Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
1-82)
Fiona Blacke, Charlotte
Hill, Liam Preston and Susanne Rauprich
26 January 2011
Q1 Chair: Good morning, and welcome
to the first evidence session of our inquiry into services for
young people. I'm delighted to have the four of you with us today,
setting the scene for further evidence sessions. I'm delighted
to say that a huge number of pieces of evidence have been submitted
to us. I think we're at 240,000 words and counting, so quite a
lot of views have been put to us. We're quite informal here and
will use first names if you're all comfortable with that. May
I start by asking you to tell me one hope and one fear you have
for youth services at the moment? Who shall I pick on first? Fiona.
Fiona Blacke: My hope would be
that, in the new context, we find a way of delivering a comprehensive
offer to young people in every part of England. That would include
high-quality youth work as well as a range of activities. My fear
is that the rapid cuts that are being made at the moment are diminishing
the capability of the sector both to grow from the bottom up and
to continue.
Charlotte Hill: My fear is that
we're going to lose some really excellent people in these cuts.
A lot of our members and a lot of the people who work with young
people are losing really good staff in the short term, so my fear
is that we'll lose some excellent youth workers. My hope is that
we're able to keep some of the really great universal services
that stop the need for the targeted servicesthat we don't
lose those universal services and just go down the route of targeted
services.
Susanne Rauprich: My hope is that,
in a challenging situation, the creativity of people delivering
the service will prevail and we will come up with some really
interesting, different ways of delivering services that we've
become used toaccustomed to. My fear is linked with the
staggeringly high unemployment rates of young people and the fact
that without supportive wrap-around services for young people,
to help them through this challenging time, we will have a generation
of young people with very little, and devastating, prospects.
Chair: Yes. It could be said we already
have that.
Liam Preston: My hope is obviously
that we don't lose a generation of young people who feel that
every opportunity that their peers have had before them seems
to be taken away from them now. I hope that doesn't continue.
Cuts to the youth sector and youth services are another reason
why young people at the moment really feel that they're getting
a hard time. That's one of my fears. My hope is that we're able
to resolve that somehow.
Chair: Thank you. After that brief warm-up,
I'll move on to Bill.
Q2 Bill Esterson: First question:
what would you say is the purpose of providing services for young
people? Is it simply to divert them, as some would say, from misbehaviour?
Charlotte Hill: It's an incredibly
depressing outlook if that's really what people think we're here
for.
Bill Esterson: Hence the "some would
say".
Charlotte Hill: Absolutely. I
think if you ask people out there who are working with young people,
they'll say they are doing that because they want to give young
people every opportunity they can to experience as many things
as they can, to realise their potential, to go out and achieve
as much as they can, and to get all the learning outside the classroom
that they can as young people. The idea that youth services are
just about stopping young people becoming criminals is a really
depressing outlook.
Fiona Blacke: I would like to
add to that. I think that youth work in particular is a deliberative
educational approach that has its own pedagogy and professional
base. Every one of us at this table could tell you transformational
stories about young people, particularly marginalised young people,
who have engaged with youth workers in a positive way. So there
is a part of youth work that is both protective and diversionary,
but it is more than that. It's a bit like saying that schools
keep young people off the streets for six hours a day.
Susanne Rauprich: The problem
is with the narrative. It is much easier to defend a discipline
that seems very difficult to understand among those who are not
effectively engaged with it. Therefore, the narrative has always
been around prevention and diversion and so on. These are absolutely
useful aspects of it, but they only work because there is a universal
underpinning of the services that are provided, and because there
is a whole-person approach, so that it is positive, encouraging,
challenging and all those things, as well as diverse.
Liam Preston: Young people value
these services immensely, and it is not just about keeping them
off the street. These are valuable tools that they are able to
do after school and on weekends. For them, it is an important
aspect of their lives. It is not just about keeping them off the
streets or out of crime.
Q3 Bill Esterson: Moving on to
the right balance between universal and targeted services, you
made the point, Charlotte, that your ideal is to keep great universal
services so that there is less needI think that is the
phrase you usedfor targeted services. The Government's
comment on this is that they are looking for an evidence base
for targeted intervention. Will you comment on what the right
balance might be, and talk in particular about vulnerable young
people who might get missed by schools or elsewhere? What is the
best way of identifying them and providing them with the sort
of support that they need?
Charlotte Hill: I think that,
where there are really good universal services, they can identify
the young people within them who might need some targeted support,
so I don't think that the two need necessarily be exclusive. What
works really well is if you can have a universal service and targeted
work as well. There are lots of examples throughout the country
of where targeted work does absolutely fantastic and important
work, but I think that, without the universal work, that will
become increasingly the point.
In terms of young people not picked up through
education, we at UK Youth run youth achievement foundations for
young people who have been excluded from mainstream education,
but again we use very much a youth work model for re-engaging
young people, and I think that that could be done a lot more through
youth clubs. This is a real way to re-engage young people who
have been disengaged from education for one reason or another
with learning through non-formal learning approaches. It is a
really good way for them to then go on to education after that.
Fiona Blacke: I think I understand
some of the dilemma that local authorities are going through at
the moment. If you talk to directors of children's services with
very squeezed budgets, the kinds of conversations that they are
having are on the notion that the services that they actually
want to invest in are those that are going to bring long-term
cost savings in high-end preventative services. That is quite
a rational approach. The difficulty in the universal-versus-targeted
debate is that, if you have a universal provision that some people
self-select for, there will inevitably be some young people in
that provision who, if they aren't part of a youth club or a similar
activity, probably will end up needing high-cost, high-end services,
because they will become involved in risky behaviours.
What we don't have is a sophisticated model
that says, "You're going to be the one who needs it, and
you're going to be the one who doesn't." So if you take away
that preventative universal offer, a whole host of unidentified
young people will end up needing bigger support. That is the difficulty.
It is actually quite easy to target those young people who are
already in the sights of social services, and you can and should
target services at those young people in care. There are young
people on the streets and involved in criminal behaviour. It's
those young people who just need a bit of a hand to be supported.
That's the difficulty in the kind of conversations that are happening
at the moment.
Q4 Damian Hinds: I just want to
ask a little question. We talk about universal services. Obviously,
there's universal availability of some things in theory, but what
proportion of young people do you think these services actually
touch? What proportion actually comes into contact with them,
as opposed to the number who could?
Fiona Blacke: I was dreading you
asking me how many services there are, because the reality is
that this is an incredibly difficult field to define. It ranges
from, potentially, the small voluntary community organisation
run by parents who are doing something in their community for
their kids on a Friday night. Nobody can count that, either the
people who are doing
Q5 Damian Hinds: Just focus on
things that are in receipt of some public money; whether it's
national money or local authority money, somehow the taxpayer
funds
Fiona Blacke: We don't have the
mechanisms to count that.
Susanne Rauprich: Just as an indicator,
a few years ago, before the last Government embarked on a programme
of stimulus, the figures were fairly small. There were targets
around 25% of young people accessing youth services. That's the
funded services. Then of course there will be others. The reality
is that there are a large number of young people out there who
are never touched by young people's services, whose parents send
them to private educational classes or whatever it is. There is
a range. Young people have different backgrounds. There is a huge
cohort. Young people's servicesyouth serviceshave
traditionally been focused in particular communities. It would
be fair to say that although quite a number of them are universally
available, the young people using them have tended to be those
from less privileged and less advantaged backgrounds.
Fiona Blacke: Our audit, which
was last conducted in 2007-08, suggested that 28% of 13 to 19-year-olds
were in contact with some form of youth service.
Q6 Chair: I just want to press
you on that a little. In effect, there aren't universal youth
services. They might be genuinely open, but if you look at a typical
town, they'll probably be on the estate with lower socio-economic
advantage. Within that estate, what percentage of the most disadvantaged
in that area of disadvantage use the universal youth services?
Are they the hardest to reach by youth services? What evidence
is there that youth services have a way of reaching people who
otherwise tend to be excluded?
Fiona Blacke: I think that's a
curate's egg. It will be highly dependent on the approach of the
particular youth services. There are some open-access services
that are very good at that. There are some that, I have to say,
are not particularly good at it, so they can't deal with young
people who have extreme behaviours or whatever. The critical thing
is the extent to which that provision has a mechanism to refer
to more specialist
Q7 Chair: It's just that, again
and again in this Committee, we're looking at services that are
trying to offer a broad range so as to engage people without stigma,
and then trying to see to what extent they reach those who are
most in need. With Sure Start centres and other things, again
and again it seems as though we struggle to see how they can make
sure that they reach those who most need their support.
Susanne Rauprich: I think there
is an issue with the youth sector. You will have come across that
with the collection of management information that would make
policy decisions easier. It is notoriously difficult to capture
provision of a service that is provided by a full range of providers,
spanning the voluntary and community sectors as well as local
authorities. There is no common data set that organisations would
use. What you do have is measurements and head counting in organisations
themselves, but that is never pulled together by anybody. The
National Youth Agency is probably the best agency in terms of
collecting figures by sending a survey out to local authorities,
but that's really all we have.
