UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 744-iv

HOUSE OF COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

EDUCATION COMMITTEE

SERVICES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

WEDNESDAY 30 MARCH 2011

JANE HAYWOOD, GILL MILLAR, DOUG NICHOLLS and ADAM NICHOLS

ROB BELL, MARTIN BROOKES, BILL EYRES and LOUISE SAVELL

PAUL OGINSKY

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education Committee

on Wednesday 30 March 2011

Members present:

Mr Graham Stuart (Chair)

Neil Carmichael

Pat Glass

Damian Hinds

Tessa Munt

Craig Whittaker

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Jane Haywood, Chief Executive, Children’s Workforce Development Council, Gill Millar, Regional Youth Work Adviser, Learning South West, Doug Nicholls, National Secretary, Community and Youth Workers Union in Unite, and Adam Nichols, Chief Executive, Changemakers, gave evidence.

Q270 Chair: Good morning, and welcome to this session on services for young people. We have three panels today, which is a tight schedule, so I ask Committee members to be short, brief, succinct and to the point. I know that panellists of your distinction will automatically respond in that way, but I apologise in advance if I brutally cut you off as we try to get through and cover the issues that we want to talk about today.

Tim Loughton, the Minister, said at the recent Positive for Youth summit, "The youth sector should have been reformed years ago." Is he right? Does the sector need to be weaned off its dependency on Government funds? Does it need a major push to change and improve?

Adam Nichols: He is right. The sector has been far too dependent on state funding, and there are too many organisations. The current context provides a real opportunity for reform, and the sort of things we would like include a more mixed economy in funding terms, and more of a focus on the volunteer side of the work force, which we think is really important. I think that the Minister is right, and I think that there is a real opportunity.

Doug Nicholls: The Minister is right and wrong all at once. We are in the middle of the most dramatic reforms in the youth work and youth service sector that we have experienced since the creation of the service in 1961. We very much welcome the formation of this Committee, but the carpet is being pulled from under your feet, because of the scale of the-I can’t call them cuts-destruction, and there are so many proposals to get rid of youth services 100%.

Q271 Chair: How many? I am aware of two.

Doug Nicholls: There are many more than two, and I think I have listed some of them in supplementary evidence-I will send some more through. There are certainly more than two; I can think of six quite easily. Even in those areas that are being cut by only 75% or 50%, the effect will be to remove educational youth work provision so significantly as to render it meaningless.

Just as a reminder, local authorities have never spent what the Government said should be spent on the youth service. The last figure that we have from 2008 of £316 million on the youth service in England is very small when we compare the number of people who come through with a positive alternative. We have asked the Minister, and we ask you, to take cognisance of the fact that by July nearly half the professional youth work force could disappear as a result of redundancies. That level of funding and support is not being replaced by any other source. State funding is indicative of a social commitment to young people, and there has never been enough of it.

Gill Millar: I am not sure that the youth sector has stood still and suddenly needs reforming. For me, it has been in a state of gradual reformation for a long time. Successive Governments have had high expectations of what they wanted for their young people, and they have expected the youth sector to respond to that either through directives and investment, or by setting out what they want for young people and leaving it to the sector to decide how to do it.

I don’t think we’re looking at a sector that is stuck in a particular way of doing things. An awful lot of good work goes on in the sector, and if we are reforming it again and further, let’s build on that good stuff.

Q272 Chair: Is there an urgent need for reform, Jane?

Jane Haywood: The sector has always reformed, and it has always tried to respond to the condition that it is in, so we are in a different position than we might have been in three or four years. We now need to look at how we can deliver more effectively. Clearly the voluntary sector is the right place to go, and the use of volunteers is right.

What is really important is that we remember that all young people, whether they are most disadvantaged or very privileged, will benefit, grow and develop from some form of youth work, so we need to think about how to ensure that as much provision as possible is available using all the resources that we have. Sometimes those resources are generous, and sometimes they are not.

Q273 Craig Whittaker: Interestingly, 6 million people in England work in the work force, with 5.2 million of them primarily from the voluntary sector-a couple of you have said that the use of volunteers is the right way to go, and it is fair to say that we are probably on that track anyway. The Children’s Workforce Development Council describes the work force as complex and fragmented. Just so we understand, who makes up the young people’s work force, and is that distinct from the children’s work force?

Jane Haywood: I think you have seen the copy of the tangerine in our document-it depends on where you draw the circle. In terms of the young people’s work force, you have people working in formal education, and then you have youth workers, family support workers, Connexions workers, guidance workers, youth justice workers and health workers-it is a very wide and varied group of people. Then you have a huge set of people who are operating in the voluntary sector, so the work force is very wide.

Is the children’s work force different from the young people’s work force? I describe it as a continuum. The skills needed to work with children and young people, are about listening to children and young people, designing services that meet their needs, keeping them safe and working with parents and carers. As children and young people grow, how you work with them changes and adapts. What you do with a three or four-year-old is different from what you do with a 14 or 15-year-old developing their own autonomy and developing their independence from their parents. I think it is one work force with a common set of skills but, as they move forward, with the ability to work in different contexts.

Q274 Craig Whittaker: Is the Children’s Workforce Development Council wrong when it says that the work force is fragmented and complex?

Jane Haywood: It is fragmented and complex, because the work force sits in so many different places. That is not necessarily a bad thing if you can support that fragmented work force in different ways, starting from the Girl Guides on a Friday night and going right the way through to somebody working in a drugs project who is available 24/7. It is a huge spread. Their training and development needs will be different and the way in which they operate will be different, but within that, there will be some common skills. Because the work force is fragmented, communicating with it, supporting training and development and getting the system to work are much more complex than if you were working in education. In education, you know where your schools are, you know roughly what a teacher does and what a teacher teaches. It is much more complex in the youth sector.

Adam Nichols: To back up what Jane said, one of the challenges is that a lot of people who are in the work force would not define themselves as being in the work force. If you turn up to run the Guide group or to coach football on a Saturday morning, you are doing it because you enjoy it and you want to support young people, and not because you view yourself as being a professional in any way, shape or form.

Doug Nicholls: I am looking at the CWDC’s state of the young people’s work force report, which was published last year. It refers to 775,150 paid staff and about 5 million volunteers, and it breaks down the different occupational specialisms. Let me make a couple of observations about the youth work element of that, which involves 77,000 paid staff and 500,000 volunteers.

The creation of the paid staff was a product of the voluntary sector and the volunteers themselves saying that this particular form of educational intervention with young people required a form of paid practice and professionalism. That was created by the first courses in 1945. We now have about 58 institutions running training for youth workers and that part of the work force is the oldest part of the young people’s work force. They sought to consolidate themselves as a profession respecting the educational needs of young people and the need to support them and give them a voice. It is that part of the work force that is under the most pressure at the moment, and that has a direct impact on the ability to motivate and sustain the involvement of gifted, committed volunteers.

A key element of youth work training is the motivation, recruitment and development of volunteers. As we know, most youth workers themselves come from voluntary effort. We are extremely concerned that the number of young volunteers will be reduced this year as key projects such as the Youth Action Network, which sought to encourage 400,000 volunteers, will literally be cut at the end of this month. We will see even fewer young people volunteering, because volunteers don’t come out of the blue.

Chair: We will come on to volunteers a bit later.

Q275 Craig Whittaker: Doug, it seems fairly clear that the work force is very fragmented. Are you saying that change isn’t good and that we should carry on the way we are going? That is the impression we are getting.

Doug Nicholls: I have always been involved with change. As Gill indicated, the sector has responded consistently to the different needs of young people and the different policy initiatives of Government. I do not accept that it is a fragmented work force working with young people. A number of different specialisms have grown up at different points of history, and they involve different and equally valued forms of intervention with young people. It is important that people co-ordinate their work more. That is why the kind of youth work training that we get to ensure there is inter-agency work, which again is unique to the youth work training, is particularly important in this environment. Co-ordination is good, but the meltdown of different professional specialisms is not good, because young people consistently tell us that they value the different skilled professional interventions that they are involved with.

Gill Millar: Change is an essential element of working with young people. Young people themselves are in a period of great transition and change in their lives. The workers working with them need to be very adaptive, responsive and so on. But if we are talking about the work force, it is important that, where we are changing, we build on what works, what is good and the skills that workers have that enable positive partnerships to be built and enable volunteers to play an appropriate role. We don’t want to throw everything out and start from scratch, because there is a lot of really good stuff.

Q276 Craig Whittaker: How might the composition of the work force change over the next few years as a result of the funding and the structural changes that are taking place?

Doug Nicholls: I have already indicated that key sections-youth work and play work, for example-face so many redundancies at the moment that the skills that young people, Ofsted and local authority and voluntary sector employers say are important will disappear very rapidly. That is the scale of the difficulties that we currently face, coupled with some of the pressures on continuous professional development and initial training, too. So, regrettably, from where I am sitting-I represent across the work force-we are going to see a serious and unnecessary reduction in key skilled staff.

Jane Haywood: We expect to see more volunteers and more people working in the voluntary sector, because the paid work face may sit in the statutory sector or the voluntary sector. We shouldn’t get confused between paid people in the voluntary sector and volunteers. But we would expect to see more volunteers, and we would expect to see more paid people in the voluntary sector. The worry is that in the change process we are going through, the voluntary sector dips too much and is, therefore, unable to respond. It is difficult to tell at the moment how much of that is happening out there.

Gill Millar: Local authorities play an essential role in keeping work with young people going in their areas. They either do that through direct provision or through contracting local voluntary organisations to do work on the ground with young people. Local authorities have obviously had significant cuts. In the south-west region, where I am based, we are seeing all local authorities cutting at least 20%, and in some cases 75%, from their services to young people.

Q277 Chair: Who is cutting 75%?

Gill Millar: Gloucestershire. Strictly speaking, Somerset is cutting 65%. There is more than one authority doing that. The reason for that are the priorities they are facing. Seeing that the priorities are child protection, safeguarding and so on, it tends to push interventions to those below the age of 11. Working with young people has taken a bigger hit. It is not only what they provide themselves that is being hit; it is what they ask voluntary sector organisations to do, too, because the money to fund those grants, awards and contracts is simply not there, either. We are seeing that as one trend.

