Government urged to improve NCS branding and links with schools

Befitting its status as a flagship government policy, praise was heaped on the National Citizen Service when an evaluation of last year’s pilots was published earlier this month.

The evaluation highlighted the scheme’s positives – an estimated return of up to £2 for every £1 invested, with 95 per cent of those who took part in the initiative saying it gave them the chance to develop skills for the future.

But, behind the PR gloss, the full evaluation report reveals a more nuanced picture, with a number of important areas for improvement identified for the coming years, as the scheme expands to 90,000 places by 2014.

The report, which found that 19 per cent of young people dropped out before the end, underlines the need for improved branding of the NCS; better relationships between providers, schools and youth services; and more peer-to-peer support to share practice across providers.

Meanwhile, analysis of the programme found little evidence of impact in two key areas – community involvement and attitudes to social mixing.

Although the NCS achieved a good social mix of young people overall, providers felt this was “less pronounced” in terms of the groups of young people who ended up working together on the ground.

Regarding the third stage of the scheme – 30 hours of volunteer work in the community – one of young people’s chief concerns was that they were not being taken seriously by local people.

But despite these issues, figures in the sector believe improvements are achievable. David Wright, chief executive of the Confederation of Heads of Young People’s Services (Chyps), says links between providers and schools must be enhanced, so that young people most likely to benefit from the programme can be engaged.

“There’s an opportunity to include local authorities in helping identify vulnerable young people and others that may benefit from being part of the scheme,” he says. “There’s also the opportunity to link the NCS into more mainstream youth provision.”

Deborah McCahon is membership development manager at Woodcraft Folk, which is delivering 360 places on the programme in a consortium with Envision, the Co-operative College and Change Agents UK. She believes improved branding would make it easier to attract young people onto the scheme.

“We are still going to schools that have no idea what the NCS is,” she says. “We are having to sell the programme itself and our version of the programme. I don’t see any evidence of the government marketing it.”

The report found that “NCS branding was not felt to articulate what NCS is about and how it could benefit participants”.

She adds that, as a new provider of the NCS, peer support would be valuable. “We have designed our programme based on our experience as a consortium, but we haven’t tested it with young people in this way before – a physical activity residential followed by a skills camp and then a community project. It would be interesting to hear from other providers about how they went about it and the progression of learning from one phase to another.”

Craig Morley, chief executive of The Challenge Network, this year’s largest NCS provider, delivering 10,000 places, concedes there is room for improvement.

He says that concerns over the impact of social mixing need to be addressed through clearer guide-lines of what providers are expected to do when grouping young people together.

He adds that, unlike the results in the evaluation report, The Challenge achieved good outcomes in terms of community involvement last year, with the organisation’s graduate programme, The Challenge Society, on course to be taken up by half of those who were on last year’s pilots.