Services for young people

Memorandum submitted by Kevin Ford, Chief Executive, FPM

1. Executive summary 

1.1 FPM believes the current policy environment provides a potential catalyst for significant change within services for young people. FPM believes that for this change to be progressive and sustainable services need to put youth first.

1.2 FPM has been developing a new mutual model for delivery of services to young people with the simple and clear purpose of providing the conditions in which all young people can make a successful transition from childhood to independent and fulfilled adulthood.

1.3 The purpose is underpinned by the following principles:

· Young people work with support from their communities to lead and run services and activities for themselves.

· Local authorities supporting civil society to provide the universal "youth offer" and not attempting to provide it themselves.

· Connecting the loose provision of universal services with the wide range of targeted and intensive interventions so that the vision of opportunity for all young people is real.

· Supporting high quality practice with young people through appropriate training and development.

· Accepting that public money will be focussed on commissioning services for those young people most in need.

1.4 The mutual provides a vehicle through which professionals who work with young people can be free to develop more responsive, flexible and relevant services at a lower cost .

1.5 The mutual structure provides a method to connect local young people to the National Citizenship Scheme. If young people join the mutual at 13, they will already be part of a local vehicle for voluntary action and community service.

1.6 NCS will link well with this and when people return from their engagement on NCS th ey will have an organisation th rough which they can continue their development and voluntary activities. In this way the mutual can amplify the investment made in young people through NCS.

1.7 FPM believes a co-produced mutual approach to delivering services for young people can have the following benefits:

· Ownership and leadership from young people.

· Locally accountable and highly responsive to wants and needs of members.

· New relationship between professional service providers and young people.

· Professional practitioners are responsible for their own practice but accountable to young people and other stakeholders.

· Profit stays local - does not drain away outside.

2. Introduction 

2.1 FPM is an award-winning commercial training company and the only major specialist provider of contextualised workforce development and training to the youth workforce.

2.2 Through our work we have successfully delivered training and development with every local authority in England and over 1,600 voluntary and community organisations.

2.3 In 2008, the Children's Workforce Development Council, on behalf of the Children's Workforce Network, contracted FPM to design and deliver the largest management development initiative ever provided for services for young people.

2.4 FPM delivered these programmes to senior leaders, frontline managers and aspiring leaders across the full depth and breadth of the youth workforce. In total almost 6,000 participants from every local area in England took part with 40% working for voluntary and community sector organisations.

3. Our evidence base 

3.1 Between March 2009 and December 2010 FPM have delivered 388 training programmes to leaders, managers and professional working with service for young people.

3.2 In total 5,936 participants took part in these programmes and our training team have a combined total of 284,928 hours of direct contact with the workforce with the vast majority of contact at the frontline, over 85%.

3.3 Contact with service leaders in both voluntary and statutory provision captured the following insights:

· Strengths and successes of service delivery to date.

· Vision and strategy for developing and delivering services over the next 3 years.

· Perceived key challenges that need to be overcome.

3.4 Almost 90% of the programmes contained sessions led by the young trainer team and we have sought their feedback on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the sector from them.

4. Recommendations 

4.1 FPM believes that services for young people are at a crossroads and in order to move forward effectively there is a need to take a systemic view of change.

4.2 Our submission embraces this approach and covers the following themes of the Select Committees inquiry:

· The impact of public sector spending cuts on funding and commissioning of services, including how available resources can best be maximised, and whether payment by results is desirable and achievable.

· The relationship between universal and targeted services for young people.

4.3 Our contact with youth services in every local area in England over the past 2 years and specifically over 50 services in the past 3 months suggest there are a number of potential scenarios for services for young people in the future:

4. 4 Scenario 1: 80-100% cuts of funding for informal personal and social development of young people with an assumption that the voluntary sector will provide services.

4. 5 The role of the local authority and its other statutory partners will be only to respond to emergency needs of young people.

4.6 It raises a concern that work in the voluntary and community sector will be un-coordinated, inconsistent and there is no mechanism for quality assurance and on-going sectoral development.

4. 7 The voluntary and community sector, itself, may not be strong enough to respond robustly to what is going on, particularly in poorer and more disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Authorities that are considering this option are making a political choice to focus their resources usually on younger children and families.

4. 8 All would recognise that emergency responses to young people where needs have become acute and intensive are both expensive in the short-term and the long-term.

4.9 Scenario 2: 40-50% cuts of funding f or informal personal and social development of young people.

4. 10 Decision to commission out all services with the vast majority of funding spent on targeted and preventative work with young people. However, the authority, as part of its commissioning plan, invests a small amount in the development of the voluntary sector as a market for commissioning and to ensure quality and consistency.