Another trend for the work force concerns what is left. In Gloucestershire, for example, where such an enormous reduction is being made, they are saying, "We’re not going to provide open access provision. Our provision will be targeted at young people who have already been identified as having a particular need to be addressed." The work that staff are expected to do will change from providing open access areas and responding to young people’s aspirations as they come along, to focused work with particular individuals. There are implications for work force development, because people who remain may be asked to do things other than what they were trained to do in the first place.

Q278 Craig Whittaker: But is not early intervention and targeted provision better anyway?

Gill Millar: It depends how it is done. You undoubtedly need targeted provision, but a good deal of what we describe as open access provision is targeted, because it is done in places and with communities where there will be a need and where that intervention will be necessary. One thing about open access youth work is that it is not stigmatised. People are not referred to a youth worker; they take part in youth work provision through that system and their needs are identified. The youth workers can either work with you, or they can refer you on. It is not like you are going to the place where the naughty boys go, and that is a significant factor. If we take that out-that provision is largely going-we will lose a big access route for young people to get more specialised services.

Adam Nichols: Can I come back quickly on the original question about what is going to change? There is a danger that we see this in terms of the statutory and professional work force. The bulk of youth provision is not provided in those settings, so there will not be any change. Arguably this is an opportunity, and we are certainly viewing it as that. I do not dispute what other members of the panel have said about changes in those areas, but if you are the Scouts you will carry on delivering with a primarily volunteer-led model, just as you have always done. This measure will not make a huge amount of difference.

Q279 Pat Glass: Can anyone work with young people, or is there something that is special or different about a qualified youth worker? What additionality does the qualified youth worker rely on?

Adam Nichols: The simple answer is, yes, anyone can. I think it is more about values and ethos than about qualifications. At Changemakers, we look for people who are passionate about young people and who believe in young people’s potential. We look for people who will engage with young people on an equal basis and who can facilitate and coach them. When I think about who is a good youth worker in the public eye at the moment, I think of someone like Jamie Oliver. He has consistently shown that he can do all those things with young people, but I don’t think he has a youth worker qualification. There are lots of Jamie Olivers all over the country who have those kinds of beliefs and attitudes. There is sometimes a danger that we see qualifications as being a prerequisite, when actually the bulk of excellent young youth workers I know don’t have qualifications at all, which is not to say that professionally qualified youth workers do not have those qualities.

Q280 Pat Glass: When they are there, do they add additionality? Would you say that anyone can work with young people where there is a drug culture or a gun culture? Surely there are dangers in that.

Adam Nichols: There are clearly specialisms involved in working with young people who have particular types of issues and challenges. I would call that content knowledge in terms of understanding problems and issues, and dealing with them effectively. Fundamentally, a false dichotomy is created between volunteers and professionals. I have seen professionals do fantastic work with young people in drug settings. Clearly, they have to be appropriately supported and trained, but the idea that someone-

Chair: You said professionals. I think you meant non-professionals.

Adam Nichols: Sorry, I meant volunteers. The idea that someone has to go to university and study for three years in order to do that effectively is not true.

Jane Haywood: Anyone can work with young people. Adam’s absolutely right that it’s about values and it is about the way you work with young people. What we know from research-not only in youth work, but across all settings-is that when you train and skill people up, they can do that job better. You wouldn’t have just anybody going in to teach a class, because you would want to be sure that they had the teaching and subject skills, and it is exactly the same in youth work. However, I run a voluntary organisation, and my whole setting is run with volunteers. In theory, I haven’t got graduate leadership or a qualified youth worker, but my volunteers are teachers, nurses and teaching assistants. They bring a whole set of professional skills from another setting. So, yes, anybody can do it. Certainly, if you are in the Guides or the Brownies, we need you to know how to keep young people safe and be able to do that, as well as knowing what to do if you think they’re not safe, and how to lead some really good activities. That is different if you’re working with hard-end drug problems, for which you will need to know a lot more.

What we also know from people who work in the sector is that they want training and skills-we are running a programme at the moment, which is very popular-and that they want that to be accredited. If you start with the people and what it is they’re doing, what they want to do, and how they want to develop professionally, that is the best way to approach this. We mustn’t think that volunteer equals amateur. I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and I am not an amateur. I do know, however, what I can do and when I need to refer to a skilled youth worker, or a skilled social worker. I know when I’m out of the range that I can deal with.

Gill Millar: I want to discuss the added value of a professional qualification, in that the qualification is a mark of having undertaken the training. I think Jamie Oliver is potentially a good youth worker. He is obviously naturally very good with young people and can motivate them, and so on. However, when I watch Jamie Oliver’s programmes with young people, I think he misses opportunities. I don’t think that he would miss them if he had had the chance to understand what he was doing in the context of broader education and policy, as well as the chance to develop the skills to be able to respond in particular ways and at particular times. He would have a deeper understanding and better range of skills at his disposal if he had done a professional youth work course. I have seen lots of very good youth workers, and I agree with Adam that you don’t go into working with young people unless you actually like them and have a passion for working with them. I have seen lots of people come in and get better by undertaking training and gaining that qualification.

Q281 Pat Glass: On additionality?

Doug Nicholls: On additionality, the voluntary work force historically said that we need better levels of practice, we need to ensure that there are people who are doing this work full time, and that they should be equipped to do so. We have a work force made up of volunteers, part-time paid, and full-time professionals who dedicate their lives to the work. All three component parts of that unique workforce within youth work want to be skilled appropriate to the level of practice that they are delivering. If you are working one night a week, inevitably, the requirements on you are less than if you have made your career out of the profession. So, the additionality that the full-timers bring is to co-ordinate and bring the best thinking about informal education practice to bear on the voluntary staff that they work with in their teams, and on the part-time staff. They have a commitment to relationship-building with young people that it is not a product of character. It is a product of sophisticated learning about group work, child psychology and education theory, which is developed within the training courses for full-time and part-time workers. They bring that core of reliability and sustainable relationship-building with young people that you can only have if you are a full-time professional practitioner, who is there six or seven days a week.

Q282 Pat Glass: Some people have argued that the professionalism of youth work over the last 20 years has been more about the conditions and pay of the work force than about the needs and rights of young people. Do you have a view on that?

Doug Nicholls: I have a strong view about that because, if you look at it, the full-time work force-whether I like it or not-has not fallen over itself to argue for more pay. It is not a high-paid profession, as the statistics show.

Q283 Chair: You have, but they have not. Is that it?

Doug Nicholls: I have tried to, but the profession is dedicated and committed. Its first interest is the rights of young people and the entitlements of them. That is where it comes from. That is historically where this profession was created. So it is not by any means a greedy and protectionist profession. People would be in another area of work if they were that way inclined.

Q284 Pat Glass: But they don’t go into it for the money?

Doug Nicholls: No, no. Some 68% of the students in qualification training are over the age of 21. They are mature, non-traditional entrants and they come from many years of voluntary experience and part-time paid experience. They recognise that in order to give the best to young people they need to upskill and get not necessarily a qualification, but skills, understandings and values to do the work better. So it is a very committed profession.

Q285 Pat Glass: Gill, can I ask you about the balance of volunteers in the south-west and across the country. What do you think that balance should be?

Gill Millar: It is obviously really difficult to get figures about volunteers. But let us consider one local authority in the south-west-Devon-which has recently done a survey on its staffing. Just within the local authority youth service, it discovered that there are more volunteers working than paid staff. If we scale that up, as Adam indicated, there are totally voluntary organisations and the voluntary organisations that have volunteers and a mix of paid staff. As the CWDC paper shows, there are substantially more volunteers than paid staff. There are also paid support staff and paid professional staff. Another authority in the region did some figures for me yesterday. They have 12 full-time professional staff working with 100 part-time support staff and volunteers as well.

Q286 Pat Glass: Given the balance, we are talking about a largely volunteer staff. Is there anything we can learn from organisations such as the Scouts that rely upon a huge army of volunteers?

Gill Millar: What I was just saying shows that there are volunteers right across the youth work force and certainly across the youth-work work force. It may be in the more specialist areas such as drugs advice and so on that the proportion of volunteers is less. What is needed and what exists in a number of places are progression routes that enable volunteers to come in and either choose to do what they do on their one or two nights a week, or to progress from that and do more complex work through pre-professional training level 2 and 3 qualifications and so on. We have seen that there is a real appetite for that in the south-west region and right across the country through the progress project, which is about providing accredited training for volunteers and the voluntary sector in the youth work force. Some 25,000 accredited learning opportunities have been made available and taken up in the past six months. There are progression routes into professional-level qualifications for those who want them.

Q287 Chair: We are going to come to qualifications in a moment. The specific question was: what can we learn from large voluntary organisations such as the Scouts that receive no public money whatsoever.

Adam Nichols: I think you can learn that you can run a highly excellent and massively-trusted-by-the-public youth organisation predominantly with volunteers. Doug said that you can only do this kind of stuff if you are a full-time professional practitioner, but I don’t think that is the case. I suspect that if you asked the public which organisations they recognised and trusted, in terms of places where they would want their children and young people to be, the Scouts and those sorts of organisations would be right up there. They don’t take any public money, and clearly they have a professional cadre of people who are doing the co-ordination, but most of that provision is run by volunteers.

Q288 Pat Glass: Are we not talking about very different things here-horses for courses? There are groups of children who would do well and flourish in voluntary organisations such as the Scouts, but there are also children who have very complex, very serious issues. For those children, you need the more professional, specialist provision.

Adam Nichols: There are targeted services, clearly, which need to exist, but if you look at something like the Scouts it is incredibly socially diverse.

Q289 Pat Glass: And there would be dangers in the Scouts trying to get involved in things like that?

Adam Nichols: I am not here to speak for the Scouts. I am not arguing that there is not a need for targeted, professional expertise and specialism, but I don’t think that that necessarily has to be provided by full-time professionals.

Gill Millar: But the Scouts and the Guides and all of those organisations provide accredited training for their work force, which is equivalent to the training in the non-volunteer world.

Jane Haywood: The lessons are the same as those from my own organisation. You recruit people young, so you have got them before they realise that there is anything else that they can do with their lives-my children started at one month old. You make it fun and interesting, because the thing about volunteering is that you don’t do it because you are a lovely person; you get something out of it, even if it is just the buzz of working with young people. You provide proper quality support and you provide training. Some of that training may well lead on to qualifications, but I couldn’t run my set-up if I didn’t invest in them as a group of people. That is exactly the same as you would do in a normal, working organisation: leadership of the people, support and direction. That is what the Scouts do. I think they probably take public money, because all of us small voluntary organisations are always whipping bids in here, there and everywhere, but it is not consistent, long-term money.

