Harnessing idealism: Think Ahead attracts good graduates into supporting teenagers and young adults with mental illness

This newspaper is proud of its campaigns to raise the quality of recruitment to public service professions dedicated to tackling disadvantage at source. We supported Teach First, the charity launched in 2002 that places top graduates in challenging schools. Its success has been such that it was copied in Germany in 2008, with the launch of Teach First Deutschland, and the original Teach First is now the single biggest graduate recruiter in the UK.

Then, five years ago, we supported Frontline, a scheme to recruit graduates with good degrees to children’s social work. It operates on a smaller scale than Teach First, but it has established itself as a high-quality training and recruitment route for graduates rising to the challenge of one of the most difficult branches of social work.

Today, we report (on page 6) on the promising launch of Think Ahead, another scheme using a similar model, to attract good graduates – and career changers – into another area of social work, namely supporting teenagers and young adults with mental illness. Applications open this week, but it has already attracted 2,600 expressions of interest for the 100 places on the scheme, which will start next July.

The scheme was devised last year by Norman Lamb, a Liberal Democrat minister in the coalition government, after he was inspired by reading an article on the success of Teach First by Andrew Adonis, the Labour minister who devised it. This latest version of the Teach First concept copies the features that produced its success. It has political leadership, committed individuals to deliver it, an arm’s length relationship with the Government and, above all, a clear focus for the idealism of graduates wanting to make life better for other young people.

The essential feature of all these schemes is that they offer temporary placements after intensive training. Graduates need not feel that they are signing up for life, but often find that they are good at what they do and are fulfilled by it.

As we have said before, we do not argue that social work should be a graduate-only profession. Part of the purpose of these schemes is to raise the status of the teaching and social-work professions by setting up a recruitment route that aims explicitly to identify exceptional talent. Think Ahead is slightly different from its precursors in that it is open not just to new graduates, but also to highly motivated people who want to change in mid-career.

The Independent on Sunday has also long campaigned for better understanding and treatment of mental illness, so Think Ahead is an opportune coming together of two of our causes. Great strides have been made in recent years in the understanding of mental illness, thanks in part to the testimony and openness of public figures such as Alastair Campbell and Stephen Fry. There is now a wider realisation that depression, for example, is as real an illness as a broken leg and similarly requires treatment.

But the support available to the one in four people who will suffer from some form of mental health problem in their lives is still inadequate, and many, many lives are needlessly blighted as a result.

Think Ahead is a welcome extension of Lord Adonis’s original great idea – one that came about only after a succession of failed attempts to raise the prestige, quality and leadership of the teaching of disadvantaged pupils. Wisely, it is starting small, but if the first intake is a success, it could be expanded quite quickly. Mental health services have been too low a priority for too long. This scheme is a practical way of harnessing the idealism of people who want to change that.