Chair: My own experience as a councillor
setting up a youth club was that, over time, more and more of
the children and young people you most wanted to come to the club
became excluded from it and were standing outside it. That seems
to go through a cycle. Back to you, Bill
Q8 Bill Esterson: I'll develop
that point in a minute. Liam, do you want to have a go at the
previous question?
Liam Preston: The only thing to
add to what my colleagues said is that it is very sporadic and
depends really on what area you live in. You can have fantastic
services in one area, but 10 or 15 miles down the road there is
very little. For young people, that distance is a huge barrier.
Something that is equal in all areas would obviously be more advantageous
for every young person.
Q9 Bill Esterson: Picking up Graham's
point about mixed background services, are they beneficial for
the service or outcomes, or not? What is the evidence? What are
your points of view?
Fiona Blacke: One of the reasons
why youth work is important as a distinctive professional activity
is that trained youth workers are very good at working with some
of the most difficult and marginalised young people. All sorts
should often be targeted towards that, but if you don't have a
universal base of services, where do you receive those young people
back to? What does that mean for a group of young people who are
constantly having to be intervened with by professional youth
workers? You need what I think has been described as windscreen
wiper, with high-end services which young people can be referred
to when they need them, but there also has to be a place where
they can go back to and get a general level of support. If you
don't have that full range of services, you keep young people
fixed in one placethat is why the debate about just having
targeted local authority services is a dangerous one.
Bill Esterson: Anyone else want to add
to that?
Charlotte Hill: I would agree.
One of the really valuable things for young people is mixing with
people from all sorts of different backgrounds. Why would you
want a youth club that just has the naughty kids or the kids with
problems? That is not of benefit to them, nor to anyone else.
The whole point is that where you have youth clubs, youth services
or any sort of projects or programmes working well, you have kids
from all sorts of different backgrounds mixing together, so they
can see all the different spectrums of life and all the different
challenges that some people might face, but equally, the opportunities
that are out there for others. It is the social mix that is really
important. The fear is that, if you just have targeted services,
you will just have groups of young people from certain, specific
backgrounds all together, and you would lose that social mix.
Susanne Rauprich: The issue is
obviously one of funding. As Fiona has already said, in times
like this public sector funding needs to be invested very carefully.
You would expect that it needs to be targeted at those young people
most in need, but we do have a full range of voluntary sector
provision out therequite a lot in fact is not dependent
on public sector funding. Where local authority provision works
very well, it works very well with voluntary sector provision,
and it is able to take a view as to where you might have universal
provision as well as targeted provision in any one area. My particular
fear is that partnership mechanisms, which really ought to be
strengthened at a time like this, are also at risk in certain
areas, which is quite short-sighted.
Liam Preston: To give some background
to the different backgrounds of the young people, in relation
to this Committee we asked for case studies about cuts in services
and how the services are used. We found that 59% told us that
they were on a low income or from a low-income family, 39% had
been victims of bullying, 28% lived in isolated rural areas and
21% had mental health issues. So, there is a wide range of young
people using those servicesagain, it is really important
to have a universal service that is able to impact on such people
at an early stage, in order to find more preventive measures which
might be needed later.
Q10 Bill Esterson: One question
that comes out of that asks how universal any service really is.
It tends to be located in a particular area, and often the reason
is because it was identified as being a hotspot. Is that just
an inevitable fact of the development of youth services?
Susanne Rauprich: I don't think
that there would ever, even in the best of times, have been sufficient
funding available to ensure that every single young person has
access to a place in a youth facility. Also, not every young person
would want that. So, yes, to some extent it is inevitable.
Q11 Lisa Nandy: As a follow-up,
Charlotte, you said earlier that one of the great things about
youth services is that they bring more people from different backgrounds
together, but Bill's question is really also about whether that
can actually happen when so many communities are so socially polarised
already. If you have a youth service that is physically located
in one community, are there ways of making sure that it brings
young people from different backgrounds together?
Charlotte Hill: It is a different
picture in different areas. There are some examples of great youth
clubs that might be located in an inner city, but surrounding
them is not just one type of young personyou've got all
sorts. One street might be quite affluent and the next street
across might not be particularly. I agree with you. Obviously
there are some areas where you will get groups of young people
from a particular background. But there are lots of examples where
young people from different mixes come together in inner-city
youth clubs.
Susanne Rauprich: I just wanted
to say that we must not view youth services as being only location
based. That is a large aspect of young people's services, but
we do have things like Duke of Edinburgh awards, school-based
youth work and a whole range of different facilities that take
young people out of their estates and their locations. They are
used by a wide range of young people from all sorts of backgrounds.
Fiona Blacke: It isn't necessarily
only about geographical mixing. You'll have community centres
that bring together disabled young people and young people who
don't have a disability. That's about social mixing. You'll have
provision where it's okay for young people of different sexualities
to be together, and that's made available. Sometimes it is about
one location, but there might be lots of different groups of young
people using that with different interests and challenges.
Q12 Craig Whittaker: I have three
wonderful young children, two of whom, Sophie and Beth, have spent
a huge amount of time volunteering with the Kuleana Street Children's
Centre in Mwanza in Tanzania. Sophie is still there and is in
her second year. Beth, our 16-year-old, has just come back after
spending three months there. Is this a ploy from my children to
get away from their father, or is volunteering quite normal for
youths? If so, what proportion of young people in the UK do you
think spend time volunteering?
Fiona Blacke: We did some research
on that, and we think it is age dependent. There are 26% at any
one time, with about 52% reporting that they have volunteered
at some point between the ages of 13 and 18.
Q13 Craig Whittaker: What projects
in particular do you think have been successful in engaging youths
to volunteer?
Susanne Rauprich: I would say
that there is not any one model, because a successful project
that engages young people in volunteering, or indeed in any other
activity, is one that starts from where the young person is at
and engages them in their interests and their needs. It basically
puts quite a lot of urgency on to the young person to develop
their own projects and solutions. Because of that I am personally
a fan of Youth Action, which has projects right across the country
where young people have a look at what is needed in their local
area or communitywhether geographical or otherwisetake
the initiative and devise a solution. Those can be hugely empowering,
and indeed life-changing, projects for young people. The reason
why your daughters are going to volunteer is obviously because
separation is necessary during their transition to adulthood.
That is something we need to encourage. Youth services provide
a very safe place for young people to do so.
Q14 Craig Whittaker: Okay, so
what do you think of the new national citizen service then? Does
it add anything new to residential programmes, for example, or
to personal development and volunteering activities in general?
What is your general perception?
Charlotte Hill: With volunteering
generally, the message that comes back to us is that it has to
be properly supported. It is one of those things that is great.
We really want to encourage young people to volunteerthey
want to engage and volunteerbut there needs to be an infrastructure
to enable them to do it. That infrastructure has to be properly
supported. We welcome the national citizen service. It is brilliant
that one of the Government's flagship things is around non-formal
learning and recognising that a lot of the work we do is valued.
The challenge is to make sure that, beyond that six-week programme,
there is a supported volunteering network and the opportunities
to be able to carry on with that. We cannot just assume that that
will happen. There must be a plan and a structure around supporting
those young people who have been through NCS, whether they are
the 11,000 this year or the 33,000 next year, to continue volunteering.
There will be some challenges around the residential element of
NCS, particularly fitting the programme into a six-week window
for what might be 580,000 16-year-olds.
Q15 Craig Whittaker: Following
up on your point about having the structure to ensure that volunteers
continue, what evidence do you have to suggest that they will
not do so? My experience is that they do.
Charlotte Hill: I think young
people want to continue, they just need the opportunity to do
it. Fiona's statistics show around 25% do, but in the NEET cohortthe
young people who are not engaged otherwisea much lower
percentage of young people are engaged.
One of the admirable goals of the NCS, in particular,
is that they want to engage all young people from all backgrounds.
The young people who are hard to engage in these programmes will
need that real support and that network to present them and support
them with opportunities to continue volunteering afterwards.
Q16 Craig Whittaker: Does anyone
have a different view?
Liam Preston: I have found, from
speaking to young people up and down the country, that they like
the idea of NCS. They are concerned, however, that their own youth
services are being cut in their areas. They think a six-week programme
and going away is a great idea, but their worry is, "What's
going to be left for me afterwards if everything in my local area
is being cut?" We surveyed 1,000 young people on the NCS:
the majority53%said that they were in favour of
the idea, but 20% were not, and 27% just did not know (Young Voices:
BYC 2010). So, at this early stage, I am not sure whether there
is information for young people to be able to make a decision
and understand what the NCS is and what it would do for them.
Fiona Blacke: The cynic in me
says that successive Governments each brought in a new programme
of volunteering for young people, whether that was Millennium
Volunteers, V or now NCS. Susanne is probably better placed to
talk about this than I am, but the reality is that there is an
incredibly rich infrastructure of pre-existing organisations that
promote, develop and enable young people to volunteer.
Like Charlotte, I think that the NCS is a good
idea. The notion that there is something significant at 16 as
a rite of passage is interesting, but it would have been more
powerful had it built on the existing infrastructure and programmes.
That would have addressed some of the problems, which Charlotte
has identified, of young people being supported into and out of
the programmes.
