Pregnant at 15, Tanya didn't think having a baby would ruin her life. But then, she didn't think she had much of a life left to ruin. Rarely going to school, fighting with her mother, and depressed, Tanya had been devastated to discover that John, her boyfriend and the father of her child, was just 13 years old; throughout their 15-month relationship, he had pretended to be 17.
The couple stayed together during the pregnancy, but five weeks after the birth of their daughter, Amy, John told Tanya he didn't want anything to do with either of them.
Yet today, Tanya is bubbling with love for her 10-month-old daughter, with shy pride in herself and hope for both their futures. In the past 14 months, she has gained five GCSEs and two level 1 qualifications. Next year, she will take two more GCSEs. If all goes to plan, she will then start a beauty therapy course at the local college.
"Amy makes my world a better place. It makes my day when she smiles," she says. "I never went to school much until I got pregnant. I had no plans for the future. Now I want to do well and go to college, then get a job and be a good mum for Amy."
Teenage pregnancies have been falling since 2002 and are now at their lowest for more than a decade: 7,586 under-16-year-olds became pregnant in the past 12 months, compared with 8,200 the year before, according to the most recent research by the Office for National Statistics.
Despite the fall in numbers, however, the UK still has the highest rates of teenage births and abortions in western Europe – five times those in the Netherlands, and double those in France and Germany. Britain's young people are still likely to become sexually active at a younger age than their European peers. The rate of sexually transmitted diseases among children aged 14 and younger is rising.
Launched in 1999, the government's Teenage Pregnancy Strategy aimed to halve the rate of conception in a decade. Instead, the conception rate has fallen by just 13.3% among those aged under 18, and by 11.7% in under-16s. But even this hard-won reduction is at risk, campaigners warn, thanks to the scrapping of all direct funding to the £285m scheme by the end of the year.
It is left to people such as Dr Kathy Burton, head of Moat House school in Stockport, Cheshire, to try to improve the life chances of the 20,000 under-18s who get pregnant each year and decide to keep their babies. To try to make education and a job the priority of mothers who are little more than children themselves. To teach them how to be good parents and, ideally, to delay further pregnancies.
"My opening gambit to every girl who comes to us is: 'What would you have wanted to be doing, 12 months from now, had you not got pregnant?' Then I make it clear that they will still be able to achieve that ambition – or do even better – with a baby," says Burton, whose school was one of the first of a dozen units across the country dedicated to pregnant girls or young mothers aged between 13 and 17.
Last month, the Guardian was granted rare access to Moat House.
The unit, discreetly tucked into a quiet residential close near the centre of Stockport, is clearly no ordinary place of learning. Signs on the walls instruct teachers what to do if a girl goes into labour while at school. Visitors are greeted by a bold picture display of cheerful pink and blue cots, each one naming and congratulating a new mother on the birth of her baby. A large, bright creche is the centrepiece of the school: the girls are allowed to check on their babies at any time during the school day but are expected to spend breaks and lunchtimes caring for them.
Four teachers, including Burton, teach the usual core curriculum to between 19 and 24 girls. Expectations are high – GCSEs are completed in two and a half terms instead of the usual two years, with the assumption that the students will go on to college. Their chances are good: last year, more than half of the 65 GCSEs taken by the students were achieved at grade C or above. Last May, Ofsted ranked the school as "outstanding" for the third time.
Alongside the maths and English lessons, the school prepares the girls for their new role as mothers. Midwives and health visitors run sessions on sex education, what to expect during labour, pain relief, weaning, potty training – and preventing further pregnancies. Nursery nurses talk to the girls about how to care for a new baby.
A Connexions careers adviser eases each girl into college by encouraging her to apply for college courses in line with her interests and aptitudes. The school even has its own Young Parents' Project co-ordinator, part of Stockport's drive to help its post-16 mums find college places and access childcare. Such specialist support has put Stockport at the head of the national league table for the government's Care to Learn scheme, which helps get teenage parents back into learning by funding childcare while parents are at college.
Having been excluded from school for much of the time between turning 13 and becoming pregnant at 14, Annie was functionally illiterate when was referred to Moat House. She is now headed for college where she will study animal care and hopes to become a zoologist. If she makes it to university, she will be the first member of her family to do so.
"Being pregnant calmed me down a lot. I had a lot of anger but I've grown up," she says, expertly cradling her three-and-a-half-month-old daughter in one arm and tidying toys with the other. "I've learned I can read if I try – and I want to try now, I want to be a good role model for Tara. Without her, I wouldn't have done anything with my life but now I've got plans and ambitions."
