United by uniform

Rod Jarman is the man charged with leading the government initiative to radically boost the number of uniformed youth groups in the UK, from the Scouts and Girl Guides to St John Ambulance and army cadets.

As the chief executive of the charity Youth United, he has been entrusted with £10m of government funding to attract 2,700 volunteers and set up 400 uniformed youth groups in deprived areas by 2015.

Jarman, a former deputy assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan Police, is acutely aware of how the criminal justice system too often fails the most vulnerable young people. Chatting over a coffee at Scotland Yard, it becomes clear that working with young people was a major thrust in his policing career.

Jarman recalls the pivotal moment in November 2000 when 10-year-old Damilola Taylor was murdered near a block of flats in Peckham, while he was the borough commander in Southwark, south London. Damilola’s killers, Ricky Preddie and his brother Danny, were just 13 and 14 at the time.

“It was one of those moments in life where you think you know what your job is, and you think you know what’s happening in the area, but you realise things are much more complex than any bit of straight analysis is going to show,” Jarman says.

“When we started looking at what was happening for young people in the borough and unpicked what their world was like, it became clear that the police service wasn’t set up in any way to protect and provide services for them. We saw young people as those who commit crime and those who were victims. We weren’t looking at their needs. Because we weren’t doing that, we were completely disassociated from them.”

This realisation led to a number of consultation events with young people in the area, as well as the launch of a detailed research project in partnership with Southwark’s teachers, social workers and health professionals.

“We sat down and talked about what we knew was going on,” Jarman says. “The reason that hadn’t happened before was because agencies would say you can’t share information about individuals. For once there was an understanding that we had to share information and we had to do things differently.”

The research found that all local young offenders had been victims on multiple occasions – not just of crime, but also of disadvantage in their homes and schools. It concluded that the state was “systematically letting them down”.

“It was a hugely depressing time, but at the same time it felt as though we could do something about it,” Jarman says. “There was a lot of energy from the local authority and nationally to support us coming up with different models of working.”

Boosting uniformed youth provision
From this, strategies to improve relationships with young people and the police flowered. Jarman went on to be the national police lead on the Safer Schools Partnership and on the previous government’s Every Child Matters initiative from 2004. This led him to start working with youth sector organisations, and then to being invited to review the Police Cadets in London.

He says that this work, alongside his efforts on Every Child Matters – which he describes as the most important legislation of the past 30 years – created a desire to boost uniformed youth provision for disadvantaged young people.

“It was clear we had a really interesting model of Police Cadets,” he says. “Young people were being referred from youth offending teams, and by custody officers.

“They were engaging with us and we were giving them some stability and a positive role model to help them during that transition time in life. The problem was that the capacity would have needed to grow from 2,000 to 200,000 to deliver it to all young people who could benefit. The cost would have been astronomical and it probably wasn’t deliverable on that scale anyway.”

Following his experience with the cadets, Jarman started to work with a police sergeant in Croydon who was running a project called Youth Organisations in Uniform, connecting young people in custody with uniformed organisations in the area. The Prince’s Trust expressed an interest in the idea, and a subsequent meeting over tea with the Prince of Wales prompted Jarman to launch Youth United in 2009.

“Prince Charles said it was exactly what he wanted to do nationally,” he says. “He has a really good way with young people and is absolutely committed to helping them, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds and vulnerable young people. He is so passionate about it. I wouldn’t have expected it.”

Jarman says the organisations involved with Youth United can offer different benefits to other youth services. He says their names resonate with employers. “I think it would be quite hard to walk into the boardroom of a major organisation and not find someone who was in one of these youth organisations,” he says.

He adds that the “structure” of activities offers something young people may not be getting elsewhere. “It is not just hanging around and thinking of something to do,” he says. “There is a programme for them to be involved with. And it’s fun.”

Since Youth United was awarded £10m funding from the Department for Communities and Local Government in February last year, the eight-strong team at the charity has been inviting bids for funding from the 10 youth organisations with which it works.