Further to Monday’s packed and animated Roundtable event held in the Houses of Parliament Doug Nicholls, Chair of Chooseyouth, has written as follows:
Just a big thank you to all those who were able to attend the Chooseyouth event in Parliament on Monday. Thanks also to those who were with us in spirit but unable to attend.
We are going to have to be focused and organised over the coming year to win. We will send out some briefings to assist with campaigning.
Ta to Sue Atkins for the montage
In the meantime here are the action points we suggested at the meeting that would really help.
1. Declare your individual and or organisational support for Chooseyouth if you have not already done so by writing simply to Kerry Jenkins at kerry.jenkins@unitetheunion.org. It doesn’t cost anything and your name will simply be listed as a supporter.
2. As soon as you can write to your MP whoever they are and ask them if they support a statutory Youth Service. Let Chooseyouth know what they say.
3 In May write to your MP and ask them if they will be supporting the Ten Minute Bill on the Youth Service.
4 Immediately write to Angela Raynor MP requesting that the Youth Service be made statutory and put within the National Education Service that Labour is proposing.
5 Get ready to lobby your MP again and get busy on Social Media when the Ten Minute Rule Bill is put on June 6th by Lloyd Russell Moyle MP.
6 Write immediately to Cat Smith MP who is consulting on the implementation of a statutory youth service, saying you support a statutory youth service and giving any reasons why and what it might look like.
All of this will make a difference at this critical time.
Over three months, the Roadshow will visit our nations and regions to meet with and speak to members and supporters who want to help shape the future of education policy.
The Roadshow will build on the work we have done so far and the final principles will underpin the NES for generations to come.
To get involved, you can attend a Roadshow event in person, or you can submit your thoughts online via the Labour Policy Forum.
The diary of Roadshow events has yet to be announced. What are your views on prioritising a contribution to this process?
—————————————————————————————————————————–
An immediate opportunity is provided by ChooseYouth to discuss the situation further.
CREATING A STATUTORY YOUTH SERVICE – ROUND TABLE EVENT
Mon 23 April 2018 16:00 – 18:00 at the Palace of Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA
Following the successful parliamentary event earlier this year, we are pleased to announce a roundtable discussion on the importance of youth services and creation of a statutory youth service.
Youth services are an essential part of a lifelong learning and civil society and act as the bedrock to many young peoples lives. Over recent years we’ve seen youth service provision decline across the country with parts going completely without.
ChooseYouth which represents over 30 voluntary youth sector organisations has long championed a universal, open access statutory youth service and now in partnership with MP’s in parliament we plan to introduce a bill to create such a service.
This roundtable event in parliament will act as the beginning of that legislative process, bringing together key stakeholders to give their input, not only on the current state of youth services but how best we can advance the cause of a statutory service.
‘In the last 100 years, there have been two defining education acts – Butler’s in 1944 and Baker’s in 1988. They represent two distinct chapters in England’s educational story. The first witnessed new schools, colleges and curriculum innovation, especially in the arts, as well as new youth and career services. Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberalism underpinned Baker’s 1988 reform bill, which meant a prescribed national curriculum and tougher accountability, along with diversity in school provision and autonomy’.
The piece prompted the following response from Tom Wylie, a former Chief Executive of the National Youth Agency.
‘Tim Brighouse makes a compelling case for a new settlement for education in England. Two particular further features should be addressed. First, it should be based on evidence, not politicians’ whims and prejudices. Second, it should reflect the fact that adolescents spend much of their time outside the classroom, and thus urgent attention needs to be paid to rebuilding the role of educational youth work for their leisure time.’
Thanks to the Rotherham Advertiser
More specifically and highlighting the need for a practice, which can build relationships over time, free from short-term targets as well as posing issues around youth work and casework, Naomi Thompson, drawing on her own experience, argues that ‘Slashing youth worker budgets close a key route out for groomed girls.’
————————————————————————————————————————–
Ta to the morningstaronline.com
Continuing the Government’s fondness for short-term public relation interventions Home Secretary Amber Rudd has launched a Serious Violence strategy, which includes a new £11m Early Intervention Youth Fund to support community projects that help steer young people away from crime.
Ahead of trying to pull together a host of stories and articles arising from and coinciding with the tragic events of these last weeks, Seema Chandwani has agreed to me pasting into a whole her passionate and powerful Twitter thread of April 6, which has gone viral.
THREAD: I’ve been relatively silent about the murder of 17 year old Tanesha Melbourne-Blake, sometimes you just have to shut up and listen.
I first met Tanesha 3 years ago during the fight to ‘Save Haringey Youth Services’. A fight her and many of her peers fought with passion.