Susanne Rauprich: I agree with
everything that has been said. I add that I think that several
organisations, and the cadet forces, have proposed on several
occasions that their programmes be badgedor might have
the potential to be badged"National Citizens Service".
That might help the Government to resolve a fairly logistical
problem about how to go about offering the range of opportunities
that must be in place to cater for the whole cohort. NCVYS member
organisations are absolutely up for that and would welcome such
a move.
Charlotte Hill: I support that.
There is a whole range of programmes that are doing fantastic
things already with that group of young people. For example, Fiona
and I work with O2, running its Think Big programme,
which has a residential element and all sorts of training and
supportthe young people go through a fantastic process.
There are opportunities with corporate partners such as O2and
others. Perhaps the Government could work with them and support,
or register, their programmes to be part of an NCS programme.
There would be opportunity to help with the finances, so that
this could become something that all young people could do. It
would also mean that there would be many different ways of providing
the service. Everybody would be getting a fantastic, valuable
outcome, but it would not necessarily have to be that one-size-fits-all,
six-week programme in the summer. There are some opportunities
to explore.
Q17 Craig Whittaker: I want to
pick up on a point that Fiona made. The NCS is not like anything
that has gone before it; it is a much bigger and more encompassing
programme, as I understand it. Do you not feel that that would
be a huge facilitator to encompass and engage far more youth than
are currently engaged in youth services in general?
Fiona Blacke: I think it would,
but my point is that it would be more effective if it was able
to build on the provision that is already there.
Q18 Chair: Is there any reason
to believe that it will not? If the Government bring it forward
from an idea and then pilot itthey obviously don't think
they have all the answersto deliver transformation and
participation before and after the central 16-year-old experience,
are not they likely to seek to build on what is there and to get
others to work with them to make it a success? If so, are there
any barriers and risks?
Susanne Rauprich: The design of
the National Citizen Service was informed by the work of a range
of youth organisations, which we welcome. There is nothing wrong
with the programme or project as it stands. The issue is one of
logistics, in that creating one stand-alone programme that builds
on the principles and work of many organisations is fine but,
in parallel, there is a range of other programmes that would deliver
the same desired outcomes. For example, you cannot necessarily
expect the Scout Association or the Duke of Edinburgh award to
change something that they have been developing over decades.
They would obviously do so to a certain extent, but it would be
much easier and logistically better if such programmes could be
given an opportunity to continue what they do under the mantle
of the National Citizen Service, which would reach an even larger
number of young people.
Chair: If you have any further thoughts
about the downsides that you have not already submitted to us,
it would be interesting to know about them. The trouble with major
Government programmes is that they often crush and destroy very
good things that previously existed.
Q19 Charlotte Leslie: I have a
quick question on the NCS. We have a quote from the In Defence
of Youth Work campaign, and I am interested in one thing it says
about the NCS and its relevance. It states: "The irony of
the Citizens Service is that of course a Young People's Service
is needed, but for 365 days a year"and this is the
interesting bit"staffed not by entrepreneurial opportunists,
but by dedicated, trained volunteers and professional workers".
As a candidate, I saw a lot of youth work in
my Bristol constituency, which is incredibly diversethere
are very well-off wards side by side with very deprived wards.
I have seen tensions with council youth services, which move out
like a sort of army and often leave a wake of authority that young
people often do not engage with that brilliantly. Some workers
are absolutely brilliant, however, so I wouldn't want to stereotype.
There is a tension between those services and the real community
workers, who don't get paid and just start things up, often without
fundingthey raise money themselves from the local community.
Is there a tension between organised local authority or Government
organisations and grassroots community groups? That appears to
have come up in the In Defence of Youth Work campaign.
Fiona Blacke: Will I start?
Susanne Rauprich: There is tension
only when it is badly managed, to tell you the truth. There does
not have to be tension. Of course, every now and again, you come
across somebody who regards themselves as the authority on all
things and won't necessarily value the contribution of so-called
amateurs. That is a completely misguided way of looking at things,
but we have 150-odd local authorities in this country, and practice
is as varied as that number. There are plenty of examples of local
authorities working extremely effectively with voluntary organisations
and where the role of a paid local authority employee is to encourage
and support community actionto support volunteers and make
their lives much easier. A balance needs to be found. We don't
have it right everywhere, and that is the reason why you have
those quotes.
With regard to the particular point about entrepreneurs,
I would welcome loads more of them because, based on the statistics
that we have just heard, even in good times only about 28% of
young people are reachedalthough probably more through
uncounted voluntary activity. However, there are still not enough
opportunities for young people, so whoever wishes to get involved
should be given the opportunity and support to do so.
Chair: Does anyone want to disagree with
that? Are all four of you broadly in agreement?
Q20 Craig Whittaker: In line with
your scepticismalthough that is probably not the right
wordabout the involvement of other organisations in the
NCS, bearing in mind that this year is only the first of a pilot,
and that only 12 organisations have been awarded contracts, what
makes you think that other organisations will not be involved?
Fiona Blacke: I do not think that
it is an organisational issue. Many of those delivering the pilots
are well-respected, existing youth organisations that are predominantly
in the voluntary sector. They have other programmes.
Q21 Craig Whittaker: So do you
have evidence to show that those programmes will not be involved
in the services?
Charlotte Hill: I think that Fiona's
point was that they would probably stop running their own specific
programmes and do NCS instead. Some colleagues said at a meeting
on Monday that it was a bit like turkeys voting for Christmas,
in that they have their own great programmes already that deliver
many such outcomes for young people, and if they were to deliver
NCS during the summer, it would be to the detriment of those programmes.
Fiona Blacke: If you could do
your Duke of Edinburgh gold award and that would also be your
NCS when you were 16, wouldn't that be great? That is the answer.
Q22 Chair: The Government could,
at a time of limited resource, spend a lot of public money to
create a badged "NCS" that would have come about anyway.
Is that what you are saying?
Fiona Blacke: A set of quality
standards and activities were the key elements of NCS. Organisations
running programmes like that could ask to be recognised as delivering
it, and with quite a large infrastructure already in place, they
would be able to offer it.
Q23 Lisa Nandy: How relevant are
youth services to young people?
Liam Preston: Again, it depends
on the specific youth service. We are receiving case studies
from throughout the country suggesting how much youth services
actually benefit young people and how much they have changed their
lives. Young people change so much between the ages of 11 and
18, so youth services are relevant to them and have a huge impact
on their lives.
Q24 Lisa Nandy: Is there evidence
that the current youth services are the services that young people
want?
Susanne Rauprich: We have to be
honest. There are still a number of services that are not necessarily
what young people want. Bad practice does exist. Not too long
ago, for example, there was a big drive to get some youth facilities
to open up on a Friday and Saturday night because that is when
young people really want them. If you follow the principles of
good youth work and shape the services around the needs and the
wants of young people, and get them to take an active role in
their design and delivery, you can be certain that they will deliver.
However, if you shape youth services around the needs of the
worker who has a family to go home to, around local authority
imperatives or around the fact that a caretaker needs to be paid
on a Saturday night but that is not feasible, you are on the road
to creating a service
Q25 Chair: Name names, Susanne.
People always generalise about bad practice and never ever tell
us where we can find it. Does anyone want to tell us about a
local authority area? The Audit Commission has said that there
is a correlation between budget and quality of youth work, but
that that is not universal. There are sometimes people with a
smaller budget but an ability to deliver great outcomes, and others
with large budgets who do not deliver, probably for the reasons
you are giving. Can you tell us about anyone?
Witnesses: No.
Fiona Blacke: It is an interesting
question. I was talking earlier about youth work being a distinctive
educational approach. What makes it distinctive is that the curriculum
does not come in a book, package or prescription, but derives
from the young person with whom we come face to face. Their life
experience forms the nature of the curriculum to which a good
youth worker works. We take that young person's life experience,
develop the curriculum and then create structured experiences
with them that give them the opportunity to reflect on what they
have learned and done, and to take that learning to other places.
It is not really youth work if it is not relevant to the young
personit is activities or something that adults choose
to do. Youth work, by its very nature, is relevant to young people,
because that is what it is.
Q26 Lisa Nandy: Liam, you mentioned
involving young people in their own services. My experience of
when young people genuinely drive and control their own services
has been incredibly positive. However, too often there is a blurring
of the boundaries between consultation and participation. Genuinely
youth-led services should involve a budget that is controlled
by young people. How far is that a realistic aspiration? Does
that happen at the moment? If so, can it continue to happen,
given the level of cuts to services that we are about to see?
Charlotte Hill: From our experience,
for more than three years we have had UK Youth Voice, which is
our young persons' panel that sits at the heart of all that we
do. They sit on our board of trusteesthey interviewed me
for my jobsit on all our committees and plan all our programmes.
They manage all their own budgets. They are completely equal
members of everything we do, but that is not a cheap thing to
do properly. It required a lot of support for us to have the really
meaningful participation of those young people. Equally, unless
you are very careful about really wanting to hear the voices of
all young people who use your services, you will get a self-selecting
group of young people who will put their hands up because they
want to do it. We have worked really hard. We have a programme
called Hearing Unheard Voices, which works to get the voices of
asylum seekers, ethnic minorities and young people in or leaving
careall sorts of groupsheard so that we have really
meaningful participation but, again, that is not a cheap or easy
thing to do. To do it meaningfully and get real outcomes takes
investment, and local authorities have to recognise that they
must invest some of their money in exactly that. Great work such
as the British Youth Council's needs investment. If you really
want young people to have a voice, you must put some money into
it.
