Examination of Witnesses (Questions 560-579)
3 FEBRUARY 2004
MR RAJA
MIAH AND
MR DAVID
HOLLOWAY OBE
Q560 Mr Clelland: Rather than you having
a bigger budget to deal with these problems it ought to be the
mainstream organisations.
Mr Holloway: In the round it should
be mainstream organisations[4]and
then it really happens.
Mr Miah: You could give me millions
of pounds and I would still be here in ten years' time. I would
still be doing what I am doing in ten years' time if the mainstream
organisations do not pick it up.
Q561 Mr Clelland: Both of your organisations
go into schools and you are making a positive contribution there
towards social cohesion, but does this work become part of the
schools' agenda, or should it and could it become part of the
schools' agenda?
Mr Miah: The schools we go into
do not have the skills to make it part of the main agenda. In
all honesty, that is why we are allowed to go into those schools.
Q562 Chairman: What skills do they not
have?
Mr Miah: It is a combination of
the skills of understanding the complexities the town faces and
also the confidence to talk about these issues. These issues have
been suppressed in our town for many years. Even beginning to
discuss some of these issues is opening up a can of worms and
some schools shy away from it. It is far safer for an external
agency to come in and do some of that work.
Mr Holloway: There are not that
many resources around[5]there
are not that many people with the right tools or skills to be
able to do it and to engage young people actively in a way which
is fun and which is relatively light and which is safe and which
moves them on. If I just think of Tower Hamlets, because that
is where we do most of our work, there is only one school there
which has consistently brought us in over a long period and that
is one of the better. The head there has been knighted, etcetera,
so it shows. It is the only one of the schools which has actually
managed to retain a decent mix. Most of the schools in Tower Hamlets
seem to go from one colour to a different colour over a very short
period of time, but is not tackled. In some schools where it has
been taken on, when they have an issue they take it on for maybe
a couple of years or just over the year when they feel they have
an issue and a problem in the school. We go in, do something,
then they forget about it. They think it is great and it all goes
away until a few years later when the next problem comes up. We
all suffer from this short-termism.
Q563 Chairman: So it is troubleshooting
rather than changing the culture.
Mr Holloway: Yes and you really
cannot troubleshoot. You can do some very good short-term work
but it is not sustainable. You need to go in there, it needs to
be regular and it needs to work. You have the citizenship curriculum
and social cohesion needs to be used as a specific part of that.
Every school needs to do it and it needs to be part of the Ofsted
agenda to see that it happens. It needs to happen after school,
money invested, etcetera.
Q564 Mr Sanders: How can that be done
where there are faith-based schools or where there is any form
of selective education? Is that not then a further complication?
Mr Miah: In my opinion the most
successful secondary school in Oldham is the Catholic secondary
school, which is very much based within an ethnic minority community
and its catchment is in that community.
Q565 Mr Sanders: It is not exclusively
Catholic.
Mr Miah: No. In my opinion, that
would be the most cohesive of our secondary schools.
Q566 Chairman: You have been fairly critical
of schools. Is that because the teachers lack the training and
the skills to do a better job?
Mr Holloway: I am not really critical
of schools at all. They have a massive job to do. I am in and
out of schools and working on the 14 to 19 agenda on the DfES
pathfinder at the moment. I just find every time I go and ask
a teacher to do something that I feel I am overloading them. They
need the space to be able to do this work, they need help to be
able to do it. I rarely criticise. I might criticise some of the
faith schools and some schools, but usually it is about fear.
The teachers, the head teacher, whoever, are afraid of doing anything.
The board of governors is perhaps afraid of doing that. They are
not trying to do anything but they want to see a change. Where
you have faith schools, where government money is going in, with
it should go an expectation that they are working towards social
cohesion. Social cohesion and social justice are in the statutes
and we should be working towards that. If they are not working
towards social cohesion, that money should be withdrawn. I have
known Islamic schools, various schools and if they are open, they
are open and they are working to solve the problem but some are
seen to be working against it.
Q567 Mr Betts: Coming back to the Cantle
report and the Youth Service, he drew attention to a lot of problems
in the Youth Service, the cuts in funding over the years, the
parlous state of it really. What are your concerns about the Youth
Service, youth facilities or lack of them? What do you think needs
to be done?