I’ve rewatched some of those campaign videos. The words are haunting. Those young people knew what could/would happen should cuts to services continue.
Watching Tanesha’s face in those videos, little did she realise the lives she was campaigning to save, would include her own.
I’m not in anyway saying if the youth services cuts didn’t happen she’d be alive.
But the issues raised by young people in such campaigns need to be heard – cutting of services creates an environment where young people feel compelled to speak out about their lives.
Young people in areas like Tottenham are very capable of articulating their own wants and needs, but they asked me to campaign *with* them because they needed a ‘political advocate’ as this fight was in their words ‘unequal’ – they felt unable to ‘compete’ alone.
I didn’t understand it at first, but soon did.
I won’t go into details, the campaign (both 2011 & 3 years ago) are well documented.
But I’ll make my first point; we fail as adults when we see young people fighting for help services as the problem.
I’ve watched the response over the past few days and there are times I’ve been frustrated.
If you’re a Politician or politico, currently engaged in this issue of youth violence, ask yourself why?
Why are you getting involved?
You don’t need to respond but if are genuinely interested in helping young people in this fight you have to accept this is their fight, not yours.
This isn’t about your stats, your policy, your budget or even your child.
This is about young people’s current everyday life.
If you are speaking about young people’s daily life, actually understand it first.
They are surviving, navigating through a world mainstream society haven’t dared make a TV series out of yet. It’s nothing like you think you know about, even if you once smoked weed when you were 15.
There are now politicians and policy donks up and down the country holding events/meetings to show they’re doing something.
Less than 1/10 will be inviting any young people to hear what they have to say.
A lot of pics will be taken.
Of the few that will engage young people they’ll go to speak to a school council or local church group or something similar.
Young people are not a homogeneous group. Tarquin in Hertfordshire doesn’t speak for Trevor in Wood Green.
Engaging young people facing this battle is difficult, made more difficult as almost every embryonic cord connecting them to society has been cut.
The young people in survival mode don’t know you, some don’t even believe they need to know you.
But don’t find a substitute!
‘Community Leaders’ don’t exist, they are a political fabrication designed in the 80s to create a hierarchy amongst the working class.
Stop meeting with them.
If you want to ask people how you can help, ask those directly who need the help.
Ask your ‘community leaders’ to give you direct access to those people, if they cannot, then the only thing they lead is you, up the garden path.
There is only one way to solve this problem and that is long-term inclusion.
This means understanding there has always been a criminal underworld – Dickens wrote about it centuries ago. If Oliver Twist was born in 1998, he’d have a YouTube account
Marginalised people exist because the system of marginalisation exists.
This is not a new problem. It existed when I was a teen. My and my little sister can remember the names of our friends murdered in 1990s.
Why we keep acting like this is a new thing is almost insane!
It’s always been about economics, opportunities and belonging, always.
You are competing with an industry that can promise young people a life you have failed to give.
It’s not just money, it’s a sense of worth, purpose, belonging and achievement.
Maslow is basic GCSE level psychology. Young people need investment.
It’s not a short term fix. It’s not a 4 week Twitter campaign. It’s not a week summer project – it’s a complete 0-19 long term investment. Including investment in people working with young people
And it’s a lot cheaper than these knee jerk reactionary initiatives.
Until you can get a child to tell an organised crime ring they’re not interested – you’ll have this problem.
Criminals need a workforce and our society is providing them with an unlimited supply of young people to choose from.
This article poses more than a few questions with regard to youth work’s growing infatuation with a skewed and individualised notion of mental health, well-being and indeed happiness – see the reference to NCS.
Jennie Bristow argues that government plans for ‘Mental Health First Aid’ risk pathologising ordinary childhood while doing little for those with more serious difficulties.
For a brief moment, I thought this was an April Fools’ story.
The government is considering the introduction of a ‘military ethos’ in schools across the UK to help children from deprived backgrounds. Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson has commissioned MP Robert Goodwill to review the benefits of an education inspired by the ‘values and disciplines’ of the Armed Forces.
Across the oceans, our friends at Youth Affairs Network Queensland [YANQ] have published the findings of a 2017 Youth Sector survey. The following brief excerpt is likely to ring a bell or two.
Survey responses repeatedly identified that services are under-funded and under-resourced
to meet the level of service demand (both in terms of intensity of service provision and numerical demand). Funding agreements are overly prescriptive and restrictive, dictating short-term, output-focused service delivery models. As such, services are hamstrung from achieving their full potential to be innovative and respond effectively to the real needs of young people within the context of their individual circumstances.