Liam Preston: We support a network
of 620 local youth councils, and we are finding that there are
areas of best practice where local authorities really engage with
their local youth councils to review services. Ofsted recently
said that a key to achieving success and improvements in those
areas is making young people part of the reviewing process (Supporting
Young People - an evaluation of recent reforms, 2010). In one
survey of local youth councils that we conducted, 62% felt that
they were able to improve youth services by being part of that
process, so we feel it is a really important issue (Young Voices:
BYC 2010). Young people want to be able to influence the services
that they use, and who is better placed to speak to local government
about those issues than young people themselves?
On the issue of cost, if you tailor a service
to what young people need and let them review it, rather than
getting other people to come in, it will end up saving money.
The end user reviewing a service is always going to be better
than someone from the outside.
Lisa Nandy: With the limited funding
now available, should we recommend that funding should be allocated
to services that are led by young people?
Witnesses: Yes.
Fiona Blacke: That would be a
great recommendation.
Susanne Rauprich: May I add something?
I think that youth participation has come a long way over the
past few years. What is really interesting is that if, for example,
you had here the young people who have been through the Young
Advisors programme that started a few years ago, you would see
that they are now feeling entrepreneurial and want to set up their
own services. Your recommendation should include the opportunity
for young people to be entrepreneurial.
I understand that you are going to visit Berlin
in the next month or so. I ask you to look at a project there
where young people are fully in control, given the keys to facilities,
or allowed to run things without the presence of adults. We have
come so far in this country and have a range of really good young
people's participation, involvement and leadership programmes,
but there is always that little bit of discomfort with adults
handing over controlthis country does not seem too comfortable
with that as yet.
Q27 Charlotte Leslie: I think
that we are all agreed that a certain amount of young people's
ownership of their services is a good thing. In hard economic
times, how much merit do you think there isand to what
extent is it already happeningin young people taking control
of the financial realities of the services they are using, and
introducing them to the reality that stuff does not come for free
but takes a lot of money and hard work?
Fiona Blacke: Under the previous
Administration, one of the great successes was the youth opportunity
fund and youth capital fund, which were distinct, ring-fenced
elements of the budget that local authorities gave young people
to control. There was huge scepticism among elected members about
whether young people would make sensible decisions, but the evidence
is that they did it extremely well.
Q28 Charlotte Leslie: And also
in terms of actual fundraising, which I say because I have been
involved in a project in Henbury in Bristol where the kids wanted
somethingwe didn't have access to grants or anythingso
they went out and raised the money themselves. What sometimes
gets overlooked is that the Government are not the only source
of funding. Obviously you need that sort of support, but there
could be merit in the kids doing more fundraising themselves,
which makes them appreciate what they have fundraised all the
more.
Fiona Blacke: The O2
initiative, which we manage for O2, gives young people
direct funding to run their projects, and then UK Youth trains
them to deliver those projects. If they are successful, they
get even more money to do it. That is about community-based projects,
often for other young people, and it is incredibly successful.
Q29 Charlotte Leslie: Is that
actually saying that there's no grants or bigger bodies at all,
and that they just get out there and do sponsored runs and stuff,
and the community gets the money? Is it that they don't take
money from a big pot or a council or anything like that, but they
make money?
Witnesses: Yes.
Q30 Charlotte Leslie: Is that
an emphasis we need to shift to so that kids can actually make
money when they don't have money to begin with at all?
Fiona Blacke: There is one challenge
about that, though. It's probably not too bad, I suspect, in
your constituency, but it might be more difficult in Middlesbrough.
Charlotte Leslie: Well, go and visit
Henbury.
Susanne Rauprich: What you are
describing is very good youth work practice. It happens up and
down the country and has done for a number of years. Young people
seeing something they want to do and needing to make it happen
is an absolute basis of youth work.
Q31 Charlotte Leslie: There is
not always a pot of money for you; sometimes you have to do it
for yourself.
Susanne Rauprich: Exactly, and
we have been doing that sort of fundraising for ever, so it wouldn't
be a new approach you were promoting, but you would be supporting
good youth work practice. That is absolutely the right thing to
do.
Chair: We are now going to move on to
funding.
Q32 Neil Carmichael: Before we
do, can I just ask about social enterprises for young people?
Would you encourage them to establish those, with the sort of
projects and activities that you have been talking about?
Susanne Rauprich: Absolutely.
There is good work being done by social enterprise, and it is
being taken up in schools and so on.
Q33 Neil Carmichael: Moving on
to funding, which is obviously an important aspect of this, and
mindful of the fact that my own county council has been reducing
funding for these services, as many have, what kinds of youth
services and providers are being prioritised by authorities in
this time of expenditure reductions?
Charlotte Hill: Susanne is probably
very well placed to answer that, as NCVYS have done a fantastic
survey, looking around the country through its members, of the
impacts and where cuts have fallen. The feedback we are getting
from a lot of our associations around the country is that these
decisions have not been made yet; a lot of them are in limbo.
The feeling they get is that decisions on spending for young people,
in particular, are way down the priority list of spending decisions
that have to be made. Many of our organisations face the challenge
that either decisions are not being made yet, or the people they
need to speak to about those decisions are facing redundancy themselves
within local authorities. The uncertainty that people have about
their own jobs in local authorities is passed on to our members.
Q34 Neil Carmichael: So there
are no trends emerging at this stage?
Charlotte Hill: I think, Susanne,
that there probably are.
Susanne Rauprich: Yes, there are
a variety of high-level trends. We are seeing anecdotal evidence
as individual projects report what is happening to them. If the
Committee is really interested in getting an overview, there are
now a number of organisations that monitor the effect, and the
reports are updated daily. We have produced a report called "Comprehensive
Cuts"there was part 1 and part 2. I don't know whether
you have looked at that, but I can leave you a few copies. We
update that regularly, and we have a financial blog, which my
colleague, Don, who is sitting in the background here, updates
as information comes our way. As Charlotte says, at the moment
we know the level of cuts that are being considered, proposed
and decided upon by local authorities. How that then filters down
to individual projects is a little too early to say. I can also
tell you that in some local authority areas, they look at 2011
and 2012 as a sort of transition, which is a really interesting
approach. They have to make top-line cuts, but they are basically
working with the voluntary sector quite effectivelythat
is their intentionto re-create and reshape services for
young people.
To finish, you will know that the funding of
youth services is not mandatory, so it is quite easy to encounter
a climate in which significant cuts need to be made. Local authorities
that are dependent on area-based grants are more susceptible.
We see more severe cuts being made in those areas, so again the
picture is not even across the country. There was one authority
that was reported to have an increase, but that was just one example.
Right across the board, all we are seeing is significant reductions
to services for young people.
Fiona Blacke: The most recent
survey of children and young people's services by directors of
children's services suggested that 80% were anticipating cuts
to children's services, and 56% of the cuts were directed specifically
at youth services. It would be useful to be able to say that there
is a common picture emerging across the country. The reality is
that far-sighted local authorities, which are really thinking
about how to modernise and deliver public services in the new
environment, are doing a lot of work around the needs base of
their youth population and their communities. They are beginning
to develop strong approaches to strategic commissioning, and then
they look at who is best placed to deliver that. This is not based
on a conversation with themselves about whether that is an in-house
or a voluntary sector provider. It is about saying we can actually
model the specifications of what we need for our young people,
and then put that out to whoever is able to deliver it. In some
places, local authority youth services are forming themselves
into social enterprises and co-operatives to try to deliver that.
In other places, there are quite sophisticated models of third
sector supply chain management emerging, with one overarching
organisation being able to manage a host of services.
Q35 Neil Carmichael: So you're
expecting a fair bit of dynamism in developing services.
Fiona Blacke: That's a nice word
for it, yes.
Chair: Driven by desperation.
Q36 Neil Carmichael: Youth workers
are obviously vulnerable in these cuts. I don't know of any statistics
yet. I don't know if you do. What is your feeling about the direction
of travel there?
Fiona Blacke: There are some big
challenges at the moment. Over the past few years we've moved
youth work from a diploma to a degree level qualification. The
changes in funding to higher education are directly influencing
the training of youth workers, because courses that were previously
subsidised will no longer get those subsidies. There are big issues.
Where do people make their cuts first? They make them in terms
of training and development and continuing personal development,
and that whole area of the work force. We share a view that one
of the great things about youth work and youth services is that
they are often staffed at a professional level by people who started
as a volunteer in their own community.
Chair: We'll come to training later.
Let's stick to funding for now.
Q37 Neil Carmichael: You, Fiona,
have commented that in an environment of reductions in public
expenditure, desirable services may be vulnerable. You contrasted
that with essential service provision. Could you describe to us
what you think is essential and what you think is desirable?