Chair: I think they told us that they didn’t, but it is pretty hard to avoid.

Q290 Tessa Munt: I am going to ask you about the benefits, or not, of a minimum licence to practise in the youth sector.

Adam Nichols: I don’t see a benefit, particularly. I think that there are some dangers. You create artificial, unnecessary barriers to entry. You potentially create a false dichotomy between volunteers and paid staff, which I have already said I don’t think is right. It could also be very expensive. In another life, I sit as a council member of the General Teaching Council, which has a similar kind of set-up for the teaching profession. The Government are in the process of abolishing it. It is an excellent organisation, but is a very expensive and quite bureaucratic process.

I think it is more important to invest in proper training and development, as Jane has said, for all parts of the work force. This idea that we are going to create some kind of protectionism-and the idea, a bit like the safeguarding legislation, which basically takes as its assumption that everyone is a paedophile before they start, that if you are not licensed it is assumed that you are not capable of working with children and young people-will mean that a lot of people who currently volunteer would simply say, "Sorry, I’m not going to do that, so I’m not going to bother to do what I’m doing any more."

Jane Haywood: A licence to practise that is voluntary and helps a practitioner to set out what their skills and qualifications are, which they can present to an employer, is a good thing. If you move beyond that, the complexities of running it, as Adam says, make it a much bigger ask.

Q291 Tessa Munt: So it’s a voluntary licence?

Jane Haywood: A voluntary licence.

Q292 Tessa Munt: But isn’t that called interviewing people?

Jane Haywood: It could be, yes.

Doug Nicholls: A number of people who have done terrible things have called themselves youth workers with absolutely no training qualification or relationship to the field of youth work. A very big issue about protection of children and young people is tied up with this. The views that Adam has expressed, as you will see from the submissions, are unique. There has been a long debate within the whole sector about the importance of getting some improved sense of licensing and regulation, bearing in mind the broad spectrum of the sector, and one simple size will not fit all. We have had a lot of discussions over the past couple of years about introducing systems that appreciate different levels of voluntary intervention, part-time workers’ intervention and full-time practitioners.

There are various forms of licence already: the training is validated, and most employers, particularly local authorities, will employ only Joint Negotiating Committee qualified staff; many voluntary organisations have their own ethical codes; and the National Youth Agency in the field has adopted an ethical code for youth work and so on.

Q293 Tessa Munt: An ethical code is just-

Doug Nicholls: Yes, but there is a spectrum of things. At the one end, there is the General Teaching Council’s sort of absolute licence, which involves appeals if you are rejected, breaches of the licence and so on. At the other end, as in play work, there are passports to practice and different ways of ensuring that employers, the public and the work force have confidence that a particular individual is equipped to perform at the level at which they perform, particularly when we are talking about a sector where performance and intervention involves young lives. So an understanding of boundaries, power relationships and acceptable practice is essential.

Q294 Tessa Munt: So you would say that it is absolutely critical that anyone whose work involves any form of contact with young people, whatever that may be, should have some sort of licence.

Doug Nicholls: Particularly if they are to call themselves a youth worker, which, as yet, has no protection of title.

Q295 Tessa Munt: A youth worker is not a profession, as such, is it? It covers a massive range.

Doug Nicholls: It is for the 8,000 or so people who do it full time, and for those 3,000 or so currently on professional qualification training, who, when they come out and when they practise, will be at the centre of an organisation of volunteers and part-time staff in voluntary organisations and local authorities.

Gill Millar: In many other areas of the work force, licensed practice has been used as a way of driving up standards and the quality of provision. In setting people up for youth work or, indeed, for wider work with young people, we need to make sure that we do not exclude unnecessarily. I would like a progressive licence to practise, perhaps similar to the Institute for Learning approach that has been taken with further education teaching, where there are recognised qualifications at different levels and there is a requirement to keep up continuous professional development alongside it in order to retain membership of an institute. I am quite attracted by that as a model of doing this. I think it is important to do it in order to ensure that the quality of what is provided remains good, because we are losing quite a lot of the ways in which we’ve checked that in the past.

Q296 Tessa Munt: Looking at continuing professional development for the youth work force, is it sufficient?

Gill Millar: At the moment, I think it’s really patchy. Local authorities have focused on core issues for their overall children’s work force such as safeguarding, assessment of young people’s needs-those sorts of things. Employers and others have in-house provision. As a regional youth work unit, we do quite a lot of professional development events in the youth work field in the region, but it is non-accredited at the moment. I think there could be more accredited CPD, and more incentive for workers to undertake CPD. It needs to be done in ways and in places and at times that suit the work force. One of the problems that we have had with the youth-work work force in terms of accessing things such as generic safeguarding training is that it takes place on a Wednesday in the town hall, but they have other jobs then because they work in the evenings.

Q297 Tessa Munt: Universities might stop offering youth work degrees because of the changes in higher education funding. Why should that be the case?

Doug Nicholls: It is not entirely the changes in higher education funding that are the current problem-they are a problem, but that is not the whole picture. Youth and community work courses are professionally validated by volunteers through the National Youth Agency’s education and training standards committee, which has standards for the operation of the courses. One of the requirements is that about 50% of field work practice is involved in the training, which is now at degree level, so a lot of placements are necessary. Those placements require skilled practitioners to supervise the students on the placements, and they require a massive amount of good will from the voluntary projects and local authorities that host them, because there is no funding for those placements for 50% of courses. And, of course, with students coming from non-traditional backgrounds, as they do in our particular sector, having to do 50% placement diminishes the time you can spend on part-time work, and fees are now likely to go up to about £8,000, on average, for youth work courses. So there are a number of pressures on the heart of the professional training, particularly relating to placements where there are simply not enough available and where the financial pressures on them are acute.

We have been very successful in getting non-traditional entrants access into our sector, and that will clearly be changed by the fee system as well. Vocational training is quite a costly area for the universities, and our sector has never achieved HE funding comparable to teaching or social work training, which are the comparable professions. No additionality has been given to our courses in recognition of their high place-work element.

CPD is in a woeful condition at the moment. I have the figures from 2008. It is a very small percentage of any local authority and voluntary sector budget for continuing professional development. That requirement, as with every other profession I can think of, would be integral to a licence to practise-that there should be a simple commitment to 5% or so of your time at work being CPD, so that the public can have confidence that you are up-skilled.

Q298 Chair: If you haven’t submitted that already, will you send us the figures on CPD? We would be grateful for that.

Doug Nicholls: I will, yes.

Adam Nichols: I think that the universities will respond to market demand. If employers and students want those qualifications, universities will offer them. As an employer, it is not something that we look at. I am not that interested in academic qualifications, whether they are for youth work or otherwise, when I employ people to work in my organisation. As I said earlier, it is the values, the attitudes, the beliefs and the philosophy that are the key thing. So from my perspective, it is not something that particularly drives recruitment decisions.

Q299 Chair: Have you employed people with youth work degrees, or have you found that that has not provided sufficient additional value to make you prioritise it?

Adam Nichols: We have and we do. I am not saying that they are not valuable, but it is not a great determinant in my experience.

Jane Haywood: It would be a real shame if the youth work degree was no longer offered, but I think that universities will want to look at very different ways of delivering it to make it much more cost-effective, because of all the issues that Doug talked about. I also think that we should look at whether there is a broader degree on working with children and young people that allows specialisms, which makes it a much more attractive qualification for the person participating, because it opens up more doors than restricting them to one area.

Q300 Chair: Very quickly, is there a case for a generic training qualification for volunteers, or should we rely on voluntary bodies’ own systems? Adam, do you have any views on that?

Adam Nichols: It would be expensive to develop. I think that it is unenforceable and that a lot of volunteers would not want to do it, so I would say no.

Jane Haywood: We know from the Progress project that we funded that volunteers value training and want it to be accredited, but it should be driven by what they want to do. I think we can help voluntary organisations understand, through advice, what will be sensible things to do.

Q301 Chair: Would that involve generic training or continuing with different bodies doing different things at different times?

Jane Haywood: I am not sure that I understand the distinction you are making. I think that we need to say to the sector, "These are the skills you need to work in the voluntary sector, and these are the different ways you can get them," and then leave it to employers and the work force to pick and mix what meets their needs.

Q302 Chair: I was thinking of volunteers in particular and whether you should use some expense and create generic-

Jane Haywood: No, I don’t think you should. And I don’t think you should impose it, because I think that half my volunteers would walk if I said, "You have to do a qualification."

Gill Millar: There already are generic volunteering qualifications. They are not necessarily in the youth sector, but there are awards in volunteering that a number of awarding bodies already offer. I have been involved in the Progress project that Jane just mentioned on training voluntary sector people. There is a real appetite there for accredited training, but I suspect the sector is too broad to be able to say that there is one award that will fit all. I suspect there might be a core on to which you build additional elements. The qualifications framework enables us to do that.

Chair: Thank you all for giving evidence this morning. If there are any further points that you want to make, please do so. I look forward to hearing from you.

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Rob Bell, Head of Social Justice Programme, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Martin Brookes, Chief Executive, New Philanthropy Capital, Bill Eyres, Head of Sustainability, Think Big, O2 UK, and Louise Savell, Associate Director, Social Finance, gave evidence.

Q303 Chair: Good morning. Thank you very much for joining us today. You are all external observers, so how efficient are youth services in terms of both obtaining and spending funding? Does anyone have any thoughts on that? Rob is looking down; I will pick on him.

Rob Bell: May I offer you our snapshot of this world? We have funding relationships with some 450 organisations. In my programme there are 130 grantees, with the large majority involved in this area. Among them there is a strong appetite to be very good at understanding the impact they make. They sometimes lack the tools and resources to be able to do that as well as they like. What we see among the grantees is fairly economic, lean and effective practice, combining-linking back to the previous discussion-youth work with volunteering and, increasingly, with young people themselves acting as peer support. On how organisations practise, I would say they are effective. We are not a typical, mass market grant maker. We have fewer relationships than many of our peers, and they tend to be for larger grants to newer organisations for longer periods of time. We may fund up to five or six years.

Q304 Chair: Thank you. Does anyone disagree or take issue with what Rob has said?

