Another excellent example is Bolton Lads & Girls Club. Famous for its connection with young boxer Amir Khan, it has an operating model well worth examining in the context of the Youth Matters green paper.
The club receives 2,900 visits from young people every week, each paying 40p for four hours of activities. As chief executive Jeremy Glover points out, even 40p is a lot of money for many of the local kids, but this scale of visits refutes the idea that young people are not interested in youth clubs. As he says, the truth is they don't want to hang out in crap places.
The project opens seven nights a week, from 6.00pm until 10.00pm, and from 8.00am until 10.00pm at weekends. Adults wouldn't put up with a local leisure centre or cinema that only opened one or two nights a week, so why should young people?
Boxing is available six nights a week and has had huge uptake among young Asian kids since Khan's Olympic success. The club runs football and other sporting teams, breakfast and after-school clubs, mentoring and outreach work, and gets excellent take-up from Black and minority ethnic groups - including girls - and disabled young people. All activities are conducted within the framework of good youth work interventions.
Glover believes the opportunity card is a gimmick that won't have any impact on the lives of kids in his target group on estates who have nothing to do anyway. No-one is going to top up their cards, and they just won't get carried around or used.
He says the debate should be about giving every young person access to a good club within two miles of their home, getting rid of bad places and improving good provision. The opportunity card should be the icing on the cake, not the starting point.
The Department for Education and Skills HQ has never sent anyone to check out Bolton Lads & Girls Club, but I can't help thinking someone should be winging their way up from Great Smith Street tout de suite to see what a properly run traditional youth project can contribute to a local community and its young people and what it means for Youth Matters.
