Strategy must boost youth opportunities
Derren Hayes
Tuesday, August 28, 2018
The government's long-awaited Civil Society Strategy recognises the "transformational impact that youth services and trained youth workers" can have on disadvantaged young people.
The strategy includes a range of measures but it is the commitment to review youth work statutory guidance and "fully embed" the National Citizen Service (NCS) into local youth provision that has the potential to redefine how youth services are delivered.
Revisiting the Education Act 1996 is long overdue. The act requires authorities "so far as is reasonably practicable, secure for qualifying young persons access to sufficient educational and recreational activities which are for the improvement of their wellbeing". Statutory guidance issued in 2008 added more detail, including setting out the age range and types of issues that services for young people need to cater for.
What is missing from it is a clear description of what specific services must be directly provided or commissioned by councils. This is the reason that cash-strapped councils have halved the amount they spent on youth services since 2010. The strategy states the review will give "greater clarity" on what local youth services should provide, but local government and youth work leaders say this cannot be done without additional funding.
With many councils facing increased financial pressures, the review must devise a way of protecting youth services budgets from further cuts. If more money is unlikely to be provided, then ringfencing what exists is the minimum needed.
Unlike council youth provision, NCS has had millions pumped into it in recent years, accounting for 95 per cent of central government funding on youth services. The government's desire to better integrate NCS into local youth provision could be advantageous to councils.
Earlier this year, the government rejected proposals to expand NCS so that it is offered year-round. However, there is an appetite within NCS Trust and among some youth work leaders to make it easier to refer vulnerable young people that youth services work with onto the four-week social action programme. Doing so would extend the reach of NCS and get more young people from disadvantaged communities participating in it. This in turn must link them into more long-term and ongoing educational opportunities - which is ultimately how the strategy should be judged.