Services for young people

Memorandum submitted by the North of England Activities & Training

1. We welcome this enquiry and hope that it will be the opportunity to end the division between formal education (schools/colleges) and informal education (Out of hours activities).

For too many years the two parts of the sector have been almost totally unconnected. This division has been reflected in and reinforced by the work of the DfE/DCSF, which has tended to focus on the two parts separately.

2. TIMINGS

The potential for greater learning through out of school hours services has not yet been realised. Prof. Tim Brighouse’s calculation that young people spend only 9 minutes of every waking hour in school shows how low the resourcing is for Out of Hours learning. In one large urban local authority, around £200 million is spent on schools and other parts of compulsory education; £3 million goes to the local authority youth service (which contacts less than 25% of the 13-19 population) and a further £6 million (est.) is raised by voluntary sector youth organisations, some of which reach some of the other 75%.

9 mins. 51 mins.

Compulsory Voluntary (Out of Hours)

Education Education

(schools etc.) (youth services)

3. UNIVERSAL VS. TARGETED

There is no such thing as a universal youth service out of school hours. Research shows that around 75% of young people have no involvement in any kind of organised youth provision. Whereas schools and colleges cater for almost 100% of the 13-18 population, out of school hours provision such as the Youth Opportunity Fund has been "patchy" (in the word of Beverley Hughes, then Minister for Young People). Services that should be universal, such as involvement in positive activities, are not: in one inner-city school with a very high proportion of students who were BME, eligible for free school meals or with special educational needs, researchers found that 66% of students had no out of hours activities.

4. The failure to ensure that such services really are universal at an early stage is one reason that there is a perceived need for targeted services. For example, most youth services have concentrated on the 13-19 age range, with under-13 provision either rationed or non-existent, yet delinquency does not begin at the age of 13. Likewise, one northern urban authority has a teenage pregnancy rate above the national average; yet it has ceased to provide free 3-day Child Care courses, even though they were over-subscribed and thoroughly enjoyed.

5. The provision of highly-funded targeted services providing intensive support can lead to the perception that young people have to behave in an anti-social way in order to receive the benefits of any funding. This is highly demotivating for the well-behaved majority.

6. VOLUNTEERING

There are too many barriers to volunteering, both for adults and young people. At present this charity is unable to take on volunteers because we have no funds for the administration charge for CRB checks. Some politicians (and funders) are still under the mistaken impression that CRB checks are free for volunteers: they are not, because the "registered body" that administers CRB forms on behalf of the Bureau levies its own administrative charge (£10 per head in our case).

7. The other key barrier to training is the cost and lack of accessible provision. For example, whilst outdoor experience is generally seen as valuable for young people’s development, and contributes to higher academic achievement, raised motivation, better physical and mental health, reduced anti-social behaviour and increased community cohesion, training for new outdoor leaders is not funded by the Skills Funding Agency, making it too expensive for any but the most affluent of potential volunteers. Similarly, minibus transport has been crucial in enabling young people to access a wide range of out of school activities and services; but becoming a minibus driver is all but impossible for volunteers, because it is also expensive and because in some areas the monopoly on driver training is held by the local authority. In one area training and assessment is available only on a Friday between 9am and 5pm, which excludes most volunteers who have full-time work or study commitments.

8. If government, central or local, wishes to encourage volunteers and the voluntary sector, it needs to have a complete change of attitude to how and when it offers support and advice. Having briefings about Big Societies or funding opportunities at 10am on a weekday is simply not good enough: civil servants and council officers will have to get used to turning out at evenings and weekends. One local charity was excluded from a large Youth Opportunity Fund grant because it was offered an interview – which was to involve a young person and an adult volunteer - at midday on a Monday in term-time.

9. NATIONAL CITIZEN SERVICE

The government needs to learn from the experience of previous summer activity schemes: a short-term experience for a segregated age group, led by people who don’t know the young people and recruited at the last-minute is not a recipe for success. If the activities proposed for the NCS are worth doing, they are worth doing all year round and for all age groups. It is quite astonishing that the architects of government-funded residential schemes have still not grasped that for many young people mixed gender provision is out of the question; and for others, any residential is culturally inappropriate. There needs to be a programme of single day outdoor experiences to ensure that opportunities really are equal.

10. The idea that the NCS will be an 8-week programme squeezed into the summer months seems incompatible with talk of involving the voluntary sector. It also suggests that, if existing residential centres are to be block-booked without any increase in capacity, there will be a corresponding reduction in opportunities for other young people.

