Conservative conference: NCS 'widens reach of youth services'
Gabriella Jozwiak
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
The National Citizen Service (NCS) is having the effect of encouraging disengaged young people to join youth clubs, according to a youth charity boss.
Speaking at a conference fringe event, Charlotte Hill, chief executive of London Youth, said youth clubs that had delivered the NCS programme in summer had reported a more diverse range of young people using their services as a result.
Hill said NCS was helping youth clubs tackle an age-old problem of universal youth provision becoming targeted at a particular group or locality.
“We deliver NCS through our members, through small local organisations around the country that embed NCS in what they offer through youth clubs,” said Hill.
“One of the brilliant consequences we’ve seen from this summer is that lots of young people who wouldn’t have gone to those youth clubs otherwise have come together, and are genuinely mixing on a scale we haven’t seen before.”
Former children’s minister Tim Loughton said funding cuts to the sector had aggravated the issue of youth clubs becoming “a dumping ground for problem kids”. But he agreed that NCS was helping to solve this.
“There are still too many youth clubs that now, even with universal provision, are ghettoised in some respects. You only get a certain type of person from a certain locality going there,” said Loughton.
“NCS is absolutely about mixing those groups up. I’ve been on NCS courses where at one end of a rope there’s a public schoolboy, and at the other end there’s a kid in care, someone from the youth justice system, or somebody from the local state school.
“It’s difficult to work out which is which, and that’s absolutely as it should be.”
Hill and Loughton made their comments in response to a question from a former London Borough of Camden councillor, who said youth services in his area had been monopolised by certain groups.
“In my area, the youth centre was identified by the wider community as a place where only bad children go, and parents were therefore unwilling to send their well-behaved children to that centre,” he said.
The NCS is the government’s flagship youth programme that runs personal and social development sessions during the spring, summer and autumn school holidays.