Fiona Blacke: It's a really
difficult question. Absolutely essential is a comprehensive youth
work offer to those young people who are most marginalised and
most at risk, if I had to put my hand on my heart. Alongside thatthis
is the critical thingis an investment in supporting communities,
voluntary and community sector organisations to move into the
rest of the space. The notion that you target your resources on
those who most need it, but at the same time, you grow the capacity
for communities and young people to deliver to the rest, is where
the priority lies.
Q38 Neil Carmichael: Presumably
that latter point is in terms of infrastructure.
Fiona Blacke: It is colloquially
known as market making. One of the issues is that a lot of local
government procures rather than commissions. You put out a contract
and buy it, but commissioning is much bigger than that. It is
about saying, "Do I have the infrastructure to deliver the
services that I need? If I don't, I have to invest in creating
that infrastructure."
Q39 Neil Carmichael: You are touching
on an important point there, because the role of local authorities
is changing from a provider role to an enabling role. Do you think
that local authorities are equipped in capacity and outlook to
bring about necessary changes to what you just described?
Fiona Blacke: Some are. The challenge
is to enable the best to lead the worst. Part of the challenge
for those of us who work at a national level is how we collectively
put in place the mechanism to enable local authorities to understand
what it is they need to do, and to have the kind of dialogue with
the voluntary and community sector and young people that enables
us to do that.
Charlotte Hill: There are examples
of really great practice in local authority commissioning, and
there are, unfortunately, examples where they are floundering
a bit. Mr Dakin, I believe that you are from Scunthorpe. North
Lincolnshire is an example where we have worked brilliantly with
the local authority and it has commissioned fantastically. As
I mentioned earlier, we deliver Youth Achievement Foundations
for young people who have been excluded. Our first pilot Youth
Achievement Foundation partnering with 7KS is in Scunthorpe. The
local authority there has done a fantastic job of commissioning
that service out over a number of years. It has worked so well
because it gives a contract for three years to extend to five
years. It means that in working with 7KS we can recruit staff
and invest in a building, because we know that we have a customer
to work with. It has worked really well.
There is a panel that the local authority sit
on, all the local heads sit on and the Youth Achievement Foundation
sit on. They look at a case-by-case example of whether a young
person should be excluded. There is no actual exclusion. There
is a managed move; they come to a foundation and there is a long-term
relationship. That commissioning relationship works fantastically.
There are examples of best practice out there that have been happening
for a number of years. It would be good if more could be done
to ensure that that best practice is shared among all local authorities,
because where it is working, it is working really well.
Q40 Neil Carmichael: What sort
of mechanism do local authorities have to share best practice?
We know the statutory functions that they have.
Chair: Neil, before we deal with the
entire next section on commissioning, I wonder whether you have
any further questions on funding before I come to Nic on precisely
that topic.
Q41 Neil Carmichael: Sorry, but
funding and commissioning are very closely linked, for obvious
reasons. We cannot discuss one without discussing the other. Sometimes
I have to be hauled back to the track. Written evidence that this
Committee has received so far has talked about the effect of cuts
from 20% to 100% in youth services. That is a huge range. Where
do you think that the actual figure lies, and what evidence do
you have to back that up?
Fiona Blacke: I think it's a moving
picture. As Susanne has said, a lot of the reports say that this
is an interim year and many local authorities are trying to buy
themselves a bit of space to make decisions. There are some places
where they are talking about completely removing the youth services.
There are propositions to do that. Even in those places, I am
not sure that the decisions are finalised. Those authorities are
looking for alternatives. I do not think that we can say yet.
Charlotte Hill: Even if we cannot
say what the percentage is, we are clearly seeing a lot of the
impact. Where contracts are ending in March, people are having
to lay their staff off. We are losing a lot of good people who
deliver fantastic work for young people. Ultimately, it may well
be that they are re-employed, but the fact is that they are having
to be laid off now because those contracts end in March.
Q42 Neil Carmichael: Last but
not least, what balance should exist between funding from the
public sector and funding from other sources, such as charity
and voluntary funding? I do not expect a definite answer, just
an overall picture.
Chair: Particularly in the light of Graham
Allen's early intervention report, which suggests that he will
produce another report looking at private sector bonds. Perhaps
also in the context of payment by results, too.
Susanne Rauprich: That is an interesting
question, albeit a difficult one to answer, because there are
so many interlocking and interlinking factors. If you take a large
chunk of public sector funding out of the system, you will have
to replace that somehow if you are committed to services to young
people. There are two sources from which that funding might come.
One is from the young person or the user themselves.
That might be difficult, particularly if you are looking at disadvantaged
young people, because they are also hit by cuts in income and
so on. So their spending power might be limited.
You then have the private sector. Such funding
is in its infancy, and it is something on which providers would
welcome the support and help of the Governmentand others
who are in a position to do soto act as a broker bringing
private sector funders into the market.
At this moment in time I find it difficult to
get a sense of the appetite of private sector companies. There
have been some real success stories, one of which is O2.
The Co-operative has spent a lot of money on young people
and has launched a huge programme. But we haven't seen a universal
understanding among corporates that they should be considering
investment in any kind of programme. Corporate social responsibility
programmes need to be developed. There are too many companies
that think that they can send their work force out to paint a
wall in a youth club and that it is done with. It is complicated,
therefore, to come up with a figure that would answer your question.
Q43 Neil Carmichael: So you want
more sophisticated CSR strategies?
Susanne Rauprich: Absolutely.
Fiona Blacke: There are models
emerging of more sophisticated CSR.
You also asked about social impact bonds, and
one of the issues is that we don't have a framework or a metric
for the social return on investment of youth services. So, rhetorically,
we would tell you that, yes, it's good for all parts, it reaches
the parts that other things don't reach, but we don't have the
evidence base. That's one of the things that we are developing
at the moment, because, in order to secure social finance, you
have to be able to demonstrate that you're having an impact.
Chair: I'm going to have to cut you off.
I'm sorry.
Q44 Pat Glass: From April 2011,
all central funding for youth services, including the 10 separately
ring-fenced budgets, will come together in the early intervention
grant, which will be £2 billion by 2014. That grant has to
support Sure Start centres, which cost £2 billion on their
own, and it has to cover the cost of extending free education
to two-year-olds and the cost of short breaks for disabled and
vulnerable children. It also has to support programmes targeted
at preventing children from engaging in crime and at tackling
substance misuse and teenage pregnancy. It has to provide support
for children with mental health problems and children with learning
difficulties, as well as transition arrangements, collections,
behaviour support services, CAMHS, paramedic services and SEN
services. Where do you think the youth services will sit in that
list of priorities? What will be the consequences for young people?
Liam Preston: Where do they sit?
Probably quite low down that list, which is one of the reasons
we are discussing this issue. It is a concern for young people.
We estimate that 50 local youth councils have already gone in
the past year. So there is a sense of "What are we going
to do"? Because, again and again, local councils are finding
it easier to drop local youth services from their budget, which
is a disheartening thing for young people to have to go through.
Q45 Pat Glass: What would be the
consequences for those using universal or open access services?
What about for those using targeted services?
Liam Preston: Again, it is really
difficult. It is easier to find the numbers of people who use
targeted services, and it is almost easier to justify that as
expenditure, because you can back it up with figures. However,
I have already mentioned how helpful and beneficial universal
services are, because they will often be more preventive than
targeted services.
Fiona Blacke: I honestly believe
that failure to invest in targeted and preventive services for
young people is an economic time bomb, that we will pay for in
future. Staff at Fairbridge, for example, can tell you that if
they are working with a young person involved in the criminal
justice system, they can keep that young person out of the system
for £4,000 a year. The cost to the state of having that young
person in a custodial place is £65,000. You don't have to
be an economistand I'm certainly notto work out
that that is bad maths.
Nic Dakin: Thank you for the plug for
7KS, which I visited the other week.
Chair: I have visited it as well.
Q46 Nic Dakin: Though that is
largely commissioning within the school day context, it none the
less may be a model that can be used more broadly. I have spent
my whole working life with 16 to 19-year-olds, so I know how diverse
and transient they can be. They are growing and have dynamic lives.
Therefore, I am interested in how we use those young people in
helping commission services in a sustainable way. Charlotte in
particular recognised earlier that there needs to be an infrastructure
to support that. Today's thing isn't tomorrow's, and today and
tomorrow can be quite close together for young people. I am interested
to hear from Liam how young people's voices can help deliver the
strategic commissioning that we were talking about earlier.
Liam Preston: One of the most
important factors is having young people at the table and involving
them in the decision making. They will often know what is required
of their peers and the people around them. It is essential for
young people to be able to be involved in that decision making
and in making an impact on the projects that are commissioned.
One thing we find is that when young people speak against cuts
in their services, local government is saying, "It's not
us. It is at national level that we are being told to make cuts."
Then when young people are talking nationally, they are told that
the decisions are made at local government level. They are finding
that they are up against a brick wall. In order to improve these
services, young people need to be at the heart of what they are
doing. It is about being youth led and having youth at the table.
That is what we think is really important.
