Youth services will play an integral role within the centres, which will open in 2008 and 2009. The centres will be a base for co-located and information technology-based services for young people, incorporating facilities such as cinema space. Young people will decide how they should be named.
Nick Page, service director for transformation in the council's children's services department, said the centres went "a lot deeper and further" than extended schools.
"This is a real opportunity for us in Knowsley to try to reach out to young people," he said. "We're investing in ensuring that these centres will look and feel very different from traditional schools. We want to give young people a place that feels like home, rather than just another place they can utilise like a youth centre."
The organisations that will build the centres and oversee integrated service delivery within them will be selected by September, with contracts to be finalised by the end of the year. Children and young people have been working with contractors over the past year to shape what the centres should offer. They will have a 15 per cent stake in the final choice of bidder.
Wendy Middlemas, acting assistant education director at Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council, told Young People Now's Children's Trusts in Practice conference last week: "Schools are not named as relevant partners under the Children Act 2004. So we will have to try to make sure that they are relevant partners in other ways. The head teachers in school will know that the children in front of them have holistic needs and will want to try to make the learning environment for their pupils as healthy as humanly possible."
www.knowsley.gov.uk.