Martin Brookes: I will take slight issue with it. I am sure that Rob is right about the grantees that he works with at the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. We analyse charities and provide advice to funders and to charities themselves. In our experience of the sector, fewer than we would expect and hope can evidence their work, and those that can really stand out and are exceptional. We tend to pick those as our poster children. There is, however, a dearth of evidence in this sector, which mirrors the whole of the voluntary sector. It is not particularly pronounced here; it is a wider problem.

Louise Savell: I will add that, from a social investment perspective, which is where we come from at Social Finance, there is a general lack of understanding among many youth sector organisations on the potential options in terms of non-grant finance, which might be available to them through loans, equity and equity-like finance. If social investment were to realise its potential for the sector, there might need to be some support to develop the demand side for the availability of capital.

Q305 Craig Whittaker: Martin, I wonder whether I can tap you for a minute on the new philanthropy capital. You have said that the charities are entering a maelstrom and will need support from other funders to weather the storm. Who are these other funders, and what strong protection can they offer?

Martin Brookes: Whoever the other funders are, they can’t provide enough protection, because the scale of the cuts that a lot of organisations are facing is just too acute. The other funders might be foundations or trusts, such as the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, or they might be private donors. Neither of those sources of funding is big enough. They could also be social investors, but that is too nascent a market to be able to step in and plug the gap. Private donations have been more or less stagnant as a share of GDP for the past 30 or 40 years. For much of that period, there has been a decline in the number of donors, as well, which may have arrested things. But it’s quite difficult to see how you could quickly and markedly increase private donations from about 0.75% of GDP, which is about £10.5 billion, when you may be facing anything up to £5 billion of cuts. Foundations give a shade under £3 billion a year. It’s very hard to see how that can be scaled up, particularly for those that are endowed and want to protect their endowment. There is a question whether some foundations should behave as endowments, and they may want to spend down, but that’s not going to happen quickly, and the scale of the resources available varies. Charities will really struggle to deal with that maelstrom. Many will face-indeed many are facing-serious cutbacks in funding and services as a result.

Q306 Craig Whittaker: To what extent will they chose to fund previously funded Government projects on the whole?

Martin Brookes: If you talk to private donors, they will typically say, "I don’t like to step in where the Government have a responsibility," but the boundaries as to where the Government have a responsibility are very fuzzy, and, in practice, many private donors will step in. They don’t want to step in without a clear exit strategy-particularly wealthy donors-and they don’t want to plug a gap indefinitely, but if they can provide some bridging finance and see that the organisation has a plan to supplement and replace Government funding, they are more inclined to get involved. So they will say one thing-that they don’t want to do this-but they will often step in. However, to get access to that money, you need the contacts, and a lot of organisations simply don’t have the right contacts or the right fundraising capacity. There hasn’t been good investment in the last decade or more in fundraising quality. If you want to access wealthy donors, in particular, and you are a small youth charity, it’s very hard to do that without knowing where to begin.

Q307 Craig Whittaker: Are you saying that various businesses already exercise their corporate social responsibility as they should, or do you think they can step up to the mark more?

Martin Brookes: I deliberately left out businesses as a funding route, because corporate funding of charities directly is pretty weak and it is declining. It gets increasingly tied in with marketing, rather than with genuine philanthropy. A serious question could be asked of corporates, but it’s not reasonable at the moment, given the way they’ve behaved in the past decade or more, to expect them to plug the gap. Whether they should, in terms of a duty, is a different question, but it is very unlikely that they will.

Q308 Craig Whittaker: Can I ask you all whether charities and philanthropic donors are more likely to invest in projects targeting young people at risk, rather than in open-access provision on things such as youth centres?

Bill Eyres: At O2, we’ve tried to do both. The core of the Think Big programme is about giving young people who have got ideas for making change in their communities money, training and other support to make a difference. The way we split the scheme is that roughly 40% is open access. As to the other proportion, we work with around 35 national and local youth charities to refer young people through who come from more disadvantaged, vulnerable situations. We have very much taken a mixed approach in terms of how we manage that. We work with Teesside university to analyse the data on all the young people who come through. The interesting thing is that the young people who have come through the direct-access scheme, which you apply for through the website, come from some of the most deprived areas in the UK. Interestingly, the targeting of open access and the work we’re doing with charities is getting through to the most disadvantaged young people.

Rob Bell: We don’t have a policy line on this, but we tend to fund what other witnesses have called a universal progressive approach. That is not a fudged compromise answer, because what goes on is really important. We tend to fund work that allows young people to engage with organisations. "Engagement" is a loaded term. What "engagement" implies is an experience that captures young people’s interest and attention, that is profound and long lasting and that involves building up relationships. It also implies that there are routes from that experience into a much more engaged level of support, including referral to external organisations. A typical grant for us would have that sort of approach, where young people can progress, stay attached to the organisation and, if it is needed, get more specialist help, whether it is mentoring, support or referral.

Martin Brookes: The sort of private donors whom we work with and advise are typically those who are looking for impacts, are quite happy to be working with youth at risk and would prefer doing that kind of thing.

Louise Savell: Generally speaking, we see more demand among investors to work with the harder-to-reach groups than to fund generic open access services. At the point where you start looking at outcome-based payments of services and financing for that kind of contract, the reality is that while it is lovely to open up services to anyone who might want to go, in terms of the real public benefit, it comes at the more disadvantaged end of the spectrum, which is the reality. There is a question for Government at that point as to what they are prepared to pay for.

Q309 Craig Whittaker: Can I ask Rob Bell what programmes for young people remain for both O2 and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to invest in? What are the budgets?

Rob Bell: I manage one of four programmes at the Hamlyn Foundation. We spend around £3 million a year on responsive grant making. We are interested in the most disadvantaged and marginalised young people.

Q310 Craig Whittaker: Is that £3 million just your pot?

Rob Bell: It’s my pot. As a foundation, we are in the middle of a six-year strategy, and we aim to average a £20 million spend a year with the majority in the UK and a smaller amount in India. I have £3 million a year, and we typically make 30 grants a year. We have 140 relationships with grantees and tend to fund for two or three years upwards.

Bill Eyres: When we launched the programme last year, the initial commitment was to spend £5 million over three years. This year, we have raised our spend to £2 million and extended our commitment to 2015. That is not just in the UK, but in other places where O2 operates, which are Germany, Ireland, Slovakia and Czech Republic.

We believe passionately that it is about not only the money that we spend directly on the programme, but how we leverage in the skills of the business to work in partnership with our charities, the National Youth Agency and two other charity partners. For example, we have around 2,000 O2 people who volunteer. We are training O2 people to mentor young people’s projects, so this year, we are aiming to give backing and support to 900 projects that young people run.

We also have a second, higher level of support, which involves up to £2,500 for the young people, who also get intensive training. We have been piloting that training this year, and we have some of the most senior people in O2 going in and working with, training and developing young people. I think a lot of the spectrum should not be just on the money that goes into the charity partnership, but on what the business can bring in added value that is powerful.

Q311 Craig Whittaker: What do you think the Government and commissioners can learn from O2’s practice of putting funds directly into the hands of young people?

Bill Eyres: Our approach is that we believe in young people. Initially, we worked with a whole range of customer groups to find out the community issue that they were most concerned about. The issue that they were most concerned about, from young families through to silver surfers, was young people becoming disconnected from their communities. There was a real passion to make a difference. When we then analysed it and worked with a range of different NGOs, the thing that we needed to do was empower young people who were making a difference at the community level. Social action is about getting money and support into the hands of young people at the grass roots. Some of the work that we did, for example, with New Philanthropy Capital on one of the first young people we had through the scheme showed a social return on investment of about 10 times what we had invested in that young person. That is the learning.

Secondly, there tends to be a purchaser-provider split, so we take a partnership approach with the National Youth Agency, UK Youth and the Conservation Foundation. We do not look at matters in terms of providers and purchasers, where we hand over the money and do not think about it again. We work very closely together.

Q312 Craig Whittaker: A 10-times return is a pretty good return. How does that compare with what we currently get from the system? Does anyone know?

Martin Brookes: There are no great numbers on what can be got from the system, but it is not unusual for good interventions to give that sort of return. Those returns tend to be spread across various spending agencies and they are hard to consolidate, which is one of the issues with designing payment by results contracts. It is a nice return, but it is not an unusual return.

Q313 Neil Carmichael: Social investment and measuring outcomes is obviously an important area. Louise, do you think social impact bonds should be specifically targeted at certain things?

Louise Savell: Are people familiar with social impact bonds as a concept? Would it be helpful to give a quick background?

Neil Carmichael: I do not know.

Chair: If you can do that succinctly, go ahead.

Louise Savell: I shall do my best. It is a challenge. Social impact bonds are essentially a financing mechanism that sits behind an outcome-based contract. The Government pay for work, while investment is raised to pay for services that are provided up front on the basis that investments are repaid in line with the extent to which the outcomes that are targeted improve. That is broadly how they work.

Q314 Damian Hinds: Can you say the first bit again, Louise?

Louise Savell: The Government only pay for success. Essentially, improvements in the outcome trigger payment rather than traditional things of funding when revenue is provided up front. In many ways, the services offer good potential for social impact bonds. There are a range of experienced, high quality service providers in the sector. It is fairly well documented that, when youth services do not work or when youth services are not provided and youth unemployment, teen pregnancy and antisocial behaviour are high, there is a significant social consequence and public cost. All that stands in favour of outcome-based financing.

The matter is potentially tricky, as Martin has said, in terms of who pays for success. When we look at where the outcomes and benefits to the public sector accrue from improved youth outcomes, there are potential benefits to the Department for Work and Pensions of reduced benefit usage, increased tax take and to the health sector of reducing teen pregnancy and mental health issues, as well as to the Department for Education. The benefits are spread around the Government. There is a real question around if you were to use an outcome-based measure in the space, who would pay for outcomes?

Q315 Chair: The Treasury is the only answer to that. It would have to buy in, would it not? You need to convince it that it would genuinely see the savings in those Departments later on, and that it would be able to harvest them.

Louise Savell: Quite. There is certainly a role for central Government in pulling together funding strands from different Departments.

