“Maybe tomorrow I’ll try to settle down. Until tomorrow I’ll just keep moving on.”

The Littlest Hobo was indisputably the best Canadian television series ever made about a stray dog that moves from place to place, stopping only to solve problems, reunite families and fix lives. Journalist and thinker David Goodhart would say probably that the lead character, an Alsatian, was an archetypal “Anywhere” - able to make a life (of sorts) in whatever town he or she (I’m not sure that was ever resolved) ended up. In contrast to the nomadic, rootless Anywhere, the Somewhere has a place where everybody knows their name (and I promise to stop referencing 80s’ television now), a home community where they can rely on others and are, in turn, relied upon. 

In his book The Road to Somewhere: the populist revolt and the future of politics, Goodhart argues that Anywheres have done well out of globalisation and therefore look down on Somewheres, who have not profited as much and that this division of wealth and attitudes has driven recent political changes. If this is true then I think we all have a lot to learn from the Littlest Hobo - if nothing else he/she was unable, due to size, to look down on anyone.

I would class myself as an Anywhere - I lived in three different cities as a child, went away to university (twice) and then had three jobs in different countries (if you count Wales) in four years. For the past decade, however, I’ve been living in the same house in south-east London and have become part of the community: I give Christmas presents to my neighbours and stop to talk to people when I’m out shopping; my daughters attend the same local school that I used to work in and we are part of a strange circle of families that babysits each other’s rodents when holiday time comes. I never thought Sidcup would be the place I called home, but it seems that I have grown roots and they are here - maybe I’m becoming a Somewhere.

I don’t, therefore, think that “Somewhere” and “Anywhere” stand in opposition as two types of people - instead, I think they are abilities and, as such, I think that it is valuable to be able to choose and to be able to switch confidently between one mode and the other, and so I find myself wondering how to enable young people to learn how to be either (or both, in succession).

Children are naturally Somewheres - in most cases their families create a safe (very) local community they can confidently rely on and, in my experience, they tend to be keen to put down roots wherever they have to be (even if their stay is very transient: I remember as a child thinking of a service station on the A55 as “home” because we’d stopped there more than once). The challenge is learning the skills of being an Anywhere and, actually, this same rooting tendency is also an Anywhere characteristic - being able to make “home” wherever you happen to be. Or rather, and this is the point, making home wherever your family (your community) happens to be.

Going away to university is an enormous opportunity to become more of an Anywhere - to prove to yourself that you don’t need to live at home to be OK: your family doesn’t need to be a harness holding you on to the high wire - it can be a safety net to catch you if you fall off. I think that the Sutton Trust’s observation that going away to university aids social mobility is right - it’s about the ability to travel to seek adventure (or employment, or both) and the confidence to strike out on your own, opening pathways and opportunities that are closed if the training harness becomes a set of shackles.

Broadening horizons

We must not allow rite of passage to be a middle-class privilege - an opportunity that is closed to poorer students. We also, I think, should make more of an effort to stop it being an academic privilege: it shouldn’t just be university that we (as a society) make it easy to go away to - we should be thinking seriously about how to make apprenticeships and entry-level jobs opportunities that young people would travel to.

My first job (the one in Wales) was in the Rhondda Valley - a very strongly rooted community with a powerful sense of self and identity. The hills are beautiful, the people amazing (and enormously welcoming to an English interloper), and the close-harmony singing is second to none. But (when I was there, at least) the employment opportunities were somewhat lacking. This would be less of a problem if the young people could go elsewhere to look for work but for many of them this was not an option they would ever consider. This fixedness eroded their confidence, and even pride in their home - without hope of a better life, there was little to feel proud of.

Being part of a community, relying on and being relied on, is a wonderful thing and there are good reasons to aspire to it and to value it when you have it, but it shouldn’t hold you back - we must make sure that young people learn that they can move on if they need to, or want to (or both).

The Sutton Trust recommends that disadvantaged students receive maintenance grants rather than loans, and I agree. I also think that we should find a way to create an equivalent of halls of residence for young non-students and that we should incentivise them to move away when they are 18 whether they are studying or working or some combination.

This will, like all education, cost money but it is, like all education, an investment in the future. It’s an investment in a generation of young people with the confidence to travel to find work, the confidence that they can make it on their own, the confidence to cast off the harness and step out on to the high wire of life. It’s an investment in young people that can, like the nameless Alsatian, keep moving on and improving the communities they pass through until the time comes to put down roots (maybe tomorrow…)

James Handscombe is the principal of Harris Westminster Sixth Form. He tweets @JamesHandscombe

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