“It’s Not the Young People Who Are Broken” — Why the System Is Failing Us All
It all begins with an idea.
At Arts Education Exchange (AEE), we meet young people every week who’ve been told—explicitly or not—that something is wrong with them. They’ve been excluded, misdiagnosed, or quietly disappeared from registers. But what if the problem isn’t the young people at all? What if it’s the systems built around them?
The Violence We Don’t See
Our national conversation about education and youth mental health often focuses on symptoms - attendance figures, anxiety levels, exam results - but rarely on causes. Across the UK, children with educational and health care plans are waiting months or years for placements. In Thanet alone, over 700 young people with plans are currently unplaced. Every week, the system quietly fails the very people it claims to support.
Education should be a site of growth and potential. Instead, it has become, borrowing from Johan Galtung’s framework, a site of structural violence: a place where suffering is built into the architecture itself. Policies that normalise exclusion, assessment-driven models that shame difference, and funding cuts that remove creative and therapeutic provision all produce harm that is invisible because it is bureaucratic.
The result is a silent crisis. National figures show that school absence linked to mental health has risen 150 % since 2019, while around 200 children a year die by suicide. Philosopher Ruha Benjamin calls this “spirit murder”, the everyday ways that institutions drain the vitality and worth from those they claim to serve.
Listening to Young People
Jason, one of our participants, once said:
“I’ve always felt quite distant and closed off from everyone else … I’ve always felt like there was something wrong with me.”
Months later, after working through our creative programme, he came to a different conclusion:
“There’s nothing wrong with me, it’s the systems around us that are failing.”
That shift, from internalising blame to recognising systemic harm, is the transformation we fight for every day.
Why Art Matters Here
Our work shows that when young people are given the time, safety, and creative tools to express themselves, they begin to reconnect with their sense of agency. Art is not a cosmetic fix, it’s a peacebuilding tool. In creative spaces, young people relearn how to play, to take risks, and to trust others. They begin to imagine futures that education had taught them were impossible.
At AEE, we hold a simple belief: creativity is not a luxury, it’s a human right. By connecting art, therapy, and advocacy, we begin to build what Galtung calls “positive peace”, not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice.
Next in the series: How a different kind of learning environment - the Third Space - helps young people move from survival to imagination.