The strengthening of local authorities' commissioning role will be good news to voluntary youth organisations, although sector skills council Lifelong Learning UK has its doubts (see p2), while the empowerment of communities to take ownership of youth facilities might help to save some youth clubs from closure. An example is Surrey, where the council is exploring renting facilities to community groups, rather than closing them. But a youth club is more than just a building, and it is important that communities can ensure it provides proper youth work.
It is also important that parish councils, if they control youth facilities, receive training on youth involvement. Not all parish councils will fight for youth facilities like Sawtry Parish Council, winner of a Community Empowerment Award for services to young people. Judges praised the council for sticking to its guns over the provision of a youth shelter in the face of local opposition.
Local authority youth workers will be interested to hear that the Joint Area Review system, introduced in 2005 to combine a number of previous inspections of local services for children and young people up to the age of 19, will be replaced in April 2009 with a system based on a combination of risk assessment and audit. Ofsted, which leads work on Joint Area Reviews, has said it will refrain from commenting on the new system, known as Comprehensive Area Assessment, until legislation is in place.
Every local authority has to put a lot of effort into a Joint Area Review, but as no area will undergo a review more than once, it can't learn from it. As more councils undergo the inspection process, bodies such as the Improvement and Development Agency (www.idea.gov.uk) have built up helpful "top tips", but it will be a crying shame if the new system does not build on the experience of the old, requiring services to spend still more time getting to know about the inspection process rather than spending that time ensuring the service it provides is a good one.