11. TAKE-UP OF SERVICES – a) LEADERS

The majority of young people will take part in extra-curricular activities and services if they are with people whom they know. School staff have the advantage of regular contact with young people but over the last 10-20 years most have become so over-loaded that they have little or no time for extra-curricular provision. Conversely, leaders who are completely unknown will usually have difficulty in recruiting participants. The historic gap between schools and youth services could be bridged by employing staff, full-time or part-time, who could work at evenings and weekends but spend time regularly in schools, along the lines of the Tower Hamlets model. This model would avoid the issues of territorialism that go with most youth-club based youth provision and allow monitoring of participation by a whole year group rather than self-selecting groups. The example of Derbyshire, where closure of youth clubs led to an increase in contacts with young people, set a useful precedent.

12. TAKE-UP OF SERVICES – b) YOUNG PEOPLE

With the right range of adult leaders, nearly all young people will take up activities and services. We have conducted numerous surveys and have yet to find a young person who did not want to do something positive outside of school hours. However, there needs to be careful thought about times (evenings are seldom good for those who rely on public transport), venues (particularly sensitive in areas with different cultural communities), costs and single-gender provision.

13. TAKE-UP OF SERVICES – c) ACTIVITIES & SERVICES

The essential weakness of existing youth provision is that it tends to be based on small groups. If the staffing at a youth club is in the 3-4 (as is common), it needs only one illness to cause a closure; and at best the range of activities and services will be limited to the needs wishes of the majority. If youth services were re-organised to be the Out of Hours equivalent of a school or a cluster of schools, there would be more scope for minority choice activities and, where young people from more than one school meet and mix, for more community cohesion.

The Audit Commission’s report Tired of Hanging Around (January 2009) concluded that young people wanted activities that were "accessible, reliable and relevant". This matches our own research and echoes a finding by Sir Herman Ouseley after the 2001 Bradford Riot: "Young people are desperate for adequate leisure & recreation activities." This situation has not changed.

14. SECTOR PROVISION

Whether activities and services are provided by voluntary, community, private or public sector is immaterial. The key factor are that they are aligned with schools so that there can be monitoring of both participation and non-participation; and that voluntary staff are fully supported financially. No volunteers should be expected to pay to volunteer, yet this is what has happened in the past. In addition, volunteers are more likely to work with well-off young people if their attempts to provide for the disadvantaged are undermined by lack of funding.

15. TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT

In this respect youth services seem to have gone backwards over the last decade. Training courses that are necessary to develop future leaders have become more expensive whilst funding that was previously available from the Further Education Funding Council and, later, the Learning & Skills Council via colleges dried up in 2007 when it was re-directed to "employer needs". This policy change effectively excluded training that applies to volunteer and freelance roles, since there is no "employer". The LSC showed no consideration of work areas such as the outdoor industry, which relied heavily on volunteer and freelance staff. The new regime of the Skills Funding Agency is no better, as it does not fund the qualification that is the national standard for leading groups in normal countryside (Level 2 Basic Expedition Leadership Award).

16. When the government has a Department of Health encouraging exercise, a Department of Education saying that it supports learning outside the classroom, a Cabinet Office that claims to encourage volunteering and a Department of Culture Media &Sport voicing support for excellence in sports and physical activity, it is hard to see why the Department of Business, Innovation & Skills is so out of step as to allow the Skills Funding Agency to stifle attempts to train and develop an outdoor workforce.

17. Equally bizarre is the Children’s Workforce Development Council, which claimed that training outdoor leaders (who would work with children and young people) was "not in our footprint".

18. We have recently received information about a bursary scheme, named (ironically ?) Progress, which will fund a prescribed list of modules of qualifications but not the complete qualifications. For outdoor education just two modules were offered, neither of which is even part of a recognised qualification to lead outdoor groups.

19. If young people are to be physically and socially mobile, transport difficulties must be addressed. The difficulties have been widely recognised, as in government guidance on Section 507B (Positive Activities) guidance and several local authority young people’s plans, but minibuses are harder and harder to get and minibus driving is almost impossible for volunteers. Even though thousands of young people have voiced the need for transport, few funders will consider applications for vehicles. There is a need to explain why applications to the Youth Opportunity Fund for a new vehicle were all unsuccessful, whereas several applications for "Youth Cafes", which very few young people have asked for, have all been successful. There also needs to be a complete review of requirements for minibus driving. At present drivers can be subject to different requirements if they drive in or out of school time, and whether they are paid or not. New guidance should be standard for all drivers, and backed up with accessible training opportunities.

21. COMMISSIONING

Commissioning procedures are often far too cumbersome with inordinate amounts of paperwork. This represents a waste of money and can result in funding organisations that are good at paperwork rather than good at delivering a service and making an impact. The issue of involving the voluntary sector is again relevant: if you want to involve volunteers, don’t bury them in paper.

22. COMMISSIONING – CONFLICT OF INTEREST

In some cases services have been commissioned by the same local authorities that are applying to run them. This practice should cease. The same applies to central government funds that are passed to local authorities for disbursement. In the case of the Youth Opportunity Fund, one local authority managed to get two of is buildings refurbished with over a third of the allocation for that district, whilst several voluntary groups were excluded because of "confusion" over interview times. The fact that a senior manager claimed to have "no idea" when interviews were taking place despite being responsible for organising them has never been investigated. Such situations must not be allowed to recur.

