Britain is the only country in the European Union that allows military recruitment at the age of 16. Some others allow it at 17, but many of these are phasing it out. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) states that all public institutions (including the armed forces) have a legal obligation to ensure that “in all actions concerning children (i.e. those aged under 18)…the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration”. As the armed forces need to recruit about 20,000 new people every year to replace those who leave, it’s more than likely that recruiters’ primary concern is with reaching recruitment targets, not with young people’s best interests.
The UNCRC has also called on Britain to review the policy of recruiting under-18s and has expressed concern that by recruiting in this age group they might actually be targeting the economically disadvantaged. This goes against the UNCRC recommendation that military recruitment should not target low-income groups. According to a 2009 study, army recruiters visited 40% of mainstream schools in London between September 2008 and April 2009. 51% of these schools were in the most disadvantaged fifth of all mainstream state secondary schools. Recruitment in deprived schools doesn’t only happen in London. In 2006, the army was also 50% more likely to visit schools in the most deprived areas of Wales than to visit those in less deprived areas. Many young people from poorer backgrounds join the army because they don’t feel they have any other opportunities – many see it as a last resort.
In 2008, the Minister of State for the Armed Forces denied that recruitment goes on in schools and stated that army visits to schools were merely "to offer advice on service careers”. However, this contradicts the Ministry of Defence's (MoD) Youth Policy, which states that visits to schools are a “powerful tool for facilitating recruitment". The army’s Camouflage programme and the RAF’s Altitude programme are both targeted at young people below recruitment age and glamorise war as a way to drive recruitment.
The House of Commons’ Defence Committee in 2004-05 also had concerns about the appropriateness of recruiting people under 18 into the military. It recommended that the MoD examine the potential impact of raising the recruitment age for all three services to 18. The MoD stated in its response to the Defence Committee that once people turn 18 they are more difficult to attract as recruits because they have made ‘other lifestyle choices’ like employment or further education. The MoD also acknowledged that the proportion of ethnic minority recruits is considerably higher amongst people under 18s, and they are concerned that raising the entrance age could adversely impact on the ethnic minority recruiting levels. But however successful the military is in recruiting minorities under the age of 18, not many of them will make it into the upper echelons of the military. Just 2.5 per cent of officers above the rank of lieutenant colonel, or equivalent, are from ethnic minorities, with an even smaller proportion achieving that level in the Navy.