out of so tat they can expand. They are really thriving - despite the fact that we are about as far from the sea as it is possible to be in Britain.

Separately, I met the air and army cadets, who are currently having their building done up. Pretty much every youth group across the constituency seems to have a waiting list and be looking for more adult volunteers and new places to meet.

The cadets are a great thing - but maybe more now than ever. Childhood has been increasingly circumscribed, with kids doing less playing out, and enjoying less freedom and adventure. Jonathan Haidt and others like Mariana Brussoni have collated the evidence that this is one of the causes of the growth in teenage mental health issues.

Figure 1. Changes in UK children’s daily time use, based on Mullan (2019) borrowed from Mariana Brussoni who got it from Nick Desbarats.

And it isn’t just that the kids all seem to really enjoy it. There is good academic evidence for the wider benefits of being in the cadets for young people. In 2021, the University of Northampton published a report into the impact of the cadet forces which found massively positive impacts across a whole bunch of domains: improved school attendance; better mental and physical health; better employability and so on.

They used propensity score matching to compare what happened to cadets to similar kids who were not. School attendance was 5% higher overall, and 7% higher for boys and children on Free School Meals -and better attendance in turn sets up higher academic achievement.

10,000 cadets a year also get CVQO qualifications directly through cadets. The kids involved do better on a lot of fronts, learning about resilience, communication, leadership, confidence, teamwork and on and on.

Since 2010 the government have been trying to expand opportunities to join the cadets, particularly the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) which runs in schools.

Initially in 2012 we launched the cadet expansion fund with a target to create 100 new cadet units in schools. Then, in 2015, my then boss George Osborne announced a goal to increase the number of units to 500 schools, a target we had nearly reached by the pandemic.

In September 2018, the then Secretary of State for Defence, Gavin Williamson, set a further aim to reach 60,000 cadets in English schools by April 2024, an increase from 43,000 at the time of the target. I knew this goal got blown off course by the pandemic, and I have been meaning to look at the numbers for a while. Here is what they show now.

Data bit

In total there are 135,000 young people involved in all the different cadet groups. About 93% are aged 12 to 17. On top of that, there are 26,000 adult volunteers (if any are reading - thanks!)

135,000 is a lot, though there are about 8 million young people aged 10-19 in the UK, so they could be much bigger.

There is a bit of a break in the data series below in 2011, when the Sea Cadets started counting younger members in their stats. But if we compare April 2023 to 2011 we see the following changes in numbers of cadets:

• Combined Cadet Force up: 15%

• Sea Cadets up: 6%

• Air Cadets down: -11%

• Army Cadets down: -15%

We should get the next year of data ndxt month. Here’s the same data as % shares:

I also asked a parliamentary question specifically about the number of state and independent schools that have cadet units. Historically, cadet units were mainly in independent schools (and particularly in boarding schools who have much more time).

The Cadet expansion programme really changed this - we have gone from 26% units in state schools to 57%. It was a great policy.

Where does this take us?

The CCF in schools is the bit that has been the focus of political attention, and has gone up, despite the pandemic. Unlike the others, it is a shared responsibility with DFE. The expansion of cadets in state schools has been a big success, though progress seems to have stalled since the pandemic. Even after expansion just over one in ten secondary schools are hosting cadet units, and even quite a long time after the pandemic numbers seem to be flat.

Sadly, overall, cadet numbers haven’t gone up, because the numbers in groups based in the community have shrunk, even as school-based units have grown. We should aim to grow the total number across all types.

Within the groups that are (mainly) not school-based, there is a difference between the Sea Cadets and the Air and Army cadets: the Sea Cadets are a charity - unlike the others, they are not wholly funded or managed by the MOD. In fact they are run by the Marine Society, which has its own long complex history starting as an employment scheme for 18th century orphans (you can spot their HQ if you go out of Waterloo on a train).

While the MOD is the landlord for lots of air and army cadets, the sea cadets do their own thing, which has downsides for them, but seems also to have had upsides: my nearest branch are a “pop-up” unit, and it seems a bit easier for them to expand. The numbers above seem to bear that out, though doubtless there are pros and cons.

How much does this all cost? In 2020 in answer to a Parliamentary question the government said that:

The Ministry of Defence does not allocate funding directly to the Cadet Forces and there are no discreet Cadet budgets as the cost of delivering and supporting Cadet activity falls across a wide range of business areas, agencies and organisations. However, based on Financial Year 2018-19 data, the latest estimate of the cost to Defence of the Cadet Forces is approximately £175 Million.

The University of Northampton study suggested this spending was easily justified by the large health and education benefits they measured, even without counting the longer-term benefits from the growth of human capital.

Conclusions

The positive impact of cadet programmes is pretty strong, and in the grand scheme of government spending the budget is tiny. In fact the cadets whole annual budget is equivalent to five and a half hours’ worth of DWP spending. Even something like Arts Council England spends half a billion a year plus - perhaps we could redirect some of that.

And given the positive impacts in the study cited above, I am fairly confident DWP would spend less in the long term if more kids got to do cadets.

We should set an ambitious goal to grow cadet numbers overall, not just the CCF in schools.

To help make this happen, it might be sensible to spin the air and army cadets more out of the MOD - either making them a DFE responsibility or endowing them as stand-alone organisations.

There are two problems with it being in MOD. First, MOD are busy fighting multiple real wars; and trying to make sure our nuclear weapons work properly. Inevitably running what are basically youth groups will always (reasonably) come some way down their list of priorities. The second is that as the written answer above suggests, responsibility within MOD is somewhat diffuse. Running themselves would bring more focus. Third, being independent might also enable the wider community to take greater ownership, rather than relying on MOD.

Either way, we need money and a galvanising goal. My starter for ten is that we should aim to double the numbers over the next decade. What do you think?