At lunchtime Vallance Gardens resembles a pleasant square in multicultural London. Children kick a football around, veiled Asian women stop to greet each other, and office workers munch on sandwiches. But all is not as it seems.
"You'd be surprised," says a young person at my side. "This is the frontline. A lot of things happen here. Over there you have Bethnal Green, over here is Brick Lane and on that side is Brady Street - so this is the centre, where the gangs meet." We're in the heart of Bangladeshi east London, talking to a project that reaches out to marginalised young people.
Rathbone, the youth training charity, has been in existence for more than 100 years. It has 70 centres across the country working with 15,000 young people between 14 and 25 years old. But in 2000 it embarked on a new approach, which is being co-ordinated by Paul Fletcher.
Fletcher is national director of Rathbone's Youth Engagement programme. "In 2000 we recognised there were lots of training programmes around," he says. "The issue was connecting with young people at street level and getting them to the programmes that are already there, and which the government funds quite well."
Government support
David Blunkett, as Home Secretary in 2000, gave his support to the idea with a £1m cheque to develop the methodology. Today, Youth Engagement has a turnover of £4m a year, with half the money coming from the government and the remainder split evenly between trusts and the private sector.
Fletcher is dismissive of orthodox approaches to engaging young people. "You have to go to where they are," he argues. "Agencies are still sending letters to 16-year-olds who they know have left school and are listed as not in employment, education or training (Neet). And then they wonder why they don't turn up! These kids have got no parental support, they might be living in tower blocks having babies, getting into alcohol and drugs." This proactive approach, of going out and finding the young people, allied to the fact that it only employs local workers with respect in the community, is what makes Rathbone different, he believes.
The approach is built on five stages. First, youth workers seek to establish initial contact with a disaffected young person. Second, they begin to build a relationship with them. Third, they take on the role of mentor to replace the "absent parent". Fourth, they direct the young person to a suitable training programme. And fifth, they offer support during their transition to work or training. This means making sure the young person gets up on time, and phoning them at lunchtime and the end of the day to check everything is okay.
Youth Engagement measures its performance from the fourth contact with a young person and says it has a 50 per cent success rate. In other words, one in two of the young people with whom it has a fourth meeting ends up in training or work. For statutory agencies, the success rate is one in eight, says Fletcher. "These young people have had a whole host of interventions over the years from social services to youth offending teams. It's not that they don't want to learn; they can't connect with the authority structures around them."
200,000 Neets
Fletcher doesn't like the term "Neet", preferring "youth unemployment". But he accepts government figures that suggest there are 200,000 young people aged 16 to 18 who are Neet. Half of those require urgent intervention, he believes. And the scale of the problem means much more needs to be done: "We think we are a leading agency on this and our teams reached only 3,000 young people last year. That leaves another 97,000 who need urgent intervention."
The recession can only exacerbate the situation. "We can already see what will happen. There will be a rapid rise in youth unemployment, crime will rise, then we'll lock up more young men and put more on the path to a life of crime," says Fletcher. But he believes lessons can be learned from the recession of the early 1980s. "Credit to Margaret Thatcher for introducing the Youth Training Scheme (YTS). That is one way to solve this problem." He believes the government's own system of apprenticeships will not work "because the entry point is too high". The YTS worked because it lasted a year, paid the young person a decent allowance and gave them on-the-job experience, he argues.
"I worked on the YTS as a young man, building garden walls in Manchester. So I'm not too dissimilar from the young people I work with now."
Fletcher may know the North West, but when it comes to the local circumstances in the East End, he relies on his youth workers on the ground. Yasmin Begum, a 23-year-old detached youth worker, says: "All immigrant groups seem to head for Brick Lane. We've had a lot of tension between the Eastern European and Bangladeshi communities that we have to sort out."
Local knowledge
Begum is proof of Rathbone's determination to employ local people with street cred over academically minded graduates with no understanding of the local communities. "I was 17 when I came across Rathbone," says Begum. "I wasn't really interested in my A-levels; I'd been forced to do them by my parents. I was involved in drink and drugs." If it hadn't been for the Bangladeshi youth workers, Begum thinks her life would have taken a turn for the worse. But instead she found her purpose: "I was passionate about youth work."
Today her job is to be visible in the parks, streets and housing estates of Tower Hamlets. It is not always easy, she admits. "You go to kids selling drugs and say 'there's another way out'. And they reply 'what can you offer me, I'm making hundreds of pounds a day?'"
But she has learned to be persistent. "We pose different questions for them and get them to think about their approach. We keep coming back every couple of weeks and they see that we care. It doesn't happen overnight and sometimes it can take years. The key is we treat every young person as an individual, not as part of a group," she says.
Then there is the complex cultural situation. "Most young people here are second or third generation migrants, so it's hard for them to relate to their parents' Bangladeshi values. Equally, the parents don't understand the culture here."
She believes Rathbone's approach of employing locals is vital. "It's a close community. If you don't know anything about it, you can't help. If one of the young girls asks me about forced marriage, I can relate to her. We have to be culturally sensitive."
Workers sometimes get mugged on the streets, so isn't she frightened? "There's always that possibility, but you can't go out with that fear. Know your boundaries - if a young person doesn't want to talk to you, don't push it."
NAJ, 18: "There is a lot of pressure to get involved in the wrong activities here. It's drugs, gang fights and postcode wars. Some people get pressured more easily than others when it comes to carrying a knife. Unfortunately, a lot of our friends do a lot of these things. We do have to associate with them, but we don't take part in the things they do. I think Rathbone is better than a lot of other projects because it gives you help and opportunities. I got involved last year after getting a phone call from one of the youth workers. It's a good way to get you off the street, even if some kids are always going to be impossible to reach. I want to join the police force and do mentoring on the side. It's seven weeks training to be a police constable and then I can go out on the beat."
DIPU, 19: "I was a young person without a job, with no skills or training to my name. I was just dossing around on the streets. I took drugs regularly. In other words, my life wasn't going anywhere. I came across a Rathbone youth worker one day and we got talking about things. They seemed interested in helping me out. It wasn't like they were strangers anyway, because the youth worker was known to me already, having lived and grown up in the area. So you feel more comfortable speaking to them. They took me in and I got involved in volunteering as a youth worker. And that changed my outlook and it's what I do now. The workers say they've seen me change over time."
