Hosting the National Young People’s Benchmarking Forum

Quite a mouthful isn’t it!!! For young Careleavers aged 16 or over this is an important participation network that works alongside the National Leaving Care Benchmarking Forum supported by the National Care Advisory Service.

In West Sussex young people have only recently been involved in the Young Peoples Benchmarking forum (YPBMF)supported through our Children In Care Council Co-ordinator. The young people have gained a significant amount through being involved in this forum, especially meeting other careleavers from around the country and contributing to getting their voice heard. 

On Thursday last week West Sussex Youth Support and Development Servivce were priviledged to be able to host a meeting on the south coast (many of the previous meetings have usually been held further North which has involved a considerable amount of travel for those concerned.) The YPBMF is facilitated by Catch 22 and along with a range of staff about 20 young people attended the meeting. Unfortunately Tim Loughton the Childrens Minister was unable to attend however he has recheduled to meet with the group in the New Year.

For me it was great to meet a pro active group of young people who are enthusiastic and positive about making changes to our systems and services in order to improve outcomes for others. Something that really struck me from their conversations was the breadth of disparity between local authority provision for Care Leavers. We often hear talk of the postcode lottery with regards to Health Services however these young people are experiencing this very thing from their Corporate Parents about their own living & educational needs. Although there is guidance concerning Care Leavers there is no clear offer to young people who are leaving care as this is very much defined by the local authority who have overall control of the budgets. This means that it can be very confusing for a young person to know what to expect and who to hold accountable.

The young people spent time looking at the questions that they hope to put to the Minister in the future, especially those to do with their entitlement and needs. Catch 22 staff were excellent at facilitating the session, particularly supporting young people to think about potential responses to their questions and how they could ensure that they got a real answer rather than a politically correct one. This was a great example of facilitating young peoples voice.

Many thanks to Catch 22 and the forum for providing food for thought and I hope that in the future they will be given sufficient time to raise their carefully thought through concerns. I look forward to hearing how they get on!

Young People from West Sussex at Parliment

On 4 November 2011, Members of the UK Youth Parliament  (known as MYPs) sat in the House of Commons and voted on which of  five issues ought to become the priority campaign for the UK Youth Parliament in the coming year. 

The Youth MPs attending from West Sussex were:

• Liam Dallamore – Ifield Community College, Crawley.
• Lola Cole – Steyning Grammar School.
• Dominic Stannard – Worthing College.
• Samuel Theodoridi – St Philip Howard Catholic School. 

As part of our ongoing development for the West Sussex County Council website for young people Yourspace we are encouraging young people to blog about their experiences. Read here for Samuel Theodoridis’ views of the day.

Youth Cabinet participate in Select Committee

Courtesy of violet yume

On Friday 4th November 2 young people from the West Sussex Youth cabinet participated in the Children and Young Peoples’ select committee. They were invited to talk about the proposed reductions in Youth Services and the impact on young people. As can be seen from the webcast I think that they contributed well to the debate, highlighting key points about targetting services, access to facilities and transport and the need to invest in young volunteers – who may not come from targeted communities.

West Sussex Youth and Development Service have been tasked with reducing its services by a further £2m by March 2012. This is on top of the reductions made last year. As I noted in my last post, we are just starting to get service delivery in shape having made the reductions last year so making more in the near future will be a real stretch. This appears to have been recognised and an alternative proposal has been submitted in the Select Committee papers to look at phasing the reductions over 2 years.

The Cabinet Member for Childrens Services, Peter Evans, is now considering the feedback and recommendations from the Committee who supported the phasing option as this will give the YSDS a better chance of engaging with communities and the voluntary sector to ensure better outcomes for young people. We hope to have the Cabinet Members decision in the next few weeks.

Cuts in Youth Services

I have just read Jon Jollys post about the ongoing cuts to the services here in West Sussex.

As he rightly points out, it is a challenging and difficult time for all practitioners and managers within the service. The YSDS has already been reduced by £2m and we are now being asked to reduce the service by another £2m by March 2012. The service is currently consulting with residents & young people about these cuts and this closes on the 14th October with the select committee scheduled for the 4th November. Young people from the youth cabinet are meeting with the Cabinet Member and Director of Childrens Services to discuss these changes and input their views and thoughts about the future of the service.

