Welsh youth charity Canllaw Online has 17m to spend on hi-tech toys. By next May, it will have set up 82 "digilabs" in youth clubs in disadvantaged areas of Wales, fitted out with PCs, webcams, editing suites and video-conferencing technology (YPN, 20-26 October, p6).
But having got the money, the question of how best to put technology to use in a youth work setting remains.
Children's charity NCH has set up a 1m project, Access to IT, to see how technology can best be used to support youth work. The scheme deals with three groups: physically disabled young people, young people and their parents, and young people leaving care.
Kam Matharu, Access to IT project manager at NCH, says: "We chose three very diverse user groups, so we could see what was working for each group."
The first project, Warren Park Children's Centre for physically disabled young people in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, opened in April. It has specialist equipment that is designed to improve disabled people's communication skills and help them to integrate into society.
The second centre, which opened last week in Coventry, aims to teach young people who are leaving care IT skills that they can use to find work and improve their employment prospects.
The third centre opens this week in Bayswater, west London, and will work with young people and children of all ages, and their parents. Those without a PC at home will be able to use the facilities to do their homework, and their parents can also learn IT skills. "It is about social inclusion, but it does have a strong educational remit," adds Matharu.
NCH's project uses IT to achieve specific aims, but it can also play a part in more general youth work. In Liverpool, the Interchill internet drop-in centre, which serves the communities of Speke and Garston, uses computers to attract young people to go there. They can use the equipment for their own purposes or take part in other activities that don't involve computers.
They are also encouraged to use technology in new ways, but the general aim is to promote informal education.
Steve Waterhouse, project manager at Interchill, says: "It is the contact point for us to light young people's imaginations in terms of what is possible."
One of the problems of using IT in youth work is that it tends to appeal mostly to young men, so Interchill runs schemes designed to attract women such as Where's Janice At?, a female-only film-making project funded by the BBC.
The sector skills council for IT, e-skills UK, runs a scheme called Computer Clubs for Girls, which targets 10- to 13-year-olds - the age when most girls lose interest in computers.
The clubs are run in schools, mainly in southeast England, at lunchtime or after hours. The idea is to teach girls about computers through topics that would appeal to them. Database management, for example, is taught through the use of fashion.
Melody Hermon, who manages the scheme for e-skills UK, says the aim is to get more women to join the IT industry. But the clubs can and do have a broader focus. "Schools have used clubs as part of anti-bullying campaigns and to encourage disaffected girls to engage," she says.
As most of these IT projects will also make use of the internet, there may be concerns about security. The NSPCC has issued guidelines for the use of computers in youth clubs, but it says the best defence is to teach young people about the potential dangers of the internet.
At Interchill, young people are free to use its computers as they please, but Waterhouse says the centre has the perfect answer: "We have a contract with the young people about the use of the project - we haven't got any nanny software here."
If young people break the centre's rules, they are temporarily barred, and if they persist they can be banned. Waterhouse points out that they experience few problems and make young people aware that everyone they talk to in a chat-room may not be who they say they are.
For Waterhouse, the key to using IT in youth work is integration. "You need to put IT work within a youth work context," he says. "Make people responsible for their own actions and make it fun."
www.nspcc.org.uk.
