Farook felt demoralised and intimidated, but approached his inspection task with an open mind. He found evidence that health and safety regulations were not being observed and pointed out areas of possible improvement.
It ended up in an argument. "I wasn't expecting that," he recalls. "I thought I was having a discussion, but the gentleman started raising his voice at me. If he can take constructive criticism from a professional, surely he can take it from a young person."
The youth worker in question and his colleagues in Leicester will have to get used to young people scrutinising their services, because the new youth inspection system is here to stay. Leicester Youth Services and Connexions Leicestershire formed the project, informally termed Yofsted, last June.
Senior youth worker Ali Latif got involved in running the project after responding to a memo from the youth service's operations director, calling for ideas on how to get young people more involved in shaping services.
"I want to see young people actively involved," he says. "If we want to provide quality services, we have to ensure that the people we're providing for are there to shape them. As youth workers, we think we're providing a good service, but sometimes we don't. There are lessons for us to learn."
With help from Connexions, Latif gathered together a group of 18 young people for a series of regular meetings.
"The first meeting was completely weird, because we didn't know what was happening or what it was about," recalls young inspector Romana Mohammed, 19. "We started throwing ideas around and looked at the Ofsted framework and found we didn't understand it very well."
The session led to the young people making a list of what they thought should be examined to assess a service.
This was built into their own inspection framework, incorporating assessment sheets that rated services according to their buildings and facilities, first impressions, activities, staff and young people's involvement.
Latif and his colleagues trained the young people on evaluating services and the team took to the streets to visit youth centres and a range of other premises.
News that an official Ofsted inspection of Leicester Youth Services was to take place in December gave the young inspectors a chance to use their skills to contribute to the real thing. They shadowed inspectors for the week-long visit, conducting their own parallel evaluation.
"It was a learning curve for both us and the inspectors," recalls 19-year-old Mohammed Shaikh. "Our framework was beneficial to them, because it showed them what we were looking for."
The young inspectors gave Ofsted a copy of their findings and are optimistic their views will be taken into account in the final report, published this month.
But Latif insists that influencing external Ofsted inspectors is less important than feeding the young people's assessment back to service managers - a process that is already under way.
Despite the Ofsted inspection tie-in, the work of Yofsted is far from over and young people seem keen to get involved.
"We need to recruit new members so that young people can continue to inspect services and provide information for their peers," he says.
"We've had so many youth workers asking how young people can get involved."
FYI
- Yofsted is an informal group led by Leicester City Council in partnership with Connexions Leicestershire
- The pilot project involving 13- to 19-year-olds is set to grow into a youth-led annual cycle of recruitment, teambuilding, observational practice visits, feedback, evaluation and review
- Following each cycle, the young people will get involved in the recruitment and training of the following year's Yofsted team
- Youth services in Leicester were inspected between 13 and 17 December last year. The Ofsted report is due out later this month.