Whilst this is happening we are also trying to bed in the new service which has seen significant changes in the way we are delivering and who is delivering our services. There has been a big upheaval for staff with many (including myself) being asked to change roles and operational areas. Staff are also uncertain of their future and are also being asked to deliver services in new and different ways. They are all working incredibly hard to deliver the best services for young people through these constant changes. Jon mentions the lack of communication and consultation with the community and young people over changes to the night a club opens and the staff delivering it. I agree that this should be the way we are working but have to put my hand up and admit that at the moment the fact that some of the clubs are open at all given the numbers of staff we have is a feat in itself. I oversee a different area of the county and know that I have been involved in making decisions about when we can open a club and who will staff it in isolation to the community and young people. This is partly down to the fact that with the need to further reduce the service is not recruiting new staff, any vacancies are managed internally which impacts again on the number of staff we have available so we are incredibly stretched.

Staff are also feeling devalued as their profession and years of training appear to count for nothing alongside a government agenda that believes volunteers can replace them.  With staff stretched to deliver our own targeted and prevention services there is less time to support the voluntary sector as we used to at the very time they need that support to deliver universal services.. They (and communities I talk to) continue to be frustrated by this.

So where are we headed? Personally I am currently reviewing the services I am responsible for with the teams I manage whilst also making every effort to talk to the local communities and involve them in the decisions we have to make. In little over a month we should have a clearer steer on the way ahead which will need more planning and organising.

On a national level at a time of increasing youth unemployment, unrest and lack of opportunity the very services that could support young people are being decimated. It seems obvious to me (and many others across the country in similar positions) that these cuts are happening too rapidly and are unsustainable, by the time the government realises this will there be anything left to rebuild from?

Targeted Youth Support in West Sussex

As mentioned in my previous post we have restructured the Youth Support and Development Service (YSDS) to deliver primarily across Targeted Youth Support (TYS), Specialist Services and Early Intervention & Prevention whilst working to support other organisations to deliver more universal, generic youth work.

This week has seen the launch of our Targeted Youth Support pages on our Website and the start of TYS programmes across the county. With a new request for service process, forms and monitoring & evaluation this is a huge change of our service. After 3 days of key training for staff we have a rolling programme throughout the Autumn term to bring everyone up to date with the programmes on offer. Time will tell concerning the response to the programmes although we have already had a good uptake by many services.

In the meantime we are out to consultation concerning the future of the YSDS with another £2 million reductions due to be made in the next year! All in all changing and testing times for all!

 

Positive Images, Positive Young People

In the governments recent Positive for Youth discussion paper one of the areas under discussion is the negative perception of young people and what can be done about it.  How can we and young people work together to counteract negative media portrayal?

This is a key aim of  West Sussex Youth Service and West Sussex Council of Voluntary Youth Services  who joined together in partnership at the South of England Show to show young people in a different light. Working with young people we developed a main stand, “Teen Square” where young people showed their wide range of talents, and then a number of differing stands and activities to promote the services available to young people. We feel that this both successfully engaged young people giving them an opportunity to perform and showed the wider public what amazing talent we have here in West Sussex! See what you think!

Carers and the internet (via CarersBlog)

I stumbled across this post having been signposted to it by Paige the young person referenced in the post. I think that it demonstrates really well how much more we can do with online services and how much we need to be thinking of this as we move forward in restructuring and developing our own services. Thank you to Michele and Paige for raising the issue.

 Note: The following blog post has been contributed by Michele Lambert, Web Manager at The Princess Royal Trust for Carers.

Working day in and out on the internet, I can veer from an incessant curiousity and excitement about new technology and its applications to an occassional urge to throw my computer out of the window and make a break for freedom, to a place where the world wide web can’t reach me. It can sometimes feel like communication overlo … Read More

via CarersBlog

The Big Society in Practice

With further reductions in Youth Services I continue to be intrigued by the concept of Big Society and how this is portrayed by some as the panacea to all the financial reductions. Now – don’t get me wrong, I’m all for contributing and volunteering in your local community and believe voluntary youth services are particularly strong.  It’s just that basing policy and services on the assumption that people who volunteer will want to do more, with little to no funding and do what we would like them to do has the potential to be either the most amazing idea ever or one that is fundamentally flawed. I tend to err towards the later.

