Conservative plan
The Conservative Party has pledged to make the introduction of a National Citizen Service (NCS) a key manifesto commitment. It will be a six-week personal development programme available to all 16-year-olds in the summer holidays and has been described as a "rite of passage".
Paul Oginsky, youth policy adviser to Tory leader David Cameron, is confident the voluntary scheme would be up and running from the first summer after a Conservative government is elected.
"It's going to be driven by quality," he says. "There's no good saying we are going for 'X thousand young people' and the quality isn't there."
Community involvement
It will consist of a one-week residential course in which young people work in teams, four weeks of "community involvement" including volunteering and a final-week residential challenge, which Oginsky says will be a "crescendo, physically and mentally challenging".
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