The young inspectors

Fourteen-year-old Dallas Mitchell looks up to her older brother Sam. When she saw how his involvement in their local council’s young inspector scheme had changed him, she wanted in on it too. "It made him see things in other ways, like thinking about the community and how to treat others," she recalls.

"Before, he was messy and used to throw litter on the floor, but this just changed him. Now he throws things in the bin."

Dallas and her 15-year-old brother are among Calderdale’s current crop of active young inspectors, a group of trained-up young people who receive £5 an hour to inspect a broad range of recreational, educational and support venues across the area and deliver verdicts on how well they meet young people’s needs.

The West Yorkshire authority is one of 22 across the country continuing young inspector projects after being funded to pilot them under a scheme called Youth4U. It channelled £4.5m of government cash to a National Children’s Bureau-led consortium including the British Youth Council and disabled children’s charity Kids, which helped 33 councils deliver the projects between 2009 and 2011.

The funding enabled them to employ local support workers to collectively recruit and train more than 1,450 marginalised young people, pay them for their inspections and provide them with support.

"It was about taking a group of challenging young people, moving them along from just being passive recipients of services to active stakeholders, feeling that people were willing to listen to their opinions," says Rob Glover, who was Calderdale’s local support worker over the course of the pilot. "There was a transformation in their self-confidence and self-belief.

"Some of the services being inspected thought that the young people were just going to rubbish them," he admits. "But because their recommendations were often simple and straightforward, such as making posters more attractive, making timetables clearer or opening at the weekend, they did their best to implement them. So there was a nice reciprocal arrangement between the two parties."

Reports like this have no doubt convinced authorities in their decisions to continue their young inspector projects after funding for the Youth4U programme came to an end last March. But the form in which they are being continued is becoming increasingly varied.

David Wright, chief executive of the Confederation of Heads of Young People’s Services (Chyps), says although most youth services have developed some form of "youth voice" work such as young inspector programmes in recent years, " there is less of it now than there was a year ago", due to budget cuts hitting youth services hard.

Revitalising the collective voice

The government’s youth policy document Positive for Youth, published in December, appears to want to revitalise that collective voice. In it, children’s minister Tim Loughton says he wants every local authority to have arrangements in place enabling young people to inspect and report on the quality of services that affect their lives.

Wright says he is hoping for "clear and unequivocal" follow-up guidance from the government, setting out a "clear and consistent expectation" of the arrangements that authorities should have in place for youth-led inspections. This, he hopes, will encourage local councillors to find the resources needed to ensure young people are properly supported to do such work.

"The statement [in Positive for Youth] is a good start," he says. "The guidance has to also say what will happen if such audits don’t take place. What happens if the audit falls short of what is an acceptable standard? In these straitened times, it should be the role of central government to encourage and support local authorities to ensure that this takes place. We councils have lots of people playing different instruments in different ways, but what we need is to have somebody conducting it."

Councils that have continued running young inspector schemes have depended on passionate advocates within their ranks to drive them. But not all of these projects have been backed with local money.
The luckier ones include Calderdale. Its local support worker, Rob Glover, had to go as the national funding ended. But councillors found the money to fund 20 inspections this year, to the tune of £120 each, enabling the £5-an-hour payments to the young inspectors to be maintained.

Anecdotes from Calderdale’s young inspectors suggest this has been money well spent. Fifteen-year-old Danielle Rippon, who joined the project a year ago, says her most fulfilling moment came when she was part of a team asked to scrutinise the website of the Calderdale Safeguarding Children Board.

The inspectors concluded that it was too focused on older people and was not colourful enough, with information that was hard to read. It has since been redesigned to become more youth-friendly and Danielle and the team have been taken on as permanent paid advisers to the board.

