Services for young people

Memorandum submitted by Partnership for Young London

Partnership for Young London is a strategic organisation with a focus on sharing knowledge and bettering young people’s lives. By working in partnership with government, local authorities and youth organisations in the voluntary, statutory and private sectors, we actively support, promote and improve youth work and services for young people across London. Our response to the select committee is made on behalf of our membership, which consists of 19 London boroughs, 21 voluntary and community sector and eight private organisations. We have also consulted with groups that are not within our membership, but which are working with young people in London.

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

1.1 Universal services make a significant contribution to preventative work; the purpose of youth work and universal services is to support a young person’s successful transition through adolescence to adulthood. This notion is at the heart of the Big Society, enabling and encouraging young people to understand their place within their communities and feel confident to make a contribution.

1.2 We recognise the financial constraints that will force local authorities to prioritise targeted services to those in immediate need – and the concomitant cuts that will minimise the capacity of the voluntary and community sector (VCS) to offer universal services. A move away from activities for their own sake, measured by numbers of participants rather than quality of outcomes is welcome, but all young people are entitled to meaningful developmental activities and the support of a trusted adult, not simply because they are experiencing difficulties.

1.3 There is likely to be a move towards more detached youth work, to reach young people where they are, and to meet targeted needs. This is in part the result of the closure of satellite youth centres which can no longer be funded following the cuts.

1.4 It should be noted that the timing of this consultation is much too late. By the closing date for submissions, most local authorities will already have made their decisions about the shape of services and the size of the cuts, so that they will be much less able to adapt to the findings of the Select Committee when they are published.

2. How services for young people can meet the Government’s priorities for volunteering, including the role of National Citizen Service (NCS)

2.1 Although there is mixed evidence of young people’s attitudes towards the word ‘volunteering’, we know that they find making a contribution to their communities, schools and youth groups very rewarding, and they already give hugely significant numbers of volunteering hours – the greatest of any section of society.

2.2 Managing large numbers of young people into volunteering needs effective brokering. Funding for such agencies, including local volunteering bureaux, is vulnerable and being slashed at a time when it should at least be sustained. The volunteering element of the NCS could provide large numbers of young people enthused about volunteering but needing further direction post-NCS. Volunteering organisations of all kinds will be crucial in facilitating progression, and they need to have the capacity to manage what is an important entry point for young people into the habit of lifelong volunteering implicit in making the Big Society work.

2.3 The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award have expressed to us their commitment to volunteering as follows: every DofE Participant must commit themselves to a minimum of an hour a week of volunteering across the period of their programme. This roughly equates to a contribution of 3,898,284 volunteering hours with a social value of over £27 million. Whilst it is important to quantify and recognise this added value, it is the individual and experiential outcomes of volunteering that make the activity essential to our programme.

2.4 Volunteering encourages young people to recognise and engage with their own communities, embedding the values of enterprise and localisation. Young people are increasingly treated as a consumer base and youth ‘culture’ marketed in a manner more intense and overwhelming than at any other time in history. What young people listen to, watch, eat, how they spend their leisure time are all increasingly dictated. Interaction with society and communities is seen as a lecture, not a conversation. Our environment disempowers and teaches young people to consume, accept and not question. The positive experience of volunteering counteracts this, empowering young people to realise that they don’t have to be a simply a passive consumer in society, either in a local or national context, and that they have both the power and the right to take a lead in shaping their communities. Anecdotal evidence confirms this, with the volunteering section of our programme being – at first – one of the most challenging sections to engage and enthuse groups about, but ultimately being the section that leads to the most sustainable activities, beyond the requirements of the programme.

2.5 Volunteering not only demonstrates responsibility, it energises independence. For DofE programmes to be youth led, the core principle of voluntary engagement must be met. Volunteering and the individual recognition of the value of volunteering is the gateway to participation.

3. Which young people access services, what they want from those services and their role in shaping provision

3.1 Young people have a vital role in shaping provision, as is their right. This has been increasingly demonstrated by the growing number of youth councils and funding panels for whom shaping provision has become natural, particularly as a result of their experiences in managing the Youth Opportunity and Youth Capital funds. They also shape services by returning after a successful period of engagement to help to deliver services themselves, as volunteers and peer mentors. They need the support of skilled practitioners to help with this, which is a more sustained and effective process than the simple act of consulting young people through potentially tokenistic questionnaires and focus groups. In its survey of 11 local authorities’ youth provision this year, Ofsted [1] identified that ‘The priority given to involving young people in decision-making had broadened their engagement in planning and evaluating the services that local authorities and their partners provided. As a result of this involvement, the young people’s organisational and political skills were sharpened and, in the best instances, the services provided were matched better to their needs.’

3.2 Young people who want to access services may not be those who actually do so in future if the emphasis is on targeted support with limited access to universal services.

4. The relative roles of the voluntary, community, statutory and private sectors in providing services for young people

4.1 Quality counts, whichever sector delivers services. The importance of this should not be underestimated by commissioners, in planning a mixed economy of services. It is clear that collaboration and consortium working for commissioned organisations, as well as new ways of working for local authorities, including the development of mutuals, is the expected pattern in future; with fewer staff to manage contracts, this simplifies the process for commissioners.