The other element when thinking about social impact bonds is whether enough is known about what works. The measurement of the outcomes themselves is not that difficult, so we could identify three or four outcomes that generate a public benefit or are tied to public sector savings either in the short or long term, such as youth employment, reducing teen pregnancy, improved outcomes and so on. Martin may have something to add, but where the challenge comes is whether sufficient data exist between specific interventions and their impact on those outcomes to build a robust investment case that would give investors sufficient confidence to put their money behind it.

Q316 Neil Carmichael: Your answer basically is that they are very good for a lot of Department areas, but you would not necessarily have a generic approach.

Louise Savell: It’s interesting, isn’t it? If you look at where there are data between interventions and outcomes, I think the two areas where the link is strongest are around youth employment and reduced offending. However, when you talk to the people in the sector, youth service providers such as Catch22 and others, feel very strongly, and I can totally see where they are coming from. Simply providing an intervention that addresses a single behaviour often doesn’t address the entire set of issues for a young person and get to the roots. Potentially there is a quite interesting model for the youth sector in saying, "Address the needs of the individual, but perhaps target toward geographic areas where there are significant inequalities of outcomes, rather than specific issue areas, and then measure perhaps two or three outcomes that would demonstrate real success."

Q317 Neil Carmichael: This question about measurement is really important, isn’t it? Are we thinking about the number of people who go through a door into a facility-which is one way of measuring-or the assessment of improvement in quality of life, and so on? We need to know what measuring system we are going to use and how effective it will be. Can you comment on that?

Louise Savell: To a certain extent, I think that it largely depends on what the organisation or entity putting up the success payments is prepared to pay for. If the Government were sufficiently convinced that the number of heads coming through the door of a particular youth centre, or the number of individuals who were provided with a certain literacy course, was indicative of future benefit to the public sector, then arguably they would be prepared to pay for it. My guess is that they probably would not. They would probably be more likely to pay for reduced youth unemployment, improved school outcomes and reduced antisocial behaviour-areas where there are real, tangible links to public sector budgets that could potentially be cash. But it’s up for discussion, I think.

Q318 Neil Carmichael: The obvious problem is that a lot of the social impacts one would want to achieve involve stopping things happening, so let us examine that. On, for example, pregnancy, are we suggesting that people who are not pregnant by the time they are 18, let’s say, pop in for a payment? It is a ridiculous concept put like that, but it relates to the issue of things not happening.

Louise Savell: Absolutely. Demonstrating a counter-factual-that if you hadn’t done something then there would have been a negative consequence-is the key challenge, I think.

Q319 Chair: What recommendations would you make Louise? We take evidence and then write reports. We make recommendations, and the Government have to respond. So we are trying to not only have a greater understanding, but to then make recommendations on concrete actions that make better outcomes more likely. At least, we hope that that will happen.

Louise Savell: There are a number of considerations when you think about outcome metrics in the youth space. The main one is what your baseline is going to be. You could look at a cohort baseline for that particular area, where I think there are particular challenges around the cuts that are happening, and question marks would have to be raised around whether a baseline based on historical precedent is really valid. Alternatively, you could look to benchmark against other geographic areas, which would have its own challenges. In Peterborough, we are matching every individual in our target cohort who is leaving prison with 10 other individuals, matched according to demographics and offending history from the police national computer. That is a very carefully linked one. Around teen pregnancy that gets harder, because they presumably have no history of getting pregnant.

Q320 Neil Carmichael: The Ministry of Justice is going down that route, isn’t it? That is slightly easier, because something has already happened-the person has been in prison, so the idea is to stop them going again. You know that you are dealing with somebody who has already had difficulties. Perhaps that needs to be factored in.

Since we are short of time I shall move on to my next question, which is to Rob. What kind of criteria do you use for the allocation of your money, in the context of measurement, and so forth that I have been discussing with Louise?

Rob Bell: We have very specific criteria. We are interested in organisations that work with the most marginalised. These are often the sort of young people with whom attempting to work to generate any sort of positive outcome is expensive and complicated. It is sometimes difficult for organisations to work with those young people with statutory money, because it’s much more difficult and time-consuming to show outcomes. We work in that area of this overall picture. We are interested in organisations that try to innovate, to develop or transplant ideas and make them work successfully in practice. We work with organisations that are willing to develop some sort of metrics to show success. Crucially, we want to-

Q321 Chair: You wouldn’t invest unless they were committed to that, and you would always set out to show that-

Rob Bell: We would. Where we started-where Martin and I slightly disagreed-is that I think organisations have an appetite to do that, but lack the capacity, skills and resources. Organisations such as the NPC help them with that. Funders can-and, increasingly, we will-compartmentalise grants so that parts of them are on research and evaluation, and often a bit on business development. We do as much as we can to help them understand-

Q322 Chair: How much does that cost? One of the issues when you talk to people is that you want to lambast them for not coming forward with better evidence of the impact, but when you look at the mechanics of what they have to do in a small organisation, it looks terribly expensive in relation to what they’re trying to do. Have you found ways of doing it cost-effectively and not too obtrusively?

Rob Bell: We have developed some work which Martin might want to outline, but as a rule of thumb, we would always make sure there was some evaluation element within anything we fund, and we’d prefer it to be independent. We broadly follow a sort of civil service model, so it’s around 5% or maybe up to 10%, depending on the case. We always make sure there’s some resource to do this work.

Q323 Neil Carmichael: So you’re really keen to establish a dialogue, aren’t you? That must help us to frame the ways in which you are measuring things, and it’s going to be easy, too, to consider impact later.

Rob Bell: Yes. The challenging thing as a funder with a cohort of grants-every organisation is in a similar position-is that what you end up with is a story that says a certain percentage of organisations achieve the outcomes we agreed and others fail, but they don’t necessarily stack up to the same sorts of outcomes. There are different approaches to measuring change, and different types of measure.

Martin Brookes: A calculation like that 10:1 social return on investment can be quite expensive and time-consuming. It usually costs tens of thousands of pounds to do a bespoke calculation like that for an organisation, which is prohibitively expensive for many organisations. The prize, I think, is to get to the point where there are off-the-shelf methods that a charity can just buy in cheaply. The thing that we’ve developed and rolled out with Rob’s support is measuring well-being and different aspects of teenagers’ happiness. That we can apply for about £300-

Chair: We will come to that, I hope.

Martin Brookes: Right. So proper social return on investment is an expensive, time-consuming and resource-intensive process. The original research on the social impact, or one of the inputs into that, cost, in cash terms, about £30,000. Had St Giles Trust had to pay for it, it would have cost them about £70,000. That’s a lot of money up front to pay for suits and accountants.

Q324 Neil Carmichael: The NPC has commented that results in the sector are hard to materialise and measure. Do you think that this is something that might distract or discourage people from getting involved in investing?

Martin Brookes: It shouldn’t do, and I think smart and intelligent funders, like the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, O2 and others get that. The results can take time to materialise, and there’s a clear and interesting pattern about how results can dip after a few months of engagement with children before they really show a benefit. That’s quite difficult to get your head around. I don’t think it’s particularly complicated for donors or investors-however they regard themselves-to understand, and I don’t think it should be a factor that inhibits them. I think the lack of evidence-the inability to evidence what you do and say, "Here is how it is. It’s a bit more complicated than a straight line, but there is evidence of it", rather than being able to say, "Instinctively, we know we’re helping children"-is more of an inhibiting factor.

Bill Eyres: With a larger social programme, such as that that we are running, our view has definitely been that if you are going to manage it effectively, you have to measure, so we work with Teesside university on a wide range of different measures.

Q325 Chair: How much do you spend on that?

Bill Eyres: We spend between 5% and 10% of our budget, which is in line with what Rob is saying. It is the right principle-we find that Teesside university provides very valuable feedback on how we can develop the programme to be more effective because they are constantly measuring it with young people. It is non-negotiable, and it is critical that you are measuring. I agree with Martin that you have to develop suitable mechanisms for charities with smaller budgets, but it is still a key principle that it has to be a non-negotiable part of your programme.

Q326 Neil Carmichael: Do you think that the commitment from a charity or a trust is different from that of Government, in terms of funding and length of commitment? Why is that, if it is the case?

Rob Bell: I guess that statutory funding has different imperatives behind it and different lines of accountability and a large part of that is around service delivery. We are not quite in the same space; at the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, we look at organisational integrity and viability and those sorts of things. In part, we support projects that we think are innovative and may lead to more sustainable funding streams, but we also help in a small way, sometimes through extra help, non-monetary assistance or bringing in external people to build capacity for the organisation to compete more effectively.

Q327 Damian Hinds: I hope that one area we will focus on in the report of this inquiry will be about how you can fund things-the extent to which you can do payment by results and the extent to which you can use these new financial instruments, such as social impact bonds. I want to put a hypothesis to you, because I am sceptical whether it works in the area we are talking about. I wish it did, but I am worried that it just can’t. I have scribbled down six challenges, the first four of which strike me as central to any payment-by-results scheme and a further two if you start introducing social impact bonds.

The first is the difficulty in defining the audience, especially when people may drift in and out of it. The second is isolating the impact of any particular intervention that a service might do when lots of things are happening in these people’s lives. The third is identifying a control group to compare that impact against. The fourth is having measures of success, particularly in the interim-we may be able to project that over a person’s lifetime, although there are all sorts of effects, but what is the measure in a definable, realistic time frame? Those first four, I suggest, apply to any payment-by-results scheme and a further two seem to me to be added when you introduce social impact bonds. The first of those is the fact that savings come from many different budgets and there is a danger with that of double counting. Fourth is that-

Chair: Sixth.

Damian Hinds: I am so sorry-I got carried away. The sixth, or second, depending on which list we are counting on-and if you take one from the other, you will get fourth-is that savings are a cash flow over a very long time horizon, so even if savings are made, they may be made in 15 or 20 years’ time, when there has been two or three changes of Government. I realise that this does not follow the pattern of what we would normally count as a question to the panel, but I wanted to put that analysis. Are the big challenges more or less right? Does that analysis suggest that, in something such as youth work, you are at the extreme end of challenging in making payment by results and, particularly, social impact bonds work?

Chair: Does that analysis prompt the question that it shouldn’t be at the youth work level that you have payment by results, but somewhere further up-the local authority might have a payment-by-results model and within that, in order to deliver a broader range of indicators, they have confidence, they have metrics, but they will invest because they think it will help them deliver? That is my way of answering that, instead of letting you do it.