"Most of the organisations have taken on our recommendations and worked on things to make services better," says Danielle. As well as boosting her confidence, she says the experience has increased her awareness of the range of facilities available in her town. "Some of the activities I’d never heard of until I inspected them and some of our recommendations were to advertise them more," she explains. "I didn’t know what was in Halifax for young people and learning about all these new activities means I can tell my younger brother and sisters about them."

Another area where young inspectors have reaped benefits for themselves and local services is Barking and Dagenham. Director of children’s services Helen Jenner says the authority decided to continue the scheme as it had become "such an important part of what we do".

But the experiences of this east London authority illustrate some of the compromises cash-strapped councils have to make to continue services like this with little or no specific funding. The council is no longer able to pay the young people for inspections, a change which has led some to drop out.

And its decision to try to cover the project’s support costs by charging organisations for inspections has led to a dramatic fall in the number of inspections, from between 35 and 40 a year to just a handful booked for next year. The lack of local funding will mean the loss next month of support worker Carl Reid, who played a pivotal role in encouraging marginalised young people on to the programme and offering them dedicated support.

Jenner acknowledges that the removal of a dedicated support worker does reduce the council’s ability to "weedle out" marginalised young people to take part. But she says links with organisations such as Connexions, which works with young people not in education, employment or training, can ensure that the project continues to provide opportunities for disengaged young people.

"It’s about making best use of the networks we already have," she says. "Because there will be less adult support available, the young people are becoming slightly more independent. It’s a double-edged sword, because you don’t want the young people to feel unsupported. But I think some of the hand-holding we did was unnecessary."

Testimonies from Barking and Dagenham’s young inspectors suggest that the confidence and enthusiasm it has generated among young people will be enough to carry it through. "I like Carl [the support worker], he’s a really good man," says 16-year-old Parastoo Neshatdoost, who got involved in the project in September 2009.

"He’s always advising us on what to do and that’s really good, because you get better confidence when you go and inspect places. I’d like Carl’s support, but I’ll still want to do it when he’s gone."

Fellow inspector Sam Wilkinson, 16, has Asperger’s syndrome and has been a young inspector since Easter 2010. He says the experience has "made it easier to work with other people who I would not necessarily have worked with and communicate with lots of different types of people". He adds: "The cash was nice, but in the end, it’s more beneficial that you’ve helped somebody else, rather than helping yourself."

Calderdale’s former support worker Glover says the economic climate makes young inspector projects more important, rather than less. "We don’t have times of plenty, so services need to ensure that what they’re providing is something that young people want and are accessible to all," he says. "All professionals can second-guess demand, but demand changes and youth culture changes and they need to keep in touch with that."

Since joining the project last year, Dallas Mitchell has been playing her part in helping professionals stay in touch with what young people want. She says it has changed the way she interacts with the world, just as it did for her brother. "Before the project, I wanted to be a fashion designer. But now, because I talk to people and was shy before, I want to be a psychiatrist," she says.

"I find it interesting to talk to people and see what makes them tick. My confidence has gone right up. It has changed things dramatically for me. It has changed me around."

FUNDING YOUTH INSPECTION TEAMS

Councils are employing a number of strategies to run youth inspection schemes in their area, mindful of the need to keep a tight rein on spending.

Some authorities are linking young inspector projects to their commissioning process by writing a requirement into contracts that organisations pay for inspections from young inspectors.

Mandy Douglas, National Children’s Bureau’s programme director for partnership and involvement, says: "For a local authority, that supports twofold what they’re doing – it makes sure that the service they’re commissioning is still relevant and it enables them to resource the young inspector service."

Providing or procuring young inspector services across council boundaries can help councils generate income for the projects or provide a solution for councils that cannot afford to train or maintain a group of inspectors. This is a route taken by Barking and Dagenham Council, which has been commissioned to provide young inspectors to audit services in neighbouring Redbridge Council.

In the absence of a dedicated worker to support marginalised young people, councils need to make use of the links with them that they already have through other targeted projects.

The Youth4U consortium is offering a nine-module course for organisations wanting to run youth inspection schemes.