Interview – Ndidi Okezie, chief executive, UK Youth

Navigating an organisation through a global pandemic is a challenge for any experienced chief executive, so for a “newbie”, as Ndidi Okezie calls herself, it is even more daunting. Okezie took over at UK Youth in January, following the departure of Anna Smee to the Youth Futures Foundation the previous December after five years at the helm. By her own admission Okezie is “new to the youth sector but not to young people” after joining from education company Pearson Plc, where she was vice president of its secondary schools portfolio. Prior to that, the psychology graduate and qualified teacher spent more than five years at fast-track teacher training organisation Teach First as an executive director.

How have you adapted to a new sector and organisation?

All the issues and concerns around young people have been spotlighted by the pandemic in a way that they wouldn’t have been otherwise. Digital inequality, grooming and mental health have all been made worse by Covid-19 and it will take all of society to unpick it.

The silver lining from all this has been the ability to work with other infrastructure bodies across the voluntary sector and public services. I was around the table with them regularly as we needed to be on the same page and be working closely together. We were having twice-weekly meetings with senior officials from government departments over the package of support for charities.

I’m new to the youth sector but not to young people. I wouldn’t have imagined I’d be an outsider to the youth sector until I joined it – the demarcation has been more acute than I’d imagined it would be.

With little experience of running organisations how did you cope?

This is my first chief executive role and for the last six months it’s been dealing with a global pandemic. I initially wondered whether a more senior chief executive would be doing more. I was so fired up by what we needed to do that I wasn’t prioritising my [own] needs. One of my board members said to me, “people would pay money to go on the leadership journey you’re going through, be gentle with yourself”.

There were times when I wasn’t sure which particular issues we should be leading on. That was something I had to figure out quickly. I’d just started to get to know this organisation; I had developed a plan and had just launched a “people first” focus and then all of a sudden lockdown hit. I needed people to trust me [but] hadn’t had the time to earn that. I was thinking about what we needed to do to survive; 65 per cent of staff were furloughed.

What are the key lessons for UK Youth and the youth sector to take from lockdown?

There’s something around the forward planning of our work: no one could have prepared for this but what does crisis planning look like? What we’ve lived through highlights why we need to be more flexible and be able to apply strategic scenario planning in all situations.

Also, young people went off the radar as schools and youth clubs closed. We waited for young people to come to us, but we can’t afford to do that anymore. How can we ensure young people can be reached and accessed?

There’s an inherent bias in the type of young people that will engage with support and we must be aware of excluding young people that may need it most.

We couldn’t find a clear sector-wide view of what young people were going through at a time when we needed to. I’m driven to figure out how we do it.

Have you adapted your plans for UK Youth as a result of the past six months?

I inherited an organisation at the end of its strategic period. I found myself asking what are we uniquely placed to do? I’m drawn to roles that deal with complex issues and I feel strongly about system leadership. System leadership is required to understand how these pieces fit together. We sit in that system space but we weren’t set up to effectively convene insights across multiple sectors and paint a clear picture of what young people need.

I have refined the next five years: year one is the response to Covid-19, but the needs have shifted a little, which allows us to respond with things like the Young & Black campaign and tackle youth unemployment – how can we support young people right now? We will use the experience of that to influence years two to five.

We’re uniquely placed to play a leading role in terms of strategic investment in the youth sector and cross-sector understanding in how youth work makes a difference. I want us to lead on addressing the inequality of access to youth services for young people and embedding effective solutions.

How will the pandemic shape youth work provision in the future?

There’s no going back on the use of digital support; a leap has taken place. But the gaps in our understanding of digital as a sector have been illuminated quite sharply by the pandemic, for example in equality of access, efficacy of services and consistency of support. We don’t all mean the same thing when we talk about digital support, for some it means equipment and for others how young people access services.

We should pull together the spokes of young people’s lives and place their needs at the heart of our response. The default position is that schools are the hub to base the delivery on, but there are a lot of young people that are disengaged with school. As a teacher I could have benefitted from knowing what you’re working on at the youth club, not just that you’re going there. For that reason I like the approaches developed by the Reach Hub and Harlem Children’s Zone, where support services are strategically joined up.

The government has pledged a review of council youth work duties. What role should voluntary organisations play delivering local authority youth provision?

All the conversations I’m hearing about the role of local authority youth services suggest we are still siloed. We need to be less concerned about the demarcation of provision and more concerned about the barriers to implementation.

We’re facing a scale of need for young people that we have not seen before. Are we comfortable that the recommendations already in train will be important? What happened to the last vision document, Positive for Youth, and have we learned any lessons? How much are new solutions driven by understanding what went wrong before?

We need to be looking beyond short-term priorities. Often standalone support policies don’t make a difference and young people end up being the guinea pigs. I think we need a 10-15 year strategy for youth that is disaggregated from government policy and considered alongside formal education.

What new skills will youth workers need to develop to meet young people’s evolving needs?

Grit and resilience skills are needed, as are entrepreneurial skills. We should be concerned about the impact of pushing a negative narrative about the future. We all need to balance painting the picture of need with equipping young people with the tenacity required to navigate this situation. We can’t remove hope from the narrative.

The Black Lives Matter movement really speaks to what youth work does, but some don’t feel equipped to have these conversations. Some organisations don’t think this is their place, or that it is right for the predominately white communities of young people they work with. But this is a journey we all have to go on together.

I was shocked and staggered to see the depletion in the number of people taking professional youth work qualifications. It feels like we’re watching the deprofessionalising of the sector.

There’s a need for the sector to increase and diversify its approach to qualifications and bring that together with young people’s needs. There isn’t a consistent view as to the value of different qualifications, and there are issues around access to funding. We can’t keep accepting the reductions in numbers; it devalues the status of the work.

NDIDI OKEZIE CV

• January 2020: Chief executive, UK Youth
• October 2018: Vice president, secondary schools portfolio, Pearson Plc
• January 2013: Executive director, Teach First
• August 2006: Assistant principal, ARK Burlington Danes Academy
• June 2005: Gains qualified teacher status
• June 2003: Pastoral head, Business Academy Bexley UK
• June 2002: Gains BSc Hons in psychology, Brunel University