Louise Savell: Yes; I think that you are absolutely right. My instinct is that if payment by results is going to work in this sector, it would be by funding a number of different interventions and organisations and bringing those organisations together to deliver impact at a wider area than the audience that one particular service may be reaching. You have probably identified the six main challenges. To be honest, the control group issue can probably be worked around by using cohorts and finding comparator areas. I think that the measures of success are probably interim measures of success, which would be linked to current and future value to the public sector.

Q328 Damian Hinds: Are there reliable or at least reasonably reliable predictors? Let us take an extreme case. You have a sort of ne’er-do-well, who eventually will turn into a loving father, holding down a job, contributing greatly to society and all the rest of it. In an ideal world, you can spot something at the age of 16 that predicts that. I realise that you will never get to that extreme. But how good are those interim measures? Or what are they?

Chair: We don’t have time for that. We’ll have to stick to the issue.

Louise Savell: Maybe we can talk offline about that.

The bigger question is who pays from the public sector? And then there is the cash-flow issue. You are absolutely right. For a social impact bond model, that is a real question and it links to the measures of success, because what you might be saying is that an interim metric is needed as the trigger for payment, in order to bring investors in within a reasonable time frame, but the public sector will have to take a view as to whether it is confident enough about future cash flows to pay on that basis.

Rob Bell: Can I add a comment about this social impact bond? Young people have holistic needs, which you have heard about. Those needs vary over time, and they are interrelated. I think that these bonds are very useful in some respects, and if they are effective they ought to generate more cash for organisations to do the work that they are doing. However, there is a real danger that you see the bond as a disciplinary tool, so it enhances the performances of organisations that are not performing effectively enough at the moment. It’s not necessarily the case that that follows on, because all sorts of different types of funding help organisations to do what they do very well. A social impact bond, by its very nature, does not necessarily make an organisation transform its work to be more effective.

Lots of our grantees recognise that they do some things particularly well. They help young people in some aspects of their lives very well, and they would like to be able to focus on that work and partner up more with other organisations in their local area, so that young people get a better service as they move between different types of specialist support. That can be done through more enlightened funding or by loosening up funding strictures to allow organisations to practise in that way. Many of them talk about it as "network delivery".

Damian Hinds: I think that politicians quite often get excited-I get excited-about the potential of social impact bonds, where we think they can work. I am not so excited about them in terms of forcing improvement, although it is a great thing if they can do that as well, but more in terms of the reallocation of funding. That means that you have, somewhat away from the politics, a group of very bright people deciding where social finance is best invested, going after those things that deliver the best returns. That is actually very interesting.

Chair: This is going to make a great seminar.

Damian Hinds: I am so sorry, Chair. I will stop now.

Q329 Tessa Munt: I just want to clarify something. Rob, you were talking about the 5% check, which I absolutely understand. That is a drill-down exercise to check thoroughly that everything is working in the way that you thought it would. You said something different, that it was 5% of your expenditure-or whatever-that probably went on evaluation. What percentage of activity does that interrogate?

Bill Eyres: That covers all the young people who go through the programme.

Q330 Tessa Munt: Do you evaluate everything in depth?

Bill Eyres: Yes. It includes a range of different things. So there are quantitative measures on the projects and there is the number of young people involved. However, there is also more qualitative stuff about where the young people were in terms of confidence and skills at the beginning of the project, and where they ended up. In addition, we measure community impact and we look at the impact for our O2 volunteers, who are a part of the scheme. It is quite an intense process.

Q331 Chair: We are obviously interested in the measurement, in order that the case can be made. We would be very grateful if you could produce a short note on what you do and how you do it. That obviously goes for you too, Louise. Thank you.

Q332 Pat Glass: Louise, has the investment in the first bonds come from corporate sources or charitable sources?

Louise Savell: For investment in the social impact bond, we had 17 investors. They were a mix of individuals of high net worth, and charitable trusts and foundations, of which-

Pat Glass: Sorry. Could you say that again? You went very quickly.

Louise Savell: Sorry. There was a mix of individuals of high net worth-

Martin Brookes: Rich people.

Louise Savell: Rich people, yes-I was trying to avoid that-and charitable trusts and foundations.

Q333 Pat Glass: The balance within those 17 investors?

Louise Savell: The balance is towards charitable trusts and foundations.

Pat Glass: A couple of rich people and a lot of charities.

Louise Savell: Four or five, and then some charitable trusts and foundations, of which, I should say, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation is one.

Rob Bell: A junior partner.

Q334 Pat Glass: Very briefly, Rob and Martin, can you explain to me the well-being index that you are developing? Would it be useful in something like youth services, and how is it different from what is already out there?

Rob Bell: Martin is the best technician around this. I can say why we’re interested in it and why we’ve tried to help.

Martin Brookes: To preface it, one of the things about payment by results and social impact bonds that I am uneasy about is that they basically value things that you can put a monetary value on. There are lots of aspects of a child’s life that are about self-esteem, well-being and resilience, and that don’t necessarily deliver a financial value or saving to the public purse, but are things that we want to improve for children.

We spent more than two years developing a simple, off-the-shelf tool that charities and schools can use to assess and track the different aspects of a child’s well-being. It has been piloted with charities such as Barnardo’s, and a whole bunch of schools. It looks at things such as resilience, self-esteem, and so on, in a very rigorous and robust way that is also very practicable for organisations to do. It is now going online with support from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. We are going to roll this out across whoever wants it, basically.

We think it addresses very clearly the problem of how expensive it can be for organisations to invest in evaluation and measurement. It provides a method that can be used and applied consistently across organisations, so you could do comparisons. I would say that it is very relevant to the sector, and lots of charities that we have worked with in developing it are in that field. It was very expensive to develop though, but the marginal cost to then roll it out is tiny.

Q335 Chair: Can you spell out a little bit more about the substance of it?

Martin Brookes: It is literally a series of questions that takes a bunch of scales that have been used and developed by psychologists and psychiatrists over the years, which are all very academically rigorous, and distils them into a 10 to 15-minute questionnaire for children to answer. It is about how they feel about different things-their friends, families, themselves, their sense of self-worth, and so on. It has now been road-tested with thousands of children to check that it is robust and works. We ran focus groups on language and so on, so it is a very good, solid, reliable and robust tool, because we were able to put a lot of investment into it up front.

The return from that is that we can roll it out and get charities, youth groups and others to use it, and to take a temperature check on whether they are really helping children. For example, a charity that takes children on an Outward Bound course can work out whether it is really having an impact. That is a fairly light-touch intervention. A charity that works in depth with children over many months, with youth workers, can also work out whether it is helping, and they can compare themselves across organisations too. That is quite an important thing to do.

Q336 Pat Glass: It’s online now?

Martin Brookes: It’s online in a sort of hidden location at the moment. I would be very happy to send you some more information about it. There are charities using it now, and we are starting to talk to others who may then take it on. We’ll roll it out much more widely later this year with the support of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, and others who invest in us.

Q337 Pat Glass: My background is in education, and for years I have worked with people who have said, "You cannot possibly measure the cost of our intervention." How will you get things like the youth and education services, who are not keen on outcomes-based measures, to pick this up and use it?

Martin Brookes: I think we will say to them that it has been developed with teachers, schools and charities. It has input from them, and children themselves. It is very academically rigorous. You may object to outcomes-based stuff because it distorts what you do, or because it only values things you can put a monetary value on. However, if you care about tracking the self-esteem of your children and whether you are improving their resilience, whether their sense of their relationships with their family and community are improving-

Chair: Every loving parent should be applying your well-being test, and the more regularly they do it the more loving they are.

Martin Brookes: For various technical reasons it is not really applicable to individual children. You have to group children to get meaningful results. Every teacher, every head teacher or every charity working with children who cares about those aspects-

Q338 Chair: The Prime Minister has often talked about general well-being as opposed to national wealth as being of value. Should we have that in the league tables? There is the English Bac and every other faddish new measure of the Government, but should we also have the well-being of the children?

Martin Brookes: One of the things that Ofsted is supposed to assess schools on is well-being. If you look at the way it does that, it is more about child protection than genuinely about well-being. Child protection is important, but there is a whole aspect about the well-being of the school. Charities that use it in schools as well as schools themselves say that it gives them useful data on how well they are doing.

Q339 Chair: All too often people talk about childhood and young people purely in instrumental terms about what they will do later. It is today that counts.

Martin Brookes: This asks they how they feel in a proper way.

Q340 Pat Glass: Would this tool identify for Ofsted or for parents a school that is seemingly high achieving but which has an almost endemic bullying culture from the staff to the children?

Martin Brookes: Yes, and we have used it directly with charities that address bullying.

Q341 Pat Glass: Send me the details please.

Martin Brookes: We have applied it in one school where it was pretty clear that the children had good self esteem, it was a really good school and the charity did not need to be there so it pulled out.

Rob Bell: It has a diagnostic function so it lets organisations look more closely at where there may be something working well. Then there is another task which is to go in and explore more closely and how they respond to that is key.

Chair: Thank you very much. Because I am too indulgent I will give Damian one last question.

Q342 Damian Hinds: The tool sounds very interesting and useful. May I ask two quick questions about it? First, what is its academic provenance and has it been peer reviewed, tested and kicked around internationally as well as in this country? Secondly, why has nobody else mentioned it to us?

Martin Brookes: I cannot answer the latter question. It has had an academic panel and steering group assess it. It has been rigorously peer reviewed. All of the questions come from existing measures. That is a crucial part of this. It distils all the very well developed academic measures that are difficult to apply in a school setting or a charity and tests whether you are taking enough elements of each to get sensible answers. There has been about £100,000 of development work and two to three years in development. I don’t know why no one has mentioned it to you. Perhaps it is because we are deliberately not marketing it. This is the first time that we are talking about it fairly publicly, but people like Rob and others know about it.

Rob Bell: At some point we and other funders would like to be able to say, "We would like you to use this tool if it is helpful to you", and they may use it alongside other measures around more material outcomes. We would like to be able to offer that and we think it offers good value and could become self-financing.

Martin Brookes: If you want, I am happy to do you a brief note on it.

Q343 Chair: Thank you very much indeed. Thank you all for giving us evidence this morning. It has been most useful.

Examination of Witness

Witness: Paul Oginsky, Government Adviser on the National Citizen Service, gave evidence.