Mr Miah: In my opinion, as soon
as cuts are announced in local authorities the Youth Service is
the first to have its budget slashed. There is an issue there
of prioritising the Youth Service and prioritising the funding
of the Youth Service. Then there is the same issue as in everything
else of the way the service is delivered. Youth Services are naturally
community based, community resourced services and what we tend
to have is Youth Services working on projects delivered to exclusive
mono-ethnic community groups.
Mr Holloway: Within the training
of youth workers there is a big issue. They are trained around
equal opportunities but not trained to do active work with young
people. The Youth Service lacks motivation in a lot of places.
It has worked better outside London than I see it working in London.
It does not have a strategic view and I do not see it working
strategically and I see it failing all over the place, to be quite
honest. It usually depends on an individual youth worker, their
understanding, their responses and their energy and their ability
to involve and engage the young people. I do not see that. In
the organisation we run, young people control the budget. Although
I am the Treasurer, I have the control, if they decide to blow
the budget in the next meeting, I am not going to stop them, because
that is giving them real empowerment. We have been operating for
quite a while with very large budgets, with young people deciding
how they spend that. They listen to me if I say this is how they
should or should not and Youth Services should be doing the same.
The Youth Services' budgets are not very big and they should be
real. They are always talking about empowerment but I see very,
very little of it and that might help.
Q568 Mr Cummings: How do you measure
value for money?
Mr Holloway: The same way as you
measure it in anything else. You look at the impact of the work,
you evaluate the work through the workers who are doing it and
you evaluate it by asking the question of the young people to
whom you are delivering the work. You go back over a period of
time and you look to see whether any of that has settled and whether
the impact has lasted and if not you ask why not and you go back
to the drawing board.
Q569 Mr Cummings: Are you receiving value
for money in your work?
Mr Holloway: Yes, I think we are.
Q570 Mr Cummings: How do you measure
it?
Mr Holloway: We do not have money
to measure the impact. We do not have the money to do the analysis
we should like to do. I should like to bring external people in
to do that. Where we go out and do the work, we have young people
joining our organisation, getting trained to do work with other
young people. The cost of a workshop is about £150 for a
single workshop which maybe last one hour and a half. If we wanted
to do a large project with a lot of people it costs about £10,000.
That would perhaps be a year long project, including some residential
work. If you look at the costs of Connexions, we are very good
value for money. If you look at the costs of the Youth Service,
we are reasonable value for money.
Q571 Mr Betts: Can I just look at some
points you both made? First of all, you both said yes, you need
more money in the Youth Service, because it is the first one to
be cut because it is not on a statutory basis. Then you are saying
that in any case it does not have a strategic vision. Perhaps
you could just say how you think that might be created and whose
responsibility that is. You are also saying that the service tends
to operate in mono-cultural types of activities. How can you then
change that approach? Surely if you try to be artificial and impose
things, that is not going to work. There are two questions: one
about the strategy and one about the details of how we might get
more projects up and running which cut across the cultures.
Mr Miah: Both of your questions
are really entwined into one. Yes, we work with young people,
yes, we can create artificial environments where that interaction
takes place. Yes, we can work with every young person in the town
and if needs be they can have a positive experience from the Youth
Service. If that Youth Service operates in isolation without some
movement on the way our children go to schools, the way in which
our communities live separately, then nothing comes of it.
Mr Holloway: Strategically it
is quite difficult. Youth Services are managed in different ways.
Some of them are managed through a committee; some of them are
just line managed as part of the education authority or perhaps
another service. It is about the analysis; it is about setting
proper agendas and not empty ones. I find a lot of the Youth Service
agendas' aims and objectives are fairly pat, rather than looking
clearly and having an analysis of what the situation is in the
local communities, in the area for which they have a responsibility.
If I were doing work there, I would go in as a consultant and
I would want to go in and spend a long time doing participant
observation and then come out and say what the issues are and
try different methods to overcome them. I do not see that is often
the case. The Youth Service and Connexions to a certain extent
are very embroiled in how many people and it is looking at people
who are out of education, out of employment, which is definitely
a good target to look at, but it is not bringing in some of those
other targets, not bringing in social cohesion as a target and
looking at the quality of work there and the impact long term.