Q47 Nic Dakin: Local authorities
have the role of strategic commissioning. You were saying interesting
things, Fiona, about the difference between commissioning and
procurement. How do we involve young people in that strategic
commissioning, particularly of those harder-to-reach activities,
for which young people are less likely to come forward? Other
young people will commission their own activities because they
will find where they are. They won't necessarily be at that table.
How do we manage that?
Susanne Rauprich: You might be
familiar with the commissioning cycle. It has different elements.
Rather than just say we involve young people in commissioning,
it is often easier to involve young people in different aspects
of the commissioning cycle. You absolutely have to involve young
people, for example, in needs assessment. There is a variety of
ways of doing that, by employing the local youth council if it
still exists, talking to a range of young people directlythere
is a whole range of different methods that can be used right through
the cycle. In Devon, they appointed a young commissioner, as a
model, and that has worked quite well. The Department for Communities
and Local Government considered that to be an effective model
and appointed four or five commissioning beacons. It might be
worth your while looking at that as an example of where young
people can be used fairly effectively. The beauty is that we have
a wealth of experience of effective methods of involving young
people in creative and varying ways, depending on circumstances.
Charlotte Hill: There's a lot
of expertise and good practice about this out there. There are
organisations such as the British Youth Council and UK Youth.
Some local authorities do it brilliantly. The real problem is
that the sharing of good practice just does not seem to happen
effectively, for some reason. Some local authorities do brilliant
work with engaging young people in commissioning. A piece of work
has to be doneit may be happening already, and I just don't
know about iton sharing that good practice, or on using
the expertise of organisations that do participation as their
bread and butter.
Q48 Nic Dakin: Are there any recommendations
that we should be making?
Liam Preston: Of the local youth
councils in 2009-10, seven out of 10 administered a youth opportunities
fund. Young people on the ground are actually doing this already.
Going back to Charlotte's point, it is about sharing that best
practice and getting more involved in areas that are not quite
already up to scratch.
Fiona Blacke: There are several
recommendations you can make, Nic. First, there is support for
commissioners, which is driven by central Government. It would
be very helpful to recommend that part of that commissioning support
advice was support to commissioners about how engage young people
effectively. The other thing is that the DCLG could be helpful,
as could the Local Government Association, in driving the sharing
of that best practice. We are part of the Local Government Association's
top-slice family.
Q49 Chair: Haven't the Government
suggested, although talking about localism, that they are going
to send some sort of recommendation on the proportion of services
provided by the third sector as opposed to local authorities?
Is that right, or am I mistaken in thinking that?
Fiona Blacke: I haven't heard.
In terms of levers, one thing that would be helpful is some kind
of consensus about commissioning standards. For example, if every
local authority said, "We will only commission organisations
that build young people's voice into the heart of the services
we offer," that would go a long way.
Q50 Damian Hinds: We had a conversation
earlier, mainly with Fiona, about the numbers of people involved
in youth services, and I think you mentioned a figure of 28%.
I have to say that that sounds very high to me, although I could
be mistaken. I don't know if that analysis is already in your
written submission to the Committee, but if it's not, could you
include itdown to the lowest possible level of detail?
Fiona Blacke: Yes.
Q51 Damian Hinds: That would be
very helpful. Similarly, for all four of you if possible, if you
have any hard data on trends over time in this sector, for example
on the numbers of people employed, and particularly on young people's
own reporting of their experience, for example survey questions
on, "There's nothing to do round here," and so on, it
would be very useful for the Committee to be able to see how things
have changed.
I want to talk about results and effectiveness.
Most of us, when we see a good youth club or facility or meet
an inspirational youth worker, regard it as self-evident or intuitive
that they are doing a good job. But what evidence is there of
effectiveness? In a world of scarcity, choice and cost, particularly
when we are talking about allocating public funds, whatbeyond
the Fairbridge example that Fiona gave; I do not know whether
that is an isolated exampledo we have as broader evidence
that helps us to know where to put effort and funding?
Susanne Rauprich: It's very difficult
to have a universal picture, because there is no universal metric.
You have individual organisations that are very good at demonstrating
the impact of their work, and there are lots of organisations
that are not so good. Mainly, the larger charities and voluntary
organisations would be very good at telling the story. That is
why Fairbridge is a good example that can be cited. Catch22 and
the Prince's Trust can be cited. Those sorts of stories are there.
Anecdotal evidence and young people's stories, of the nature that
you were asking for, are also available. You go round and you
can have young people telling you stories about how a certain
intervention has changed their life, so that is there. However,
what is really difficult, in terms of evidence, is to put that
into some sort of national grid or set of statistics for the amounts
of investment, whereby we could show the total amount of investment
and the total amount of return, and a straight journey from A
that will always lead to B. That is quite difficult. That is the
problem that we're facing.
Fiona Blacke: The answer is that
there isn't a single evidence base. That is one of the things
that makes decision making incredibly difficult.
Charlotte Hill: It's something
that we, as a sector, have to get better at.
Damian Hinds: I was going to observe
that, too.
Charlotte Hill: Absolutely. I
am relatively new to the sector, but it is now universally agreed
that people are going to look at results, and they are going to
need outcomes and evidence. Increasingly, people are realising
that. It is not impossible to do. I think that people have traditionally
said that it's really hard and asked how you can measure whether
a young person hasn't gone into the criminal justice system because
of the intervention. There are, however, definite measurements,
and we've been working very closely with Teesside University's
Social Futures Institute over a number of years now, looking at
exactly that. That's the thing. It's going to take some time to
build up the long-term impacts, but it is happening. People are
realising that we absolutely have to start having very clear independent
measurements of the impact that youth work has. The sector is
moving towards that, but it has been too slow.
Q52 Damian Hinds: For good or
ill, that is the world we're living in.
You mentioned one academic study. Who is leading
this work in your sector? Why haven't we heard about it?
Fiona Blacke: Because we're just
beginning. We are probably now going to tell you about 10 different
examples of people who are leading it, which is always a worry
for us. We're doing some work with the Young Foundation to develop
a similar calculatorwe hopeto the one that is being
used for family intervention.
Susanne Rauprich: The Greater
London authority is funding Project Oracle, which has the ambition
of bringing together a sort of metric for London. The Prince's
Trust has just embarked on another exercise. You have heard from
UK Youth and the NYA. There are already many organisations out
there that are doing it quite well for their own circumstances
and that have invested quite heavily into things like that.
The problem is that there is no overarching
and universal way of doing it. That is going to be difficult.
What is most needed is, I suppose, certain standards, which can
be agreed against, and then it is up to each organisation to use
their own measurement tool to describe their work against those
particular standards. What we don't need is yet another measurement
tool, of which there are plenty; what we do need is an agreement
on the standards.
Q53 Damian Hinds: Are there plenty
of robust, universally accepted measurement tools? If there are,
we haven't been talking about them this morning.
Charlotte Hill: Lots of people
are doing lots of different things. I don't think that there is
one robustly agreed measurement tool.
Susanne Rauprich: It is the agreement
thing that is the problem.
Q54 Damian Hinds: Have any of
you called Graham Allen to talk about his study on early intervention
and to ask to piggyback either on phase one, which has just finished,
or on phase two, looking at social impact bonds?
Susanne Rauprich: That's an opportunity
that we are obviously looking at. We should take advantage of
that.
Charlotte Hill: We've been in
touch, but we'll certainly be following up on that, because, again,
we are looking around social impact bonds and bonds particularly
around investment for young people who have been excluded.
Q55 Ian Mearns: Probably going
back 15 or 20 years, the NYA was pretty much data rich back in
those days, wasn't it?
Fiona Blacke: It was. Those were
the days when we were funded by the Government to do that.
Q56 Ian Mearns: In the absence
of that infrastructure, is the fact that you are all here, and
representing fairly diverse parts of the youth programme that
is out there, not an opportunity to bring some heads together
and commission some joint research between the different organisations
at the table and bring in others? Let's have a go at that, because
it seems to me that we are using a bit of a scattergun approach
at the moment and not getting any great results from it.
Susanne Rauprich: There are two
different elements to that. On the one hand, the issue is the
data. They are very simple management information data. About
three or four years ago, we did a study that looked at the management
information needs for the voluntary sector and we found the same
picture. If we asked organisations such as the Duke of Edinburgh
award, they would be able to give the answer just like that because
they had invested really heavily in management information. What
is needed is quite heavy investment. To put in the system and
manage it, we priced at something like £2 million. We do
not have £2 million to put into something like that. It
would probably have to be a central investment, or a wealthy backer
would have to be found from somewhere. That is why it has never
been established. Social impact tools are a little easier.
Q57 Ian Mearns: I am wondering
whether the sector in conjunction, say, with the LGA could start
talking to each other.
Fiona Blacke: We are. We are
talking together. There are incredibly rich and quite strong
partnerships between all the organisations that are here. That
is one piece of work that we have not done. It is certainly something
that we could do.
Charlotte Hill: We do all work
together, but we need to do it a lot more. There is a lot more
we could all do together. We are all aware that there are lots
of shared things. Tools for evaluation is a sector that we must
put our heads together on a bit more.
Q58 Damian Hinds: Given the challenge
and where we are on the timetable, how do you see payment by results
working in the sector, and when?