Q344 Chair: Good morning, Mr Oginsky. After our packed panels, you are sitting alone. Welcome. You have been advising David Cameron on youth policy for more than four years and yet here we are in late March 2011 and the Government still have not articulated a youth policy. Why not?

Paul Oginsky: Last week there was a youth summit which Tim Martin led on, but he brought together people from all the different Departments. It very much called for young people and people from the voluntary and private sector to say, "Look, we want to know what you think works in terms of working with young people." We have designed a flagship programme called national citizen service. A lot of time and effort has gone into that over the past four years. I haven’t listened to the rest of the inquiry. I stress that it is the flagship programme; it is not the whole fleet. We need organisations doing the great work that they do before national citizen service because that is aimed at 16 year-olds.

Q345 Chair: There was a summit last week and we are into 2011. Why have the Government not come forward with a youth policy before now?

Paul Oginsky: In part, they want to hear what this inquiry says. But they also want to take their time and get it right. They will be making a long-term policy announcement soon. They do not want to rush because they have not set a time scale.

Chair: You certainly can’t be accused of that.

Paul Oginsky: Thank you. It will probably be around summertime when they will announce a more thorough and cross-departmental youth policy.

Q346 Neil Carmichael: Hello. What is the remit of your role in terms of advising Government? Is it just focused on national citizen service?

Paul Oginsky: My title is the Government adviser on national citizen service. However, that is a flagship policy, so other youth services are meant to be able to link to that to give a message to the rest of the youth sector as to what the Government see as important. Therefore, for four or five years, I have been going around asking people what they think is important and how they think national citizen service should be shaped. That includes young people themselves.

Q347 Neil Carmichael: Could you describe to us what you think the big society is in the context of youth services?

Paul Oginsky: This is a key question. First, I don’t think the big society is a new thing. When you go around and talk about the big society, some people get quite annoyed because they’ve been doing it for years. Everyone who I meet in Government accepts that. It is not new; it is just a way of signalling what the Government think is important. It is about people taking responsibility for their communities and for their lives. That has been happening for years. The Government want to clear away things such as red tape, and they want to encourage people to get involved in their community, take responsibility and get involved in civic action.

In terms of youth policy, we should think of a spectrum. At one end, young people are doing that and are engaging in society. They are able to do that, build relationships, make decisions and feel responsible, perhaps through working with adults on a level. That’s big society’s dream. At the other end, there are young who are unable to do that and are not engaged with society-perhaps they are being antisocial or they are just apathetic. We are trying to move young people towards the other end of the spectrum

Q348 Neil Carmichael: Where does national citizen service fit in with that concept?

Paul Oginsky: National citizen service is a personal and social development programme.

Q349 Chair: If I could cut you off there, we will come to further explanation of that in a moment. Neil, can you ask something else?

Q350 Neil Carmichael: I’m sorry. I will ask a question that I presume somebody isn’t going to ask. What is your definition of personal and social development?

Paul Oginsky: I’ve watched all your inquiries on the internet. It is interesting that still in 2011-I’ve been in this game for over 25 years-people find it hard to answer a question such as, "What is youth work?" That spectrum view is useful. Young people who are able to make decisions in relationships and build them in a healthy way, are kind of on that path. But for young people who are not able to do that, we need to be more interventional. I define personal and social development as a process by which we learn from our experiences and become more effective in our decisions and our relationships. So decisions is personal, and social is relationships.

Q351 Neil Carmichael: Right. Where does the national citizen service fit in that context?

Paul Oginsky: It’s a personal and social development programme. The ambition is that at 16 every single young person will have the opportunity to take part in a personal and social development programme. In that way it is universal, but it also has to be targeted because some young people will not volunteer for it because it is a voluntary programme. That is why we need to be interventionist with some young people and encourage them to volunteer.

Q352 Neil Carmichael: How does that differ in terms of existing youth sector activities?

Paul Oginsky: I don’t think it differs. What it offers is a framework which all youth organisations can play a part in, either preparing young people for the National Citizen Service or picking them up afterwards, or contributing to the National Citizen Service itself. It is only a framework that we got from the sector. We went around and asked everyone, "What do you think works?" They said social mix, getting young people involved in their community, residential work, supporting the transition to adulthood. That is what we’ve built, and now they can feed into it.

Interestingly, the two criticisms I’ve heard when I go around are, "Why are you always trying to do something new?", and, "This is nothing new." It’s not new. What is new is the framework, which allows everyone to contribute.

Q353 Craig Whittaker: Good morning, Paul. You mentioned several times that this is the flagship. In fact, I think you said that it is the flagship, not the whole fleet. As of 16 February this year, only 1,000 young people from a potential 600,000 had signed up to the service. What conclusions do you draw from that?

Paul Oginsky: Actually, this year, 2011, is the first pilot year of the National Citizen Service, and there are places for 11,000 young people initially. We anticipate that it will be full and perhaps even over-subscribed. We have 12 youth organisations leading on the pilots, and they are just now opening their doors. I think that only now as we speak are young people becoming more and more aware of NCS. The important thing is to get the social mix right. It is not good enough just to fill the places. We have to get the social mix, and that means hard work, often by targeting people and encouraging those who would not put their name down to put their name down.

Q354 Craig Whittaker: You think that many of the 8,000 who showed an interest will sign up, along with the 1,000 who have already done so. Is that what you’re saying?

Paul Oginsky: The 1,000 you are referring to were involved in some forerunner stuff before the election, which some charities did based on the model. That was really useful to us, and we learned from it and fed it back to young people to see what they thought. This is the first year that we are doing some NCS work properly.

Q355 Craig Whittaker: We saw Doug Nicholls earlier; he argued that as £300 million starts to disappear from the 365 days a year youth service, suddenly £370 million emerges to fund these summer projects. Will this scheme replace other youth services?

Paul Oginsky: So far, the Government have allocated only £15 million. This is a pilot year, and it needs to work in order for us to be able to secure any other money. The money has been secured by the Cabinet Office from the Treasury, so it is additional money. It is not money that has been saved from other services. In that way, I really want to stress that this is money going to the youth sector, to do the kind of work that they told us they want to do. Hopefully, if it works-it will be thoroughly evaluated-we can convince the Government to put a lot more money into it, which is the figure that you are quoting. It is money going to a common reference point that everyone can share, but hopefully it will not take away from the current funding.

Having listened to the other speakers, I would like to take a moment to say that cuts do not always mean savings. I would like to stress that to councils as well. Often, some of the cuts that they make to youth services will cost them money in the long run.

Q356 Chair: Could you clarify exactly what money the Government have promised the National Citizen Service? We have figures of hundreds of millions.

Paul Oginsky: The only money that they have announced so far is £15 million, which is for 2011. The 2012 allocation has not been announced, although they are intending to have 2012 as a second pilot year. They have not announced it yet because they are testing the model, and saying to people, "Okay, what would this cost? If you are going to run this programme as designed, how much would it cost?" What we are finding is that people come back with quite varied amounts of what it will cost.

Q357 Chair: I thought they had announced in the spending review £37 million for 2012.

Paul Oginsky: I thought that the Minister was going to announce that, and I didn’t want to steal his thunder.

Q358 Craig Whittaker: Is young people’s development best served by a short one-off programme, or do you think it is better with an ongoing offer of support? Do you really think that young people at 16 are going to give up their summer holidays, just after finishing their exams?

Paul Oginsky: There are two questions. We need to inspire young people to be part of their community ongoing, so I do not see NCS as a programme and then it stops. It’s about helping them to think about society, and helping them to think about their contribution to society ad infinitum. It also means that they can come back on the programme and help our staff and so on in future years.

Eventually, as NCS grows, it will become part of the culture of Britain-something that everyone will have done. In 10 or 15 years’ time people will be turning round to each other and saying, "Where did you do your national citizen service?" One of the great things about it is that it’s not a targeted programme, so it does not stigmatise young people; it is for all young people, and therefore it’s for all us adults to encourage young people to come on it. This year, 2011, will be the hardest year to recruit because we do not have 10,000 young people who’ve done it and who can help us to recruit and get young people on it. We know that young people are the best recruiters for these things.

Do I think that young people will put their names down for it? Absolutely. We said to young people, "Why would you put your name down for it, because it’s voluntary?" The key thing that they said was, "If the staff are good, we’ll be there." That’s our key challenge, getting the right staff.

Q359 Pat Glass: Can I talk to you about the financing of the National Citizen Service? We have been given a number of figures; we’ve heard that it’s £15 million this year and £37 million next year. We’ve been given a figure of £370 million, and possibly, if 600,000 children choose to be involved, it may be £740 million.

You said that you do not want to see this is as a replacement for what is happening in youth services now, but the fact is that this one-off will cost more than the annual youth service budget collectively across the country. Is that justified, at a time when we’re seeing youth services disappearing? This morning, we heard of 65% or 70% cuts in Gloucestershire’s youth services. NCS is six weeks for middle-class children whose parents can afford to have holidays anyway. Is this really justified, and a good use of money?

Paul Oginsky: These are important points. I stress that if we take NCS at this point and say, "Let’s not do it. Let’s put it in the bin," we will still face all the cuts that we’re getting at the moment. However, this is an opportunity to show Government, because it will be so thoroughly evaluated and it is very high profile, what personal social development programmes can do. By helping the social mix, we’ll get a more cohesive society and help young people to be involved in society. We heard from the previous panel about £1 getting a £10 return; this is our opportunity, I think, for the people who believe in this kind of work to demonstrate what it can do. If we can do that, it isn’t going to be taking money; it’s going to be bringing in money. We can demonstrate the value of this work.

Q360 Pat Glass: Is this not already happening in things like the Duke of Edinburgh’s scheme? My grand-daughter goes off to pack week with the Brownies. Is this not already happening for many children? We are losing money from targeted services that are desperate for support.

Paul Oginsky: I stress again that we are not taking money to do this; we are bringing money to the sector. It’s not the Government who are going to be running this; it will be people out there-the ones that you’ve mentioned. We went out there and asked people what works, and we worked closely with people like the Duke of Edinburgh’s scheme. They work with 13 to 25-year-olds. This is a common reference at 16 for everybody. They said that they’re helping people to get on the programme, and also picking people to do the Duke of Edinburgh’s scheme after the programme.

If we can get it right, and I believe that this is our golden opportunity, it is a chance to show the whole country what this kind of work can achieve. It is a flagship in that way, but it’s not the whole fleet. The Duke of Edinburgh’s scheme has been a real support in development, and so has the Prince’s Trust and Fairbridge and the rest.