As we move to Targeted Services due to funding reductions we are withdrawing from the universal delivery of generic youth clubs in the more affluent areas of the county. This affects many of our rural villages.  With this in mind I am one of probably many who is working with volunteers within local villages to see how they can take on the running of the local youth club. The meeting the other evening was a great example of what individuals are prepared and not prepared to do. The group are really keen to ensure that the club in their village remains open. They want to do as much as they can to do this and want us to work with them to find youth workers. However they are also really clear that they can’t do this without support and involvement from ‘professionals’ who know about systems, policies and how to work with young people.  We are able (at the moment) to offer advice, guidance and support and have also pointed them in the direction of voluntary organisations working in this field. However whilst they are happy to volunteer they don’t want to have to take on responsibility for employing staff, health and safety both on and off site….and the list goes on. Members however are equally clear that we can no longer employ staff to undertake youth work in these areas and that all the work is the responsibility of the volunteer groups. Impasse!

In some of the areas under discussion there are small groups of young people who have quite challenging behaviors. The group are aware of their limitations and can’t understand why we are looking to them as volunteers to deliver what they believe is an essential service for young people that should be delivered by those qualified to do so. This resonates for me with what Nick Wilkie wrote last September:-

“Nobody has suggested that our banks, for example, should be led into recovery by armies of well-intentioned volunteers. So surely we don’t think that equally complex social ills can be remedied entirely without professional expertise and full-time commitment?” (See full post here)

Local communities know this, volunteers know this, we know this and yet still we march towards the dismantling of universal services regardless of the potential damage this may cause. In the meantime the local communities and I are still meeting to see what we can create in spite of policy, the Big Society, and other good (?) intentions because we all know that at the end of the day the ones who are going to miss out are those most in need of support, encouragement and opportunities – young people!

Digital Media in the Youth Work Curriculum

Courtesy of Mosman Library

I am currently looking at the programmes that we will be delivering and developing for the Targeted Youth Support part of our new service. In doing this I have been reflecting on how we ensure that we embraceDigital & Social Media and make sure that they are an inclusive part of what we are doing.

For instance when we are looking at risk taking behaviour, are we making sure that we include online risk? When delivering courses on Independent Living do we include advice and information about identity on line, online gaming, healthy lifestyles and the impact of social media as well as other areas of digital media. Do we support young people in how they can use the internet to find information and check whether this information is correct? What digital literacy are we including in our programmes?

These reflections have been prompted by a number of people and reports, that I have recently heard or read. For example:-

In Munch, Poke, Ping  Stephen Carrick-Davies considers the risks which vulnerable young people, excluded from schools and being taught in Pupil Referral Units (PRUs), encounter online and through their mobile phones.

Sangeet Bhullar  is the Founder and Executive Director of WISE KIDS, a non-profit organisation providing innovative training programmes and consultancy in New Media, Internet and Mobile Technologies, Internet Proficiency, Literacy and Safety. A key aspect of their work is founded on the belief that individuals and communities need the knowledge, skills and tools to understand and harness the power of the Internet and Mobile technologies.

Risks and Safety for Children on the internet: the UK Report by Sonia Livingstone, Leslie Haddon, Anke Görzig and Kjartan Ólafsson presents initial findings from a UK survey of children and their parents designed to provide a unique insight into the balance of opportunities and risks experienced by UK children on the internet

Reading these articles and browsing other articles on line have made me wonder how we start to ensure a systemic approach to ensuring that young people, particularly those not in school settings, gain the skills to make informed choices around their use of the internet.

I’d be keen to know if you’re doing anything around this and how you are making sure that digital literacy gets covered in informal education.

Apps and Youth Work

I’ve posted before about my interest in Apps for youth work here. Due to the changes happening within the Service I haven’t been able to pursue my interest as much as I’d like however it’s still brewing there in the back of my mind, especially when we continue to have conversations about social and digital media.

A while back Tim Davies  pointed me in the direction of Apps for Good . I’ve come across them again more recently. Have a look at this interesting app that some young people developed through their school.

I think that projects developing apps could work really well in a youth work setting, especially with those groups of young people who are disengaged from schoool. I also think that it brings a different focus to digital / social media work which can work alongside the (what I feel to be) dominance of social networks and facebook. 

Unfortunately as I am not techie so I still need to work out how I can make this happen!!! Any thoughts?