Susanne Rauprich: We would welcome
payment by results. It is an interesting concept. It lends itself
to some areas where outcomes can be clearly specified, so for
universal services it is a little more difficult. It is probably
easier for some targeted youth services. We hope that we can
commission someone to look at that in greater detail. It will
not be before the end of this inquiry, but we hope to keep you
informed as it develops. Obviously, there are certain issues
with the payment of results. One of them is how voluntary organisations
in particular manage it, in that the risk is obviously passed
on to the provider.
Damian Hinds: Partly.
Chair: It depends who is commissioning
it.
Q59 Damian Hinds: You do not have
to design it badly; you can design it well.
Susanne Rauprich: Absolutely,
so that would be our main concern. Payment by results is based
on that principle. Organisations have to guarantee that they
deliver and are therefore paid for it. There are risks, which
might be difficult to bear, particularly for smaller organisations.
Our reservation is that you would have to be imaginative and make
sure that the funding schedules would allow the smallest to participate.
Q60 Chair: It seems an extraordinary
failure that you cannot make a better fist of explaining what
a difference you make. If we look at youth, in particular, we
have NEETs now. I know that it is not only about avoidance but
enrichment as well, but throughout the period of the previous
Government, the number of young people not in education, employment
or training just went up and up to 2007, when there was record
economic growthand more NEETs. Of course, there has been
the downturn and the problems, and the figure has rocketed again.
There are a million such young people, and to
an extent, we are hearing, "You have to keep the status quo,
because we do a great job. We have no evidence for that, but
please support us, and these dreadful cuts will hurt young people."
To an extentI am taking the controversial viewpeople
are saying, "Young people have been let down. Something
has gone pretty savagely wrong, and the very groups that work
with them and have a particular duty to work with the most vulnerable
do not seem to have come forward. They don't seem to be able
to evidence their ability to help stop young people ending up
in the dead end, where a million currently find themselves."
Discuss.
Fiona Blacke: Organisation by
organisationwhether or not it is a Connexion service, and
I have run onethey can evidence that to you. Individual
organisations, as a sector, cannot do that. Part of that is because
of the diversity of the beast that you are talking about. It is
almost difficult to describe us as a sector. We are so differentfrom
the very local to the statutory service, to the private deliverer.
The funding streams from the Government have been so different.
NEETs programmes would have been funded by the Learning and Skills
Council and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
Funding for youth would have come from local authorities, ring-fence
funding would have come from here and money for participation
would have come from CLG. You name it, that's where it's been.
The sector has struggled as a consequence of that.
Q61 Chair: As we write a report
that makes recommendations that the Government have to respond
to, do you want to add any thoughts on recommendations that we
can make? Because times such as this come periodicallyas
long as we haven't ended boom and bustit is very important
that the value that you deliver can be evidenced in such a way
that decision makers with limited pots can allocate you money.
At the moment, they appear in many places not to be doing so.
Charlotte Hill: I certainly think
that some capacity-building within the sector would be hugely
valuable as a recommendation from this. I agree with you that
the bigger organisations are able to do it, but lots of organisations
out there don't. They have never properly invested in evaluation
and in really recording in a meaningful way their outcomes, outputs
and impacts. They have been doing fantastic work, but they have
not necessarily had the tools to measure the impact. It is a huge
bit of work that could be supported as a recommendation from this.
Q62 Chair: Of course, if local
authorities have the overriding duty for the well-being of their
young people, which they do, they should have been working out
what part you play in delivering their ability to reduce NEETs,
to enrich people's lives and so on. I wouldn't put it all on you.
Charlotte Hill: Just quickly on
payment by results, a lot of the feedback we have had from smaller
organisations suggests that they have two problems with commissioning.
First, if you are not a big organisation you might be the best
placed organisation locally to deliver, but you cannot engage
in the commissioning process. Secondly, payment by results prevents
you from being able to do it, because you would need some sort
of part-payment up front.
Q63 Chair: It doesn't have to
be broken down to that level. Someone who is being paid by results
can, even without massive amounts of rich data, decide that they
believe that in order to deliver the outcomes on NEETs or whatever
they are being paid for, actually, youth services are part of
that. They can decide to invest money and pay it to commission
the service without requiring endless data collection, because
they believe actually, it is part of a joined-up approach.
Fiona Blacke: Health services,
I have to say, are traditionally much better at commissioning
in that kind of way than youth services.
Q64 Damian Hinds: It is absolutely
crucial for the smaller organisations that have to blossom that
first of all there are mechanisms. To return to the conversation
I was having with Susanne and Fiona, you don't have to design
these things badly. There is a role for you people as leaders
in this sector to make the case for how you design those things
well. Secondly and critically, for the smaller organisations in
particularbut even the bigger organisations, franklythe
last thing anybody wants to do is to drown them in a sea of measurements.
There have to be judicious, sensible ways of doing these things
which let people get on with what they do best. SorryI
realise that these are supposed to be questions, not statements.
Chair: You're following my bad example.
Q65 Neil Carmichael: What's clear
from this evidence session is that there really isn't any planning
strategy, or whatever, for youth services. What sort of shape
should we be thinking of for such a strategy in terms of our final
conclusions? How should we deal with the fact that you are obviously
having relationships with so many different structures, some of
which are not necessarily accountable and some of which are clearly
not talking to each other?
Fiona Blacke: I think I'd be rich
if I knew the answer. That is an incredibly difficult question.
Charlotte Hill: I also think it's
quite difficult to have an overarching strategy. The fact is that
if the Government want local authorities to make decisions at
a local level, it is up to the local authorities how they want
to commission the youth services and what they want to spend their
money on. I don't see how, at a national level, it is possible
to do that if you are really meaningfully saying, "You're
making your decisions at a local level."
Fiona Blacke: But there is something
about standards. Inspection looks like it's going to go for youth
services. We need to have some nationally agreed standards for
what a great local youth service should look like; I think that
would be helpful. I am not saying levels and I am not talking
about prescription, but I think a shared view about what good
looks like might be helpful.
Q66 Chair: Or outcomes.
Fiona Blacke: Or outcomes.
Q67 Neil Carmichael: I am now
straying into territory on which I haven't really done any research,
but I am making an assumption because we are going to Helsinki
and Berlin as best practice then good practice for us to see.
Have you thought of looking in northern Europe, for example, and
asking several questions, such as how is delivery organised, is
there any sort of benchmarking, and are there any structures that
effectively ensure that best practice is shared?
Chair: Susanne?
Susanne Rauprich: Well, as you
can tell from my accent
Neil Carmichael: I'm from the north-east,
so don't worry.
Susanne Rauprich: Anyway. I wish
we had more opportunities to look a bit broader, to see how other
people run certain things. As NCVYS, we have ourselves been to
Berlin, in September. We went, for example, to look at a system
of accrediting volunteers and their achievements, because we think
that that is a really good scheme which, ideally, we would like
to import into this country. It would be about recognising the
efforts of volunteers and certificating them in some way, so that
they are more widely recognised. So, yes is the answerwe
do look elsewhere and see where we can learn from best practice.
I am sure others have as well.
Fiona Blacke: We now run for the
British Council the European Youth in Action programme, so we
are hoping that that will provide some opportunities for the whole
sector to look more broadly across Europe.
Charlotte Hill: Just to add, we
are a member of an organisation called ECYC, the European Confederation
of Youth Clubs, so we do a lot of work with colleagues across
Europe. In fact, we have invited all the chief executives and
presidents from across Europe to come in Maythey are all
coming to England and we will be looking at some of this shared
practice of our new areas. There are lots of examples of sharing
practice.
Liam Preston: We're the national
youth council of the UK, so we engage in the European Youth Forum
and speak to other national youth councils across Europe, again
to engage in best practice as much as possible, and to see if
it works and how best to assimilate it.
Q68 Tessa Munt: A Government report
in 2002 said that perhaps we ought to aspire to having one youth
worker to 400 young people aged 13 to 19. How far along that route
might we be? Charlotte's pulled a face, so
Charlotte Hill: I was just thinking
that I have no idea how near, or not, we are to that. I assume
we are absolutely miles away from that. I don't know if you have
got statistics?
Fiona Blacke: I've got 2007 statistics,
which suggest that there were 8,273 full-time equivalent staff
employed, which was an average of 46 per local authority.
Tessa Munt: Great.
Fiona Blacke: Compared with 51
in 2006even then the trend was going down.
Q69 Chair: Do you have any figures
further back?
Fiona Blacke: Again, the trend
seemed to be going down in that period, I think. I can certainly
let you have these statistics.
Q70 Tessa Munt: That would be
helpful, thank you.
The other thing I wanted to ask you about particularly
was what the practical effect of removing higher education funding
from the courses for youth work will be, and about the practicalities
of the realism around whether professional youth work should hold
an honours degree or not. May we explore that a little bit, please?
Liam Preston: Obviously, the British
Youth Council was opposed to the raising of tuition fees. We think
that will have a huge impact on young people aspiring to go into
doing youth work. I think it has already been mentioned, those
young people who have volunteered or who have possibly even gone
through youth services themselves will often aspire to and want
to continue into that field. This £9,000 has become a barrier
Q71 Chair: Can you explain how?