Most of the girls are in long-term relationships. Often with the same boyfriends since the age of 14, they talk of how having a baby has strengthened their relationships and given their partners a new focus in life.
"My boyfriend, Colin, used to be so immature," says 16-year-old Lauren, who gave birth to her son Ciaran two months ago. "He was just a kid himself. But now he's got a job and is finding us a house. At the beginning, he wouldn't hold Ciaran because he was so scared, but now he changes his nappy, feeds and burps him. He's a brilliant father and Ciaran's a real daddy's boy: his eyes light up whenever his dad comes into the room."
Behind Lauren is a shelf of Romeo and Juliet textbooks. Underneath are letters the girls wrote earlier in the year, to their "bumps": "When you get old enough to have sex, please use protection because you don't want to end up like Mummy," reads one. Another says: "Me and your daddy are going to bring you up so you can go and sort yourself out with a career when you're older."
By her own admission, Lauren had little idea what to do with her future before she became pregnant. Now she laughs as she remembers the recent suggestion of her boyfriend that they should have eight children. "My dad wants me to have more kids too," she says. "He asked me when I was going to give him a granddaughter but I've told them all that they have to wait. I don't want another kid until I'm at least 24. I want to train as a nursery nurse and get a good job sorted before I have more kids."
Currently there is no requirement to provide mothers aged up to 16 with a full-time education if they cannot attend school towards the end of their pregnancy and in the weeks after the birth. The Department for Education has said it "thinks that this is wrong".
From September 2011, the DfE will require all local authorities to provide full-time education for every child, with the aim of getting 60% of young mothers into education, employment or training. Whether it will achieve its goal is another question: a recent report by Barnardo's, the children's charity, found that 72% of young mothers are currently not in education, employment or training, compared with about 10% of 16- to 18-year-olds generally.
Many young mothers interviewed as part of the Barnardo's research said they had never been officially excluded but that their schools had put pressure on them to drop out over unfounded health-and-safety fears.
Other young mothers admitting having dropped out – effectively excluding themselves – because of their schools' lack of support and flexibility. In some cases there were no offers of home tuition or alternative teaching arrangements.
"Most mainstream schools, even if they let a girl stay on when she gets pregnant, are unhappy letting her continue her education in school beyond 36 weeks," says Burton. "Here, we have them up to and beyond their due date. After they give birth, they are only given four weeks' maternity leave. Most nurseries won't take a baby until they are 12 weeks old, which means that even if a girl stays in the most accommodating of mainstream schools, she can take up to 18 weeks' absence – which, in year 11, is a significant amount of time."
Funded by Stockport local authority, Moat House is expecting cuts of no more than 7% next year. But Burton fears the impact of reductions in the welfare services that target school attendance and deprivation, both key predictors of teenage pregnancy. She also believes the scrapping of direct funding for the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy is "short-sighted" and says the disappearance of the education maintenance allowance, and of all childcare-specific funding after the age of 19, will hit young mothers trying to stay in education and training.
But while reducing the numbers of teenage pregnancies can seem a sisyphean task, there are some reasons to be cheerful. Some authoritative studies have found that early parenthood does not guarantee social deprivation. In fact it can be a positive influence on the lives of young mothers – if they are given enough support.
"Young mothers often see parenthood as providing a chance to create a loving family – often compensating for their own bad experiences of childhood," said Suzanne Cater and Lester Coleman, authors of a 2006 report into planned teenage pregnancy for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. "Many said that their life would have been worse if they had not become a parent, pointing to family insecurity, a growing sense of worthlessness and lack of direction."
A 2003 study by John Ermish for the Institute for Social and Economic Research came to a similar conclusion. Using evidence from the British Household Panel Study, the professor of economics found that outcomes for women at age 30 showed that the negative consequences of teenage parenthood had been overstated. Most notably, he said, outcomes are shaped most powerfully by poverty.
Dr Jan Macvarish, author of the new book Teenage Parenthood: What's the Problem?, agrees. "The disproportionate political attention given to teenage parenthood has produced a number of profoundly unhelpful outcomes for young parents," says Macvarish, a lecturer at the University of Kent. "Rather than [society] respecting young people who have chosen to grow up through parenthood, they are treated as dysfunctional, destined to fail and in need of 'special treatment' that is far more intrusive than most new parents would accept."
Back at Moat House, 17-year-old Natalie agrees. "Being a teenage mother is hard," she says. "But the most difficult thing is the way I'm judged and treated by people who assume bad things about me, just because of my age. They don't know how much I love my baby. They don't know I'm a good mother. They don't know any of that, but they assume all sorts of things about me. And that makes changing the future for me and my child so much harder."