Q361 Pat Glass: If I can come back to the financing, finally. We are in very difficult times. Although you say that NCS is not taking money from other sectors, the fact is that it is public money, and there is only one pot of money. If it is going to the NCS, it is coming from other areas. You said that it is not new money. Is it coming from the early intervention grant?

Paul Oginsky: No, it’s going to be new money. The money at the moment is being run by the Cabinet Office from the Treasury and is invested in the sector. In future, the funding will come to the Education Department, but only if we can show the value of it. That is why it is getting so thoroughly examined in order to prove it. I really think that this is an opportunity.

One of the key things-I know what you say about the Duke of Edinburgh’s-is that the programme is not owned by anyone. I am not Conservative or of any political leaning, but the Government have asked us what works in this area. Many people you have spoken to over the weeks have contributed. We have said, "This is what works", and the Government said, "Okay. We’ll invest in that." I don’t feel that it is owned by this Government, or any Government, or by the sector or young people; it is a community opportunity. In this country we don’t do good transition to adulthood; we aren’t very good at getting young people involved in the community or social mixing. If we can crack that and help young people to make better decisions and build better relationships, that would benefit every department. Which department wouldn’t benefit from people making better decisions and building better relationships? That will save us so much money that it will well outweigh the costs of the scheme. In its report, the Prince’s Trust showed £10 billion as the cost of exclusion, and this week, Catch22 showed a £3.8 billion cost from young people not being involved in enterprise.

Q362 Pat Glass: If as a result of this, we get a National Citizen Service, but youth services across the country disappear, will that be justified?

Paul Oginsky: Youth services being cut across the country is heartbreaking, but I think it is indicative of the fact that people have not understood their value. I think this, as a flagship, will help explain to them the value.

Pat Glass: I hope so.

Paul Oginsky: I hope so too.

Q363 Chair: Will there be any cost to those participating?

Paul Oginsky: We have left that open to the providers. Some of them thought that there must be a cost so that young people show some commitment, and other providers thought that any cost would be exclusive. It is a pilot. Let’s see how it goes. Some providers are making a nominal charge of £25, others are saying nothing, and some maybe a little more.

Chair: How much is a little bit more?

Paul Oginsky: One hundred pounds. I’d like to see how that goes. I have my own opinion on whether we should be charging for this now. I think young people make a commitment by signing up to a scheme that is meant to be challenging. If any of us were to go away on a six-week course, where you mix with people you wouldn’t normally mix with and take challenges you wouldn’t normally take, that would be a commitment enough, really.

I understand that as part of the Government’s philosophy, they do not want to fund this ad infinitum, indefinitely-coming back to your point. They have said, "Let’s see everyone in society contribute." It is the idea of the big society. A lot of philanthropists are able to contribute to NCS. Organisations such as the ones you have interviewed today have said that they will offer support with staff through their CSR programme and have offered their buildings. It is an opportunity for us all to galvanise around our young people.

Q364 Tessa Munt: The moment you stick a £25 price tag on it, or £100, you are up in the realms of the middle classes. My personal opinion is that that is completely exclusive. You were talking about cracking the social mix. How are you going to crack it and stop the programme being flooded by the middle classes?

Paul Oginsky: As I said, it’s a framework, and we’re trying to build a relationship with the people providing the service so that it’s based on trust. I know a lot of the organisations that are providing it this year, and they have been doing this kind of work for years. They are not out to run off with the Government’s money.

Q365 Tessa Munt: There is no such thing as the Government’s money; it is taxpayers’ money all the time. I am exercised by the same thing as Pat, and probably other people round the table. You strip out one part and whack it into this pot, but I’m not sure how your framework will pull into this process young people who don’t have the opportunities that the middle class has.

Paul Oginsky: You are right to say that it is taxpayers’ money, and these people aren’t looking to run off with it. But we do not want to say, "You’ve got to have two people of this kind and three people of that kind." We are saying that we want a social mix.

Q366 Tessa Munt: How will you get it?

Paul Oginsky: The charities on the ground that are delivering this are confident that they can do it, and we’ll find out this year. Craig was talking about the forerunners to this. The forerunners were the Young Adult Trust and the Challenge network. They found that the difficulty wasn’t getting young people from tough housing areas and people who were disengaged. Actually, there was a disproportionate number of people on last year’s course who were young black women from housing estates. We have to make sure it’s everyone and that it’s a proper social mix. I think we’ll all be surprised about who comes forward and who says they will do it. But, for me, that will happen because it has street cred. Some young people have to turn round to each other and say, "That’s brilliant. You want to get on it." Then we won’t be able to stop them.

Q367 Craig Whittaker: Four years go, before I became an MP, I attended the launch of the service up in Preston with David Cameron. Am I right in saying that the initial plan was for the Government-if the Conservatives became the Government, and now they have-to pay a fee to a charity of the child’s choice once they had finished? Has that now gone out of the window?

Paul Oginsky: I think it has moved on. What we’re looking to do now is set up alumni. Once young people come out of the programme, they are alumni, so they can stay connected with each other-perhaps through the internet, Facebook and that kind of stuff-and be presented with opportunities. When we asked employers what they were looking for in young people, a lot of them said that, first and foremost, they were looking for young people with interpersonal skills. There is an opportunity for young people and employers. There are also opportunities such as the International Citizens Service, where young people can go abroad. We might be able to develop things so that people can go on and get a bursary towards something else. That might depend on philanthropy.

Q368 Craig Whittaker: I think the initial plan was that once a young person had finished the service to the community, the Government would make a donation to a charity on their behalf. That was my understanding of the initial plan four years ago. Are you now saying that’s changed? That would have been a good way of bringing in people from all different backgrounds.

Paul Oginsky: But I don’t think people from all different backgrounds would need that really. It might be more targeted at young people who particularly needed it once they were motivated and up and running. Something we’ve got to avoid is what I refer to as the astronaut syndrome, where young people go on this amazing course through the summer for six weeks, but then they’re just back in their home area. We have to make sure that the alumni scheme really works. It will be the alumni and the opportunities that are presented that help to get young people on the programme.

Q369 Tessa Munt: We’ll have to stop using the word "alumni", because that’s exclusive in itself, and it’s not going to be understood by most young people. If you say alumni, they won’t have a clue. To go back to an earlier point, you’ve got 1,000 people signed up already, haven’t you?

Paul Oginsky: This year?

Tessa Munt: Yes.

Paul Oginsky: Not yet. We’re looking to get 11,000 people on the programme this year.

Q370 Tessa Munt: How are you going to measure their class?

Paul Oginsky: Measure their class?

Tessa Munt: Yes. You’re telling me that it’s not going to be just the middle class. How will you know? How will that happen?

Paul Oginsky: In the same way as you could say we’re going to measure their ethnicity or religion. We’ve brought in an evaluation organisation, which will tell us whether we are achieving what we say we have achieved. With the help of philanthropy, we are paying to get that evaluation right. It’s going to be long term, over two years, and then for a further nine months to see how young people are coping, whether they were the right social mix and whether the scheme helped them with transition to adulthood. The Government are serious about evaluating this before they put in any more money.

Q371 Tessa Munt: The other thing you said was that if it has the right staff, it’s really cool and they’ll just come flocking in. What skills will you be asking for and looking for in those staff?

Paul Oginsky: I have spoken about personal and social development. One of the key things that we are looking for are people who can help young people with guided reflection. It is not enough to run an activity, whatever that activity is, and ask, "Did you enjoy it? Go back to your dorms." It needs staff with the ability to do personal and social development. It is a skill set.

Q372 Tessa Munt: How do we measure that?

Paul Oginsky: It is about inquiring into what young people got out of it. Where did the fight break out? How did they resolve the issues? How will they use the skills in future? Picking up on earlier discussions, that is a particular skill set and it is more interventional. You are making a key point; that is what we need to develop as we go on with the National Citizen Service.

Q373 Tessa Munt: It is a bit late though, isn’t it? This is happening now. I am asking what skills you will look for in your staff base.

Paul Oginsky: In the tender document we laid out what skills we were looking for.

Q374 Tessa Munt: What are they?

Paul Oginsky: Guided reflection, the ability to communicate with young people and run experiential activities and so on. There is a whole list. There were more than 250 applications to run this year. We ended up with 12 organisations. They have demonstrated to us that they have the staff to do that. Next week, we are getting them together to share best practice. There is a flagship programme, hoping to bring more organisations in to swap best practice again.

Q375 Tessa Munt: My last question is on the away from home experience that these young people will have. How will that be maintained once they come back to a world that, in my area, has 70% of the youth service stripped out?

Paul Oginsky: Once they come back, we ask them to explore what their community is. The first two weeks are residential. The first is away from home, while the second is within their home area. They are exploring what community means to them. The word "community" rolls off the tongue, but what does it actually mean to people, and do they feel like they belong to a community? After that, they come up with a project that they want to run themselves. We give them a small grant, and they run a project that makes a social impact.

Q376 Tessa Munt: I want to stop you there. I am sorry about this; I ask this in every single Committee. How does that work in a rural setting?

Paul Oginsky: This is one of the things that we are trying. We have got people working in the rural setting, and it might be that we have to adapt the programme a little for that. That is something we have to find out. When we say "social mix", it is great to have people from different ethnic backgrounds and different social classes, but it would be fantastic if people from different parts of the country could mix, such as those from rural and urban areas. We are not looking at the finished model; we are looking at how we can get this to work. Some of the providers are coming up with really innovative ways of doing things, such as, during the first week, someone running it in a rural setting sharing a residential centre with people from Newcastle or Liverpool. When those attending go back, they can stay in touch with each other, but they would be more exploring what their community is and what community means to them.

Q377 Chair: What about the transport costs for that?

Paul Oginsky: Transport is one of the main costs. At the moment it is being secured through the providers. That can be a really good way of showing everyone galvanising behind the programme, by organisations supporting the transport. It does not have to be a cash donation. It can be gifts in kind towards the programme.

Chair: Thank you. It is worth saying, at the end of this session, that anyone watching on the internet, as you have done, Paul, is able to contribute to an online forum that we have set up in conjunction with thestudentroom.co.uk/youthservices. I hope that anyone listening or reading this will go to that site and post their views. Thank you all very much for giving evidence to us this morning.