Liam Preston: Because you obviously
need to have a degree to be able to participate in that area.
It is the feeling of some young people that that fee is too much
for them to want to go and aspire to do that particular job, whereas
previously, as mentioned, a lower qualification was needed.
Fiona Blacke: Perhaps I can add
a bit of detail to that. Let us start at the end of the question
and work back.
If we are looking for highly skilled professionals
to engage with young people, many of whom are marginalised, disadvantaged
and mistrustful of adults, in a way that develops such young people
but is not formalised by a classroom setting, then, yes, you need
people who are qualified to degree level and whose practice has
been assessed in the field by other qualified practitioners, so
you know those people are good enough to do that job. I would
argue all the time that it is at degree level, it is a profession
and it is a degree-level profession.
The challenge with HE funding and the changes
in the funding mechanisms is that, in the past, youth work degrees
were funded in such a way that they had additional funding to
enable the practice element to be paid for. They are expensive
degree programmes, because half the time is spent in assessed
practice, and there is the academic study. The changes in the
funding formula will mean that that additionality
is gone, which means that if universities
continue to fund them in those ways, they will have to find those
funds themselves or pass them on to the students. That makes it
a very expensive option
Q72 Chair: Sorry, they will find
it by having a fee that is appropriate. Is that right?
Fiona Blacke: Yes.
Q73 Tessa Munt: Sorry, they were
fundedcan you say that again?
Fiona Blacke: The standards for
those programmes are set by the profession. If universities want
to continue to deliver those programmes, they will have to find
the additional funding, either from within their own resources,
or indeed, by handing that on to the student, I believe. That
will make that incredibly difficult, particularly when historically,
those coming into the youth profession were from a non-traditional
entrant background. Now, we are only looking at those courses
that are known as the science, technology and engineering courses
getting that higher level of funding under the new HE funding
formula.
Q74 Chair: I don't want to rehearse
the whole tuition fee debate, but with the threshold raised to
£21,000, the monthly payment lower than it was before, and
those in low-paid work having the entirety of any remaining debt
written off after 30 years, surely the message you should be sending
out to young people is that they will be paying less per month
than they were before. They will have anything extra written off,
it can be put in the fee, and they can afford
Fiona Blacke: Can I separate
out
Q75 Chair: If you are sending
out the message to young people that the fee will be what puts
them off, that is a misrepresentation and it risks people
Fiona Blacke: Graham, I don't
think I'm saying that. What I'm saying is that universities will
choose not to run those programmes because they are expensive
to run. So, if you have a choice between running a general social
science qualification and a youth work degree, you'll choose the
general social science, because it will cost you less. Therefore,
we will not have professionally trained youth workers.
Damian Hinds: Degrees and professional
training are not necessarily the same thing, just en passant.
You can have professional training without a degree course, to
be clear.
Chair: So, the risk is that fewer courses
would be available and therefore, fewer places available for people
who are prepared to do it, rather than perhaps the point that
was madealthough there could be this perception, especially
if everyone keeps telling people that they won't be able to afford
to gothat people would be put off going in the first place.
Q76 Tessa Munt: Have any of you
anything to say?
Susanne Rauprich: Just one comment,
which is that the youth sector work force is incredibly diverse.
The majority of services to young people are run, delivered and
developed by volunteers, but they are then supported by a range
of other people. What, I suppose, collectively we would say is
that you have to have a work force in place, which really provides
opportunities for all sorts of people, and therefore they need
to be trained in different ways, depending on the function and
the role that they do.
Fiona Blacke: Absolutely.
Susanne Rauprich: So, you have
volunteers, and there are some very good support and development
programmes available for volunteers. You have part-time and full-time
youth workers. You have managers, specialists, generalists, arts
coaches, sports coaches, and all sorts of things. Some of those
can go through apprenticeships, some through in-house training,
and some need to go on a university degree course. What you must
have is that sort of range in order to have a work force that
can meet the diverse needs of young people.
Q77 Tessa Munt: Which is a good
example to young people who are accessing the services anyway.
Witnesses: Absolutely.
Q78 Tessa Munt: Charlotte, did
you want to add something?
Charlotte Hill: I reinforce completely
what Susanne has just said about there having to be an entry point
for everybody, because that is exactly it. The people who often
become the best youth workers are the people who have been volunteers
themselves. People who can engage young people the best are those
who understand their needs the best. I guess it is just that there
has to be that basic foundation level entry for everybody, and
there will be different routes in, in exactly the same way as
Susanne said.
Tessa Munt: I want
to ask another quick question, if I may, but it is not related
to training. Is your question related to this?
Q79 Charlotte Leslie: Yes. I may
be completely wrong, but from my experience, there have been people
working out of, say, sports clubs, who are just volunteers. They
are, in practice, some of the best youth workers that I have ever
seen. They have not gone anywhere near a degree in youth work,
but they are brilliant. Are we being too narrow in our definition
of youth workers and are we closing the gate when we do not have
to?
Susanne Rauprich: Those sports
coaches usually have a specific designated role.
Q80 Charlotte Leslie: No, they
don't, because I have a long history in amateur sports clubs and
I know young people who have been through a club and just start
helping the coach. They do not have any professional qualification
whatsoever, except for a CRB check, and they are absolutely brilliant.
I would not need any more proof than what they are doing that
they were up to performing those tasks with young people. Are
we being too narrow?
Susanne Rauprich: I'm sure you
are absolutely right, but they probably got to that stage with
the support of somebody who had been around longer or who might
have had a professional background to get them to the point of
being absolutely brilliant in their interactions with other young
people.
Fiona Blacke: I argue that you
could have five games of football led by sports coaches and four
of them would be brilliant games, in which young people learn
a lot about their sport, have a great time, and enjoy the interaction
with the adult. One of those games would be youth work with a
professionally trained youth worker, and it would involve a deliberate
educational approachthe football is just a vehicle for
the learning. That is the difference.
To give a quick example, I recently spoke to
a doctor who works for PricewaterhouseCoopers. Through Common
Purpose, he had been sent out on a placement to a detached youth
work project in Leeds. He went out three times with that project
and the first couple of times he didn't get it; all he could see
was someone standing on a street corner talking to peoplehe
couldn't understand the process. The third time, he saw the educational
process happening and the dynamic. It is hard to understand youth
worksometimes we look at things and say, "That's a
game of table tennis." Four times out of five it might be,
but one of them might be youth work.
Charlotte Leslie: I wonder whether there
is a misunderstanding in your estimation of what's going on in
amateur sports clubs. I completely see what you are saying about
education and the wider purpose, but perhaps it would be worth
looking a bit more closely at the education that also takes place
in purely amateur sports clubs.
Q81 Chair: Susanne may come back
on that. Should we make any recommendations in the light of the
possibility that there will be a reduced number of youth work
degree places? Is the current requirement right in terms of a
professional qualification, such as a degree? Are there any recommendations
that could maintain the professionalism and yet ensure the access
and numbers of people coming through?
Susanne Rauprich: May I just assure
you that we recognise the value of what goes on in amateur sports
clubs. For example, we are currently working to deliver 25,000
accredited training opportunities, mainly to volunteers, a large
number of whom are from those sports scenarios. So we absolutely
recognise and value the contribution that individuals are making.
Don't go away thinking that we do not see that as being part of
the system.
Charlotte Leslie: That's great.
Susanne Rauprich: Fiona will have
something to say about higher education. In terms of recommendations,
however, we think that there is a big gap in entry-level qualification
in youth work with lower guided learning hours. There is a gap
in creating a pathway that is universally recognised, right from
the volunteer entry-level to HE. I suppose that the HE recommendation
would be that the funding formula should not be changed.
Fiona Blacke: That would be the
recommendation we would ask for. I entirely endorse what Susanne
has said. Successive Ofsted inspections have shown that best practice
is where there are services strategically and professionally managed
by professionally trained staff. We need the mix of them and we
need an infrastructure that enables people to get the appropriate
level of training, wherever they happen to come in.
Q82 Tessa Munt: I would like to
have a sense of what you think the input is of faith-based organisations
into youth work. We were talking a little earlier about the Friday
and Saturday night-out provision. My experience in a rural area
is that that is almost only ever provided by the Christian church
or others.
Susanne Rauprich: It is enormous
and diverse. The main Christian denominations all do youth work
in their parishes, and we know that that is going on in other
denominations. Our main concern is that a lot of churches have
cut or are reducing the national support structures, and the churches
themselves are not investing as much as they really should into
supporting the work that goes on in parishes on the ground. We
also have an issue with some of the Jewish and Muslim work not
necessarily being recognised at national level as something that
reaches disadvantaged communities in a very effective way. For
example, the outcome of the latest round of the Department for
Education's grantI do not think I have seen a single faith-based
organisation that made it through to stage 2. That has been the
trend over a number of years so there is a bit of concern there.
But absolutely, quite often faith-based organisations, because
they have a very strong value base, are the most effective waysparticularly
for those lacking a sense of communityto engage in some
of the most challenging situations that they find themselves in,
and there is an awful lot of good work that goes on.
Chair: Any final comments on the subject
of faith groups? No? Thank you all very much indeed.
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