Services for young people

Memorandum submitted by Baljeet Singh Gill, programme coordinator of the Youth and Community programme at Ruskin College

1. The Youth Service is the only Universal Service available to young people, all others are targeted. It is vitally important not to pathologise young people and enable them to access a service in which they are free from coercion to attend. This is a universal right that all young people should have as the spirit of the 54 articles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child uphold and to one we have signed up on.

2. The Youth Service has an admirable record of encouraging volunteering. The Millennium Volunteers and 'V' Talent were merely a formal method of acknowledging the volunteering that had been an ongoing feature of the work that the Youth Service had been doing. The National Citizen Service is also a feature of the work that Youth Services have been involved in although the language used is very different. Youth and Community workers have been developing inter-generational and other projects that address almost all of the issues raised in the National Citizen Service agenda. The evidence from youth workers of the number of young people who would have ended up in criminal activity, becoming drug users, homeless or involved in the sex trade is readily available and can indeed be witnessed in the personal biographies of many workers who would not have become 'citizens' had it not been for the valuable input from a trusted youth worker they once had contact with. Volunteering cannot succeed without the support of paid professions and a professional structure that not only supports volunteers but one which also provides a possible career route to those who know of no other way to become employed and take themselves off the unemployed market. In the end it is not money that has motivated many of these people but an aspiration to want to do something meaningful in their lives that has led them to take on educational debts, more work and to risk going out of their comfort zones to put something/give something back to their communities.

3. All young people have a right to and access the Youth Service. Participation has been ingrained in the work that Youth Services do with young people. Hear By Rights is a document published by the National Youth Agency-NYA- that many Services have adopted to ensure that young people participate in all aspects of the organisation and not just in the service delivery. This should become the blue-print of all agencies if society were to take the issue of participation seriously.

4. The Statutory Service has extensive working relationships with the Voluntary and Community and in some instances the Private sector (depending on locality). In many instances the Voluntary and Community Sector depend upon support in the guise of grants buildings or personnel or administration such as Criminal Records Bureau checks. Therefore, a cut in the statutory will have an adverse impact on other organisations that the Government wish to support. As a trustee of OCVYS-Oxfordshire Children's Voluntary Youth Services- we have already been notified that a direct grant that we received annually from the local authority will no longer be forthcoming, we have also been aware of a number of member organisations that are in similar situations and whose valuable work of getting young people into volunteering will now cease as they cannot function without funds.

5. The JNC qualification is a well established and professional qualification that is recognised nationally. It is validated on a five year cycle which ensures that the training keeps abreast of and responds to the developments taking place in the workforce as well as in policy. This is an essential quality standard which all governments have aspired to and is evidenced in the high quality of OFSTED and he reports that have come from this sector.

6. The impact of public spending sector cuts will have an adverse impact on The Youth Services, this is already evident in local authorities who have made drastic cuts already. Payments by results is certainly achievable as has been demonstrated since targeted work was introduced at the turn of the 21st century under 'Transforming Youth Work', although it is certainly not desirable as young people need to have access to informal education services. Resources can best be maximised by allowing professional youth and community workers to submit evidence based on our professional approach and not that imposed by Government. In Oxon 20 out of 27 centres are going to be closed, many other authorities have already decimated their services only to see an increase in crime, drug use and people staying unemployed longer or in some areas such as Blackpool less impact on the work done to protect young people from sex crimes and grooming. Northampton, Buckingham and Warwickshire are only a few who have also made drastic cuts that have impacted the Youth Service adversely, some of these authorities such as Warwickshire had conducted a similar exercise in the early 1990's only to find that they had to re-install the service.

7. Local government structures often ignore their statutory rights to provide a service provision for young people in any meaningful manner and the Youth Services are almost always the first service that is discarded in any re-structuring. At Ruskin we have people who will go onto make great youth workers and be very positive role models to young people who currently no other service can work with, we support the work of the Youth Justice Board in many projects such as the Youth Inclusion Project by the early intervention projects set up by YOT/YOS but supported by the Youth Service where youth workers are employed to work with young people deemed to be difficult to contact (NEET).

8. The value and effectiveness can be assessed on many levels. First there is ample evidence from young people who value and fight for their service and make their voices heard, secondly it can be seen in the number of youth workers themselves who have come from backgrounds that may have led them to become disenchanted members of the community instead of being positive role models to young people of what can be attained, thirdly the effectiveness should be measured by the change that occurs in young people based on the high principles, values and ethics by which youth workers operate. This is by far the most important aspect as other services may buy into principles such as empowerment, participation, equality of opportunity and informal education but the Youth Service is unique in that it does so through the development of the positive and effective building up of relationships where no coercive methods are employed where young people learn to negotiate and compromise and yet be assertive, this surely is where citizenship should start?

December 2010