A drive for young people to inform decisions, shape provision and inspect quality lies at the heart of the government’s strategy for 13- to 19-year-olds.
The government’s Positive for Youth statement commits £850,000 of funding to the British Youth Council, part of which will be used to advise councils and others on how to involve young people in decision-making and auditing services.
But just how much work is needed to get youth participation across the country up to scratch?
The National Youth Agency (NYA) has been working with 25 councils to develop participation processes and last month published a toolkit offering tips on how to engage young people in commissioning.
Peta Halls, NYA development officer, says there are a number of authorities with good participation models, but others have a long way to go, adding that involving young people in commissioning can be “daunting”.
“It needs a lot of support for the young people and there are many legal aspects to consider,” Halls says. “A lot of local authorities do it very successfully though and we are keen to share that work.”
Cuts and reforms
However, there are concerns that local authority cuts and changes to the way services are delivered is hindering the development of participation.
An Ofsted report on commissioning services for young people, published in August, found young people’s participation in service design, delivery and monitoring featured in all of 14 areas visited.
But few had reviewed or evaluated their youth participation policy in the light of “new and emerging commissioning arrangements”.
Bill Badham, co-director of the youth involvement company Practical Participation, says there is a risk that councils dictate the parameters of participation, allowing young people the opportunity to get involved in the commissioning process, but only on narrow terms set out by adults.
Instead, he advocates a “bottom-up” system that not only affords young people a hand in choosing the local provision on offer, but also a say over the way in which the commissioning process itself is designed – including fundamental decisions about budgets and whether or not services should be outsourced.
“Quite a few local authorities have come to know that participation is the right thing to do, but that doesn’t mean it is done well,” Badham says. “If the service is underfunded or the authority has already taken a decision on outsourcing provision, involving young people in commissioning is not that great.”
Rosina St James, vice chair of the British Youth Council, says many young people are unaware that participation schemes even exist. She believes local authorities must overhaul the way in which they communicate with young people if they want to make participation truly effective.
“A lot of young people, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds, feel as if they are quite disconnected,” she says. “They don’t feel they have a voice or a stake. They don’t really realise some of the things that are happening in terms of participation. More needs to be done to enlighten them.”
She believes this could be achieved if council employees visited schools and young offender institutions, among other settings, to promote their work on participation. St James concedes that the current financial climate makes it more difficult for councils to free up the resources needed to carry out such outreach work. But she believes local authorities could make much more of inexpensive methods of talking to young people. “Twitter and Facebook are good avenues that participation workers should follow,” she says.
Successful participation
Rachel Munday-Crates is manager of Staffordshire County Council’s Children’s Voice Project, which works with looked-after children to shape service provision. She argues that local authorities need to adopt some key principles of best practice for participation to be successful.
She insists it is vital to involve young people from the beginning of the process, rather than getting them on board halfway through, as well as being upfront and realistic with them about what can be achieved through their involvement.
“If you go in promising the earth and can’t achieve it, you lose their trust and they lose confidence in you,” she says. “You also have to help them to create their own agenda and work towards some-thing that is close to their heart.”
For example, her project supported young people to tackle the issue of pocket money for children in care, because foster carers and children’s homes were handing out different amounts. After consulting the young people affected, they came up with plans to standardise the sum of pocket money given to all looked-after children. “They were realistic and came up with a brilliant proposal,” Munday-Crates says. “That was turned into a policy and rolled out across the county.”
Youth participation in Bradford Connexions:
James Purdie, strategic commissioning manager, Bradford Council
When Bradford Council was deciding how its Connexions service should be run between 2010 and 2013, James Purdie, the authority’s strategic commissioning manager, involved young people in the process from the start.
The council used a three-stage engagement process to mirror the different stages of commissioning. “We asked young people for their experience of the service that had been in operation,” Purdie says. “We got them to describe what an excellent service would look like from their perspective.” Young people were asked questions such as “what makes a great service?” and “what makes an awful service?”
Their top 10 requirements were then collated from more than 70 responses. “That gave us a real wealth of information,” Purdie explains. “We then allowed young people to be involved in who would provide the service. There was a face-to-face phase where providers were asked to make a presentation, and spent some time with young people who had prepared activities and questions for them.
“In all of this, we were able to make sure that the young people working with us understood the process. At the end of the day, young people were responsible for about 15 per cent of the marks available in the procurement exercise – they were able to have significant influence in the process.”
The involvement of young people in the way the service is run has continued, through suggestion boxes and the employment of young people for specific research and evaluation work.
“Despite the difficult economic climate, Neet (not in education, employment or training) rates in Bradford are now at an historic low,” Purdie says. “Feedback we have received from young people and various performance indicators all show us the service is doing well.”
