Participation in Action: Young commissioners help shape the future of services

To meet this call, Central Bedfordshire Council has formed a team of 10 young commissioners to help its commissioning department with decisions about local youth services. The group consists of 15- to 17-year-olds from the Central Bedfordshire Youth Parliament and young inspectors committees, who volunteered to devote time to reading tenders and interviewing applicants.

The young people began their work six months ago with a residential training weekend in Buckingham, where, as part of a larger group, they were taught how the commissioning process works. Led by council youth workers, the group practiced reading tenders and interviewing organisations in a mock commissioning process.

From this training, the final 10 young people committed to spending four to six evenings working on the project. They were asked to help the council select service providers for three activities: locality youth work; volunteering; and impartial information, advice and guidance.

Jackie Squires, youth commissioning officer at Central Bedfordshire, says the council’s tendering process consists of two parts. The first sees a panel review applications and score them. The second involves interviewing the highest scorers. The young commissioners took part in both stages. Working in pairs, they scored the tenders before all 10 moderated the results and fed the results back to the adult panel. The young people were responsible for up to four of the questions providers were rated on and their views were given equal weight as those of the council employees.

Young commissioner Max Aaron Hurst, 17, says this made the process particularly inclusive for the young people: “The fact that the marks were split near enough 50-50 with both panels meant that the youth actually had power into who was going to get the contract.”

Squires says the young commissioners were particularly good at assessing the tenders. “They performed extremely well,” she says. “They asked pertinent questions, were good at reading lengthy answers and made considered judgments.”

The second stage of the process required applicants to be interviewed by the council. These interviews were held in the evening to ensure the young commissioners’ education was not disrupted, as all of them were students. For this reason, the number of young people involved in the process varied from evening to evening, depending on their availability.
 
Squires says those tendering for the work responded well to being interviewed by the young panel since they were all from the youth sector and understood the value of participation.

Sometimes young commissioners joined the adult panel; other times they held a separate interview session. Squires says the young people made fair challenges to council staff and came up with innovative questions. “They came up with one question, which was: ‘What is your unique selling point?’,” she says. “This was a really good question – and we’ve since used it when interviewing for staff.”

They also received recognition for their work in the form of a Skills for Commissioning: Consultation and Assessment qualification, which is accredited by the exam board AQA.

Rebecca Rooker, a 17-year-old member of the group, says the experience has influenced her future career choices. “I feel like I’m being taken seriously and I’m being listened to,” she says. “This is going to look great on my CV. The fact that I have interviewed people for actual contracts, as well as learning about commissioning, could even give me a start in that direction for a career.”

Squires says the project required little extra funding aside from officers’ time working in evenings. The only financial expense was created by the residential weekend and paying trainers, which was paid from the council’s youth work budget.

The outcomes of the project have encouraged Bedfordshire to repeat the process. Ketan Gandhi, youth services commissioning manager, says: “When it’s specific services for young people, we really need to have young people’s involvement to make sure that the services, and the people providing them, are fit for young people.”