I do not see that many people able to do it. There is not that
much expertise out there. I do not know what you find[6]It
is expertise, resources, materials and finance which are missing.
Q572 Mr Betts: Should elements of youth
provision be put on a statutory basis?
Mr Holloway: I would say ideally,
yes. It should be driven by statute and it should be driven by
education as well. It depends on their agenda and their strategy
and their training and the professionalism of what they are doing.
Mr Miah: A clear link in the role
of the Youth Services is about bringing the citizenship curriculum
to life. Children are taught citizenship in the schools and the
Youth Service should bring that to life.
Q573 Chairman: Would it make any difference
making it statutory unless they had a significant amount of extra
money?
Mr Miah: Yes, because it would
be valued in the way that everything else which is statutory is
valued.
Q574 Chairman: You think it is the lack
of value which other people in local authorities give to the Youth
Service which is the biggest problem, rather than the fact that
most local authorities spend very little on it anyway.
Mr Miah: Yes, a combination of
both.
Mr Holloway: Yes, that explains
a lot of it. It is easily cut, not being statutory, and it is
in the front line of where you cut. Maybe not at this very moment,
but certainly in the past, in my experience of youth work over
about 15 years is of continuous cuts, where do they cut when there
is little left to cut? My expertise in fund raising and things
like that is a response to the cuts to be able to provide money
from other areas to provide a service, hence being able to get
something up and running like Tolerance in Diversity.
Q575 Chairman: Cynically though, my feeling
is that there is hardly any money left in the Youth Service to
cut, is there?
Mr Holloway: They have increased
it by a marginal amount in the last year. But I do not see much
of it.
Q576 Chairman: An awful lot of local
authorities are trying to move the Youth Service out of fixed
buildings to having youth workers almost on the street. In Tameside
they have a system where they have these movable pods and when
they get a situation where youngsters are causing a bit of friction
in a neighbourhood, they move in and make a provision for those
youngsters for a short time. That seems to work quite well, because
it is flexible and it moves around. Do you think youth workers
really manage to get to communities where there is friction or
once they are not based on a building do they tend not to be able
to get to groups and certainly to ethnically mixed groups?
Mr Miah: I always found the pod
debate rather interesting and I have worked in places where we
took resources into a community where there were issues and young
people were being disruptive and we provided a service for maybe
two months or three months and then we moved the pod out and on
and left nothing behind. The debate around the pods is very much
around the reason we have them, which is because we do not have
enough funding to service that community properly in the first
place. The solutions we are offering are very, very much short
term. We go in with the pod, we go in with a detached team of
youth workers, we do a piece of work over two or three months
and we move out of that community.
Q577 Chairman: So you think the key thing
is to go in, but to have the resources to stay.
Mr Miah: Yes, to go in and stay.
Q578 Chris Mole: Would you be worried
that if you put Youth Services on a statutory basis you would
lose the flexibility you need to work with different communities
in different localities?
Mr Miah: No. What you would find,
if you put Youth Services on a statutory basis, would be that
you develop expertise and you develop a range of ways of working
with young people from different communities and you would find
that works far more.
Q579 Chris Mole: I am a little worried
that the next question applies a little of a stereotype, or it
could be seen as that and it is certainly not intended to. How
significantly does drug dealing contribute to the overall problem
of poor social cohesion amongst young people?
Mr Miah: Not to be cynical, many
of the young people I work with do not care whom they buy their
drugs off as long as they have the drugs.
Mr Holloway: I do not think it
is an issue. It is an issue for social cohesion in so far as you
have drugs and if you have a lot of drugs happening in a community,
it unknits communities because it sets people against each other.
There is a lot of money floating around, a lot of violence floating
around, that sort of thing, but it is not a racial thing whatsoever.
It cuts across every class group, every race group.
4 That take on social cohesion as a core objective. Back
5
Training and education materials. Back
6
Addressed to Mr Miah. Back
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