4. 11 The majority of universal access work is left to the voluntary sector. The difficulty here again is the link between the targeted and preventative work and the universal access. Youth work will take place in a wide variety of settings and organisations but with no critical mass of youth workers and professions.

4.12 This runs the risk of services fragmenting and professional practice becoming diluted and inconsistent. The commissioners may, therefore, seek to assure quality by adopting bureaucratic measures from the centre with a consequent rise in cost and bureaucracy. It is unclear whether this approach would be either efficient or effective.

4.13 Scenario 3: 40-50% cuts of funding for informal personal and social development of young people .

4.14 Local authorities work with stakeholders and young people to establish new ways of providing service provision, including co-operatives and mutuals and federal arrangements sharing back-office functions.

4.15 In this scenario, there is a much greater chance of combining both targeted and open access provision and maintaining an integrated approach which covers activity in the voluntary sector as well as in the statutory sector.

4.16 Limited public resources will be best focused on working with young people who need support either:

· to enable them to take control of their lives and avoid sliding into failure (preventative), or

· to provide emergency and remedial support or to take action in response to criminal activity (intensive intervention)

4.17 There is now a vast amount of research which evidences the catastrophic costs of failure to individuals, families, communities and the state (Custody for Children: The Impact. February 2010, Standing Committee for Youth Justice; NEF - 2010).

4.18 Just focussing resources on intensive interventions can result in an ever growing bill as more young people slide into failure. Focussing on both prevention and intensive support provides an "invest to save" route through which public authorities can release monies from future costs of failure to fund the preventative work.

4.19 However, this activity needs to be fully connected to the looser range of opportunities available for all, with the potential for targeted intervention with particular communities to stimulate and support the development of voluntary and mutual activity.

4.20 The risk is that targeted and intensive work becomes separated, stigmatised and unable to find effective routes for young people to get back into the mainstream.

4.21 The past ten years have seen significant advances in the involvement of young people in decisions about the services they receive and the activities that are available to them. It is time to take this further.

4.22 The new model offers the chance for young people to join and to jointly own the organisation that provides support and services. It gives young people a chance to take real responsibility from the age of 13.

4.23 It provides a vehicle to build leadership skills, develop enterprise, volunteer, link with their communities and so on. It provides a way to connect many of the successful developments that already exist and to take them further.

4.24 However, there are significant hurdles in the cost and the set up of these new ways of working which means that whilst the ideas have attracted considerable interest, there practicability in a climate demanding immediate and rapid cost-cutting and re-structuring may make them less attractive.

4.25 There is a risk, therefore, that real innovation and opportunities for young people to take a lead in the co-production of their own services may be stifled by the need for short-term, expedient decisions.

4.26 How might government best support local authorities so that within the resources at their disposal they are able to genuinely innovate?

4.27 Emphasise that young people should have a significant say in the control and delivery of their own services.

4.28 Emphasise that there is a proven relationship between open access and open contact with young people and prevention which saves the state significant sums of money in the long-run.

4. 29 Provide support to local authorities who are able to innovate and consider new ways of work to test these new approaches. This would best be done as matched funding and could be in the form of bonds to be redeemed on the successful inception of new ways of working.

4.30 The development of locally co-produced services involving young people presents a tension with traditional rules and practice on commissi oning and procurement.

4.32 Government should encourage local authorities to experiment with new ways to enable money to flow with young people and through them to service providers who are genuinely respond ing to and meeting their needs.

4.33 This would mirror developments in relation to the work programme; the pupil premium and much innovation in adult social care where money is being passported to the service us er to purchase services direct.

4.34 Looked at in this way, services for young people could include young people using a membership card (smart card) through which any public money supporting them could be channelled. The card could also allow for payment of fees.

4.35 The delivery of services for young people through the local authority appears to be in a state of flux and future provision may well be best located outside the local authority. Advantages of this include flexibility, responsiveness, cost and above all young people having a say in what is going on.

4.36 The most effective way of driving up quality in work with young people if government is to avoid using burdensome and ineffective bureaucracy will be to drive up the quality and status of the profession of yout h work and related professions.

4.37 A strong and flourishing professional body for youth work with a licence to practice and registration has the chance of encouraging and supporting good practice by youth workers wherever they are in a way that is under their own control and free of government sp ending and other interventions.

4.38 Such a body would also encourage brighter and talented young people to consider a career in youth work in the same way that Teach First has encouraged new entrants into the teaching profession.

December 2010