4.2 There are, however, inherent dangers in this approach. One is the development of contracts of such enormous scale and funding that few organisations, even the larger VCS ones, are willing or able to take on the financial liabilities, leaving the way open for large private companies with no specialist expertise in young people’s services but with experience of contract management. This cannot be good for shaping young people’s services. Moreover, the complexity of contracting arrangements leads to smaller and medium-sized organisations being unable to join such consortia, leaving really local groups further distanced from an already shrinking pool of funding.

4.3 Another danger of managing contracts with too few staff, and particularly too few specialist staff, was demonstrated in the London Development Agency’s handling of the Mayor’s Youth Offer funding in 2009-10, during which time the reduction of the number of project managers available to manage contracts led to severe problems for the local authorities trying to cope with service delivery underpinned by complex monitoring requirements, with LDA project managers who did not understand the nature of the work being undertaken, and who had insufficient time to devote to each borough.

5. The training and workforce development needs of the sector

5.1 The youth workforce is very mixed, with practitioners entering through a variety of routes, at different ages and with different levels of qualifications, on full- and part-time contracts and as volunteers. The workforce tends to be loyal to the profession, regarding it as a vocation; as such, it is important to have facility for continuous up-skilling to ensure young people get the best possible support.

5.2 The Progress project currently being delivered to the VCS by the VCS across England has already raised the need and desire for accredited training that is of practical use. The development of the Qualification and Credit Framework will have a significant impact on practitioners’ capacity to build qualifications in small stages, which will be increasingly important as funding for training is cut yet again. As the Big Society demands more and more volunteers to be working with local groups, it is vital that these volunteers are well-trained and appropriately supported to ensure quality provision for young people.

5.3 Given the likely increase in detached youth work mentioned above, this part of the workforce will need particular training related to the potentially more dangerous nature of their work, and organisations will need to ensure that staff with a sufficient level of accountability are on hand to provide support.

6. 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

6.1 The impact of cuts has been both severe and sudden for local authorities’ youth provision, which is losing out at the expense of statutory children’s social services and education, and is thus experiencing more trenchant cuts. Big reductions are being made in numbers of staff; a freeze on spending on venues and staffing (essential elements in managing satellite youth centres) is forcing centres to close, with a negative impact on territorialism and gang behaviour; cuts made by associated teams in local authorities (e.g. Looked After Children Teams) are affecting youth work services delivered to specific groups. Local authorities are trying to be creative in the ways in which they plan to commission or deliver services in future, including the use of mutuals; working with community interest companies; trying to form partnerships with schools; and smaller impacts such as charging young people to attend universal services.

6.2 Payment by results is appropriate for work supported by Social Impact Bonds, such as resettlement of young offenders, and for larger organisations that can potentially manage the financial implications, but it is not appropriate for others, given the preventative effects of good youth work, which are difficult to prove in the short term. As with commissioning, there needs to be an emphasis on quality, which is evidence-based and not simply based on a historical relationship.

6.3 There needs to be greater realisation at government level that voluntary sector doesn’t mean ‘managed and staffed by volunteers’, and that funding for service delivery must be allowed to be realistic and include recovery of costs. The impact of the loss of funding for the VCS through local authorities’ cuts will hit the youth sector hard, and although the transition fund will go some way towards helping, the total sum available for the whole of the VCS, across all ages and sectors across England, is clearly insufficient.

6.4 As commissioners naturally focus resources on direct service delivery, there is a real danger that infrastructure will suffer, to the detriment of those who use it. Infrastructure bodies provide important support services in keeping the workforce trained and informed, and in supporting cross-sector working in particular, but they will be hit hard by the inability of service users to continue to find contributions, and there is little other support available. The effect of depleting infrastructure resources will be felt in the short and long-term; in particular, the need to rebuild networks and connections in the future will be a waste of time and resources that could be avoided by sustaining infrastructure. To say that users must pay for infrastructure is naïve, when they are the very organisations that are being hardest hit by cuts.

7. How local government structures and statutory frameworks impact on service provision

7.1 Local authorities have undergone numerous restructures in recent years, especially in services for young people, in working to meet requirements imposed by central government for new delivery methods and more recently as a result of the cuts and the drive to do more with less. The absence of the Area Based Grant has already had a big impact this year, from which services are finding it difficult to recover, and the increased freedoms given to schools and the absence of the extended services budget will make them even more difficult to work with than previously. The absence of ring-fencing of budgets is having a detrimental effect on youth services, which can no longer protect the really useful funding available to them, through PAYP and the Youth Opportunity and Capital Funds.

8. How the value and effectiveness of services should be assessed

8.1 The youth sector has grappled with the need to measure quality of interventions, which has resulted in quality assurance schemes/quality marks being developed by VCS organisations (e.g. London Youth) and the National Youth Agency, as well as Project Oracle in London.

8.2 For organisations working in more than one local authority, which is a particular issue in London, it would be helpful if there were a standardised list of quality marks that were acceptable to any borough, to simplify the process of commissioning and to prevent VCS organisations having to undergo multiple quality mark processes, at expense of time and resources, to meet the different requirements of neighbouring boroughs.

8.3 Measuring the impact of youth work is not simple, and should include recognition of the following:

§ With the increased requirement for collaboration between partners, separating out specific contributions may be more difficult;

§ Short-term impacts are difficult to prove, given the preventative nature of much youth work;

§ Where outcomes are preventative, it is difficult to attribute the absence of a problem from a young person’s life to any particular intervention, or even from any at all;

§ The resource implications in the measurement of outcomes should be recognised by commissioners requiring that evidence.

December 2010