The combination of funding criteria and competition-based tendering were seen as creating a sector culture that encourages ‘siloed’ service delivery. Organisations become inward focused and are increasingly operating independently of other services. Service delivery becomes focused on narrow, specified outcomes at the expense of addressing the inter-related needs affecting young people’s long-term outcomes. Funding criteria also effectively preference funding to large NGO’s at the expense of experienced, specialist local agencies that typically have a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of local community and youth needs.
Respondents also described the constant change imposed by the lack of funding security inherent in short-term contracts and defunding of programs. This impacts support relationships with young people and inhibits services’ capacity to offer ongoing support over time for young people with multiple complex needs. It also
fosters a sector culture plagued with uncertainty that makes it difficult for organisations to undertake long term agency-level planning and offer job security to staff.
At the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, ‘civil society’ is referenced in virtually every presentation and fireside conversation. The world, it seems, no longer consists of two sectors—public and private, state and market—there is a third: NGOs and INGOs, charities and philanthropists, human rights watchdogs, aid and development agencies and global environmental campaigns to name but a few. The ‘Third Sector’ has arrived, and Its CEOs now mingle seamlessly with those from banks, energy companies, media giants and government agencies.
The problem with this embrace of ‘civil society’ is that it bears little resemblance to what civil society actually is or means. Most of civil society is not constituted formally or headed up by a CEO. Just 40 years ago, very few not-for-profits or charities had CEOs at all: that term was associated with the corporate sector, and few community groups or charities had even contemplated mimicking the language and culture of such a different sphere. But in just four decades all this has changed, and it has changed at an extraordinarily rapid rate, with very little public discussion or scrutiny of the enormity of the organizational transformation involved and its social and political impact.
He suggests in a provocation to many of us:
The principal factor, however, in driving both the transformation of the social sector and the relatively low level of critical public debate about it has been the global rise of the managerial class and its capture of much of the not-for-profit world. In the wake of the 1960s/1970s social movements, governments invested heavily in a plethora of welfare state programs and services, and universities churned out an army of social science practitioners with an insatiable demand for things to manage.
Not-for-profits and charities were easy pickings, so voluntary associations of all kinds were transformed into instruments of service delivery, ‘community representation’ and ‘therapeutic welfare’ in the public interest. Traditional bodies such as the Red Cross, the YMCA, church missions and voluntary health societies fell like dominos to ‘management capture’ and quickly became unrecognisable to those who knew them a generation before.
As of now, the posting will appear on Tuesday as the site statistics indicate that the highest number of visits occur on this day. Why? I haven’t a clue.
An impressive, thoughtful and thorough briefing London’s Lost Youth Services 2018 [pdf] produced by Sian Berry, Green Party member of the London Assembly.
Since 2011, the cumulative amount not spent on services for young people in London is now more than £145 million.
————————————————————————————————————————-
ta to muddymatches.co.uk
Opening Words by 42nd Street’s youth co-researchers [on what I think is an exceptional piece of work TT] We became involved in the research to learn more about youth loneliness because we are passionate about giving young people a voice – as experts in our own lives. We knew intuitively from our own experiences and those of our friends and family that youth loneliness is a really important but far from understood issue; we knew that it was a complex issue, with a whole host of causes and even wider implications on young people’s lives.
Develop new ways of thinking and talking about youth loneliness, beyond medicalised discourses of epidemics and towards more expansive understandings of youth and more inclusive ways of belonging.
Arts-based and creative methods create spaces and relationships where young people can find connection and navigate painful forms of loneliness.
Restore threatened youth work provision and fund a plurality of options so that all young people have someone who knows and accepts them for who they are.
Re-imagine interventions beyond individual funded projects and towards commons spaces and social movements to bring into being more co-operative and convivial communities.
Youth-led social action is necessary to develop the practical and political change, benefiting youth participants and their peers.
The Association’s FREE national, collaborative ‘Policy and Practice’ seminar programme continues to expand, and we have been delighted with the response. Registrations have topped 200 delegates (52 academics; 107 practitioners; 57 students) across the seminar programme. The aim of these seminars is to foster greater levels of collaboration between higher education institutions and practice agencies in the profiling of challenges and opportunities facing youth and community work policy and practice across the UK. Follow the link above for a full listing, or the unique links for each event found below (please note the ‘post-strike’ revised dates for Glasgow and Dumfries):
Friday 20th April (Worcester) ‘Youth and Community Work in Transition’
Given IDYW’s emphasis on both narrative and critical practice we can’t wait to get our hands on a copy. We quite fancy making the launch, but you can’t have everything………
In this blog, which appears on the Centre for Youth Impact website, Tania de St Croix, Lecturer in the Sociology of Youth and Childhood at King’s College London and member of the IDYW Steering Group, offers her critical thoughts on the Youth Investment Fund Learning Project, which the Centre is leading with New Philanthropy Capital and others. You can find out more information on the YIF Learning Project at https://yiflearning.org.