22. PAYMENT BY RESULTS

It can take years to see the impact on a young person of a particular learning experience, as Ofsted has recognised. Therefore, payment by results could result in measurement of superficial, short-term indicators. There is also the surreal prospect of two young people undergoing the same service experience, with one being funded because it showed a "result" and the other not funded because it didn’t. A third reason for leaving Payment by Results in the Victorian era is that youth services, if they are to mean anything, should be responsive to young people’s wishes – and that means all young people, not a token sample. The Youth Opportunity Fund was supposed to be an example of such responsiveness but failed dismally, leaving thousands of young people with no say in it and no benefit from it.

23. GOVERNMENT STRUCTURES & FRAMEWORKS

Government structures and frameworks have part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Firstly the split between central and local government has allowed each to shrug ff responsibility onto the other. Thus, in the case of the Youth Opportunity Fund, local councils would claim to have complied with central government requirements; but those "requirements" were inadequate to create any minimum service standards, because the DfE/DCSF response has been to say that administrative arrangements were to be locally decided. Thus there were no safeguards against "lost" e-mails, letters and phone messages; against interviews being offered at two working days notice; against young people who wanted to be decision-makers being excluded; and, most importantly, against perverse funding decisions.

24. The quality of public services has not been helped by toothless watchdogs. The Local Government Ombudsman apparently has no power to challenge poor decisions, only to adjudicate on points of administrative procedure. This is actually an incentive for local councils to have vague procedures or no set procedures at all. The Audit Commission claimed to be restricted to accepting complaints about council spending only in a brief window at the end of the financial year. Young people deserve better than this. There should be a single complaints body to deal with any complaint about any publicly-funded service.

25. A particularly unhelpful structure is the fragmented nature of youth policy, which comes mainly from the DfE (but split between schools and youth services) but also from Departments of Health, Culture, Media and Sport, Communities, Local Government and Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and Justice as well as the Home Office and the Cabinet Office. This is not joined-up government.

26. Even within the DfE/DCSF, youth policy has emerged in fits and starts, with a funding regime to match. No two departmental funds have had the same application process and several of them have given cause for serious concern at the lack of a transparent and equitable decision-making.

- The National Youth Volunteering Programme rejected an e-mailed application on the grounds that it was not complete, yet the print out proved that it was.

- Community Cohesion funding of £4.5 million was not available to small groups with local contacts, which could have expanded their effective provision; instead all the money went to just two projects, Do It For Real and Media Box. An application to the latter was rejected for the bureaucratic reason that £300 of projected match funding was not secured – out of a budget of £12,000. Millions have been spent on the Do It For Real programme yet still there is no single-gender provision, whilst organisations that could run activities for Asian Girls groups get nothing.

- The Local Network Children’s Fund was supposed to help smaller groups yet an application in 2007 was rejected because the fund had already closed – even though the DCSF website stated that it was open until March 2008

- My Place poured £180 million into just 41 youth centres. How could a department that has preached equality of opportunity do this when there is no model of any youth centre catering for more than a tiny fraction of the local youth population ?

- The Youth Sector Development Fund also had a round that was supposed to benefit small organisations that deliver a range of activities, which we do: an application was rejected on the grounds that estimated figures for participation, which we had based on actual figures from participation in 2002-04, were dismissed as "unrealistic"

- The Youth Opportunity Fund has been the greatest frustration of all. It was supposed to benefit all young people, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, yet three attempts to get funding, compiled by young people from six inner-city schools and a school for deaf children, have all been unsuccessful. DCSF annual reports have repeatedly said that the fund needed to reach more disadvantaged young people. The full details of our experience are available in the pamphlet and forthcoming documentary, "The Missed Opportunity Fund".

27. This charity has engaged in activities over 400 young people with diverse backgrounds: 14% Bengali, 8% Indian,57% Pakistani, 15% White British, 3% White Roma and 3% Black/ Chinese/Arabic/Iraqi of whom 11 were deaf, 4 had learning difficulties and 2 ASD. Over two years we arranged 42 varied activity courses, trips and events of which 21 were on Friday/Saturday nights. 34 were female-only and the vast majority of participants were taking part in that activity for the first time. Despite that we experienced all the rejections described in paragraph 26, as well as from every other DCSF fund that was open to voluntary youth groups.

28. There needs to be a single, accessible fund, which is open all year round and which can involve young people in decision-making without unreasonable restrictions (such as being expected to attend an evening meeting at a local authority youth service building, which happens to be in an area known for prostitution). There should be a full investigation into where money from the Youth Opportunity Fund went. It might reveal sums that could be repaid to support the new fund.

December 2010