High aspirations for all

At a time when swingeing cuts to local authority budgets are putting the future of many children and young people’s services at risk, Chris Wright thinks the sector should stop thinking about the impact of austerity and instead focus on how to deliver more with less.

He believes dealing with budget cuts head on and thinking innovatively about alternative provision for services is much more beneficial for the vulnerable children and young people who so often rely on them.

“We think public service delivery has to change for a number of reasons,” explains Wright. “One, outcomes for a lot of those we work with are not very good, and two, the economy can’t necessarily afford to carry on paying for the services that it has paid for over the past 30 or 40 years.

“We are trying to be part of that debate about how you provide public sector services effectively and efficiently within the public sector demand constraints.”

One of the ways of dealing with the cuts, Wright says, is to make use of volunteers to support the delivery of services.

“It’s one of the things I feel most enthused about,” he says. “There are so many people who want to do something. It’s how we unlock it and how we create opportunity to volunteer and contribute – we have to be a bit more prepared to take risks. Today it’s become hard to offer that kind of support because of all that regulation and the concerns around child protection – of course that’s important, but I think we’ve become too risk averse.”

Wright goes on to cite examples from his lengthy career in social care and youth justice – spanning more than 20 years – including feedback from Catch22 colleagues on a recent trip to Stuttgart in Germany.

“Their probation service is ran by an organisation not dissimilar to us and they use volunteers as probation officers,” he says.

“I’m not saying that’s the answer to it all, but I think there is a different approach to dealing with public services – we need to look at how they are constructed. I think we should be optimistic and positive, and we might have to be a bit more prepared to take more risks and just think a bit more imaginatively.”

Another option, which, as chief executive of Catch22, Wright will no doubt be keen to support, is outsourcing the delivery of services to voluntary groups and organisations.

He boldly claims that the social enterprise can run public services more efficiently than the government due to its lower overheads and ability to generate project-specific funding through partnerships with businesses and trusts.

Working with excluded children

Catch22 uses these partnerships to ensure service users, often vulnerable young people and their families, receive the best support possible in the organisation’s seven areas of expertise – care leavers, education, employability, families, gangs, justice and social action.

One such partnership with banking giant HSBC helps young people into employment, while work with the Clothworker’s Foundation encourages students at high risk of exclusion to stay in school – an area Wright is particularly keen to tackle.

Catch22’s approval last August by the Department for Education as an academy sponsor for pupil referral units should help develop this strand of its work further.

While the social enterprise is yet to begin work on the project, it is in talks with its first school and expects to become a sponsor of two schools within the next year.

“It’s quite exciting and allows us to put our money where our mouth is and do some of the things we believe in, which is engage young people and get the focus on some of the things we believe the focus should be on,” says Wright. “It’s very easy to spend our time being negative and depressed, but I think we need to be ambitious and positive about the lives of the people we work with.

“If I could do one thing it would be for every teacher to believe the children in their classroom can achieve – a lot of those kids have never been believed in and there’s evidence behind all of this about belief and aspiration.”

More recently in December last year, Catch22 acquired five schools from the CfBT Education Trust, building on its development as an education provider.

The schools, in Norfolk, Suffolk, Bristol, the Thames Valley and London, will deliver alternative education to vulnerable children excluded from mainstream education.

While Wright is quick to admit that all children should be in mainstream education where possible, he says it is vital that the best possible education is offered to those who are unable to maintain their place.

Asked about the worth of providing alternative education, Wright once again points to the importance of believing in vulnerable young people.

“It’s an opportunity for us to raise the standard and say these kids may have been kicked out of mainstream school for their behaviour, but lets not end up kicking them all their lives,” he explains. “We want to provide the best environment we can to allow children to achieve and we strongly believe an academic curriculum is as relevant to these kids as it is to any kid – but it’s the way it’s taught, the way you engage the young person and the way you focus them.”

Key to this, Wright says, is building effective relationships and “sticking with them”, but he admits it won’t be easy “because a lot of them have a very poor attendance record so we have to start from a very low base”.

He adds: “If you can win their confidence and the confidence of their families, then you’ve got a chance. A lot of the young people who will turn up in these schools have a strong aversion to going to school, so it’s the journey travelled that we measure.

“It’s the light being switched on. These young people have become so disconnected that it takes a lot to win their confidence.”

Again Wright believes volunteers and community groups have a role to play in engaging and supporting pupils who are either at risk of exclusion or have been excluded as a result of their behaviour.

Social action benefits

He believes social action is also a key way of engaging vulnerable children and young people.

A self-proclaimed passionate supporter of the National Citizen Service, the government-sponsored youth participation initiative, Wright says the volunteering programme gives Catch22’s service users the opportunity to build relationships with the “typical population” and engages them in positive work within their communities.

He is also particularly proud of Catch22’s work with the British Exploring Society on Project New Horizons, which has seen disadvantaged young people embark on expeditions to Egypt, Norway and Iceland over the past three years.

The aim is to develop new skills for young people, and raise their aspirations and self-esteem in an attempt to help them find education, employment or training.

Wright explains that the British Exploring Society’s expeditions are largely filled with students from public schools, yet a young person from Project New Horizons was presented with the adventurer of the year award at the charity’s annual review in January.

“I was really proud of that,” he says. “If you believe, you can really achieve things. Social action isn’t the answer to everything, but exposing young people to these opportunities gives them an opportunity to grow and develop.”

On the subject of growth with regard to Catch22, Wright says the organisation grