Detached Youth Work: The cost of reaching out

So says Tyneside detached worker Mike Burgess, who has many years of experience and knows the impact this work can have. Now, thanks to the first major study across England of the spread, nature and effectiveness of street-based youth work, the rest of us can get an idea as well. Youth workers can also find out how much the typical detached project costs to run, and use this information to lobby for funding.

Measure of success

The study was commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, prompted by the Government's ongoing policy focus on the most disadvantaged young people. The foundation's principal research manager Charlie Lloyd explains: "We know these disadvantaged young people are unlikely to have contact with traditional youth organisation services, yet there was a question mark over whether Connexions had really embraced the detached work model. We decided to see what outreach and detached work could do to reach the most excluded."

There have been a number of small-scale studies in the past, notably Mary Morse's The Unattached in 1965, that have shown the benefits of this kind of work in a neighbourhood context. In the foundation's study, a research team undertook a mapping exercise followed by telephone interviews and visits to selected projects. After 10 months, 31 projects were re-contacted to see what had changed for them.

The research found significant growth in the number of projects - at least five times more than the last attempt to count them in 1976. It also found a shift away from longer-term, area-based projects towards short-term, targeted work with high-risk groups or on particular issues.

Short-term funding created problems of staff retention and there were signs of a high turnover of projects opening and folding. The research used a "social exclusion inventory" to analyse the kind of young people the projects were in touch with, and this confirmed that while most projects worked with a range of individuals, they were successfully reaching the socially excluded.

What is more, the small-scale study of re-contacted programmes suggested the projects were making an impact on that exclusion. Between first and second visits, the numbers not in education, employment or training fell from 29 per cent to 21 per cent. Those attending school or structured youth provision rose from 26 per cent to 37 per cent, while known offending fell from 45 per cent to 31 per cent. Other areas - family relationships, rough sleeping, drug and alcohol use - also moved in the right direction.

Tom Wylie, chief executive of The National Youth Agency and member of the steering group for the research, is pleased but cautious about the results. "It shows what common sense tells us: that some young people benefit from the opportunity to talk to someone in a way that a formal system can't provide and where young people can control the pace of disclosure," he says.

Not wide enough

But Wylie acknowledges the small scale of this part of the study and the difficulty of disentangling the outcomes of any one intervention from the influence of other factors. "It would be helpful to deepen our knowledge here," he says. "That requires the kind of long-term study this project was not funded to do."

The short-term and fragile nature of the funding for many projects was a major concern for research team member Professor John Pitts. "Funders suffer from a belief that huge social issues can be turned round quickly, rather than working at the pace of young people," he says. "The possibility of doing long-term developmental work is limited. As a result, detached work becomes a stepping stone to something else. There's a hierarchy in the profession and detached workers are some of the worst off - there's an inverse correlation between the needs of young people and the status of workers."

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation's Charlie Lloyd was also concerned about funding models that tie projects to quick results on quantifiable targets.

"Despite the promise shown in this report, funding often doesn't allow projects the time to make an impact," he says. "There's a central irony, given the mission of the Government, that the funding models actually hamstring those working to that end."

The foundation has backed up this concern by supporting a groundbreaking costing exercise providing policymakers and funders with figures showing how much it would cost to roll out a model detached work project to cover a specific proportion of the most disadvantaged areas. The costing analysis, conducted by Tom Wylie, is described in the panel (above right) and indicates that for 25m, some 250,000 young people in the most disadvantaged areas could be reached, a cost of around four per cent of the spend on secondary schools in those areas.

"For a modest investment, sustained over time and influencing mainstream services, the lives of many of the most marginalized young people could be transformed," says Wylie.

Set the standard

The costing exercise is a first for the foundation and is a process set to be expanded to all other reports. "It was an experiment for us and I'm rather pleased with it," says Lloyd. "We have to have a minimum standard. At the moment it's down to luck whether a young person finds a detached project, and it's not good enough."

Back on the front line of the work on the Meadow Well estate in North Tyneside, Mike Burgess, of the Phoenix Detached Youth Work Project, finds the research findings ring true.

"People are trying to get detached work on the cheap," he says. "There is a lack of understanding of the work, with top-down developments that want quick results."

Burgess wants to see projects set up for a minimum of three years to give them time to start delivering, and an end to so-called "intelligence-led" work where workers are effectively expected to give the police information.

"What makes me effective is that I have time to build relationships with young people," he insists. "I can meet them and provide activities when they are 13 to 16, and they come back to me and I can work holistically on issues in their life when they are 16 to 25. But you have to keep that work going."

Reaching socially excluded young people: A national study of street-based youth work was launched, along with a paper on the costing exercise, on 21 June. For more information, visit www.jrf.org.uk

STREET-BASED YOUTH WORK

- The Joseph Rowntree Foundation detached youth work survey identified 1,547 projects, of which 564 returned questionnaires

- Almost half had been in place for three years or less, while just 24 projects were more than 15 years old

- Seventy-six per cent were doing detached work, 61 per cent outreach work, 26 per cent detached work only, and 12 per cent outreach only. Forty-five per cent were also involved in building-based work

- Coverage was very uneven. Some local authority areas, such as Kent and Bristol, reported 20 or more projects, while others appeared to have none. In Devon and Cornwall, there was one project per 3,030 13- to 19-year-olds, while in Northamptonshire it was one per 55,642

- Funding varied enormously. A few projects reported budgets of less than 150 a year after staff costs. Others had a turnover of 500,000 or more

COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation study looked at nine detached projects and calculated the unit cost of working with each young person at two levels - a "contact" or a "participant". For low-cost projects - those not fully resourced - costing was 3 to 6 for a contact and 6 to 16 for a participant. For higher-cost projects, with full services, costs ranged from 10 to 17 for a contact and 12 to 23 for a participant.

There was one inner-London project where costs were 25 and 39 respectively.

Basic service

Based on this information, the study calculated the cost of providing a full service project allowing basic contact with some 125 young people and intensive work with around 25 young people every week. Staffing included one full-time, JNC-qualified worker (on an annual salary of around 28,000), one 18-hour part-time worker, two sessional workers working two three-hour sessions, and administrative support for 12 hours a week. A 10 per cent management cost was also built in. The total cost comes in at around 75,000 a year.

National coverage

The next step was to "scale up" the cost of ensuring better coverage of England. The National Youth Agency was commissioned to work with Oxford University to apply the Index of Multiple Deprivation, used by the Government to determine financial support to local areas. The index includes income; employment; health and disability; education, skills and training; housing; and geographical access to services. It uses a building block of "Super Output Areas" - sub-ward areas that are socially homogeneous with populations of 1,800, with 130 in the 13-19 age range.

The table below shows the ballpark costs of providing a standard project that would cover the most deprived five per cent, 10 per cent and 50 per cent of Super Output Areas.

COST OF A STANDARD DETACHED PROJECT Number of Number of Estimated % of 13- to 19- projects cost school year-olds needed (m) spending Most deprived 254,955 325 24.3 4.2 five per cent Most deprived 494,858 596 44.7 4.0 10 per cent Most deprived 2,186,727 1,897 142.3 3.0 50 per cent Source: The Joseph Rowntree Foundation