Tania begins:
Many involved in the youth work field are critical of the youth impact agenda, particularly its emphasis on the quantitative measurement of outcomes for individuals, and its neglect of process, group work, and structural inequalities. Those of us involved in ‘In Defence of Youth Work’ have argued that the contemporary emphasis on impact and outcomes cannot be separated from its context, the neoliberal ‘desire to financialise human existence’, and its consequences for which practices are valued and who gets to decide. We have claimed that open access youth work is particularly unsuited to outcomes-based management and that open youth work’s future existence is undermined by an emphasis on impact measurement.
She ends:
So what? And what next? The current approach to evaluating the Youth Investment Fund demonstrates thoughtfulness and attention to the special characteristics and challenges of open access youth work. As a result, the experiences of young people and youth workers funded by this scheme will be more meaningful and less onerous than they would have been under a more prescriptive top-down approach. The YIF Learning Project goes some way towards challenging dominant approaches to impact measurement. Yet in other ways it is reinforcing the status quo: continuing to prioritise the measurement of individual change, converting qualitative elements of youth work (its quality and young people’s experiences) into statistics, and aiming towards a financialised ‘value for money’ analysis.
Ultimately, without questioning the broader context – the basis on which measurement is still preferred by most funders and governments, as a neoliberal tool of governance and control – many of these problems remain intractable. Moving beyond such dilemmas, then, is not merely a matter of creating more congruent impact tools, reducing the data burden, and involving young people and practitioners in the process (important though all of these things are). It requires imagining meaningful evaluation beyond a focus on outcomes and measurement, thinking seriously about the social and political purpose of youth work, and the role of young people in creating change. It involves working with others – beyond the youth sector and beyond our national and regional borders – to challenge the global dominance of finance and investment logic in activities that hold to a different version of ‘value’. While such aspirations may seem momentous, there is nothing to stop us dreaming of a different world, and doing what we can to make it real in our everyday lives.
What is the Youth Investment Fund? – taken from the website with our link to the identity of the grantees being our only addition or comment.
The Youth Investment Fund is providing new opportunities for young people to get involved in their communities, support their personal development and get the skills and confidence they need to enter the workplace.
The fund is made up of £40 million of government and National Lottery funding from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Big Lottery Fund.
Funding has been awarded to 86 charity, voluntary and social enterprise groups in East London, Liverpool City Region, West Midlands, Tees Valley and Sunderland, Bristol & Somerset and Eastern Counties over the next three years – find here the names of those granted support.
It will create new youth clubs in rural areas, expand sports projects to build the confidence of young people encouraging them to get active and increase services providing support and guidance to young people.
The Youth Investment Learning Project will:
Design, pilot and implement new data collection approaches for open access youth provision
Develop a shared measurement framework and pilot associated outcomes measures.
Collect and collate data from the grantee organisations
Share learning and methodology
Report findings on ‘what works’ and the impact of open access youth services, including a process evaluation in years 2 and 3
Test the feasibility of approaches to understanding value for money in open access provision?
Provide tailored support and capacity building training to grantees in order to embed impact evaluation within ongoing youth work practice.
This is the first notice of the forthcoming ChooseYouth event announced at the IDYW conference on March 9.
CREATING A STATUTORY YOUTH SERVICE – ROUND TABLE EVENT
DATE AND TIME
Mon 23 April 2018 16:00 – 18:00 BST
LOCATION
Palace of Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA
Following the successful parliamentary event earlier this year, we are pleased to announce a roundtable discussion on the importance of youth services and creation of a statutory youth service.
Youth services are an essential part of a lifelong learning and civil society and act as the bedrock of many young peoples lives. Over recent years we’ve seen youth service provision decline across the country with parts going completely without.
ChooseYouth which represents over 30 voluntary youth sector organisations has long championed a universal, open access statutory youth service and now in partnership with MP’s in parliament we plan to introduce a bill to create such a service.
This roundtable event in parliament will act as the beginning of that legislative process, bringing together key stakeholders to give their input, not only on the current state of youth services but how best we can advance the cause of a statutory service.
Together, we can create an education system that works for the many, not the few, and your voice matters to us. That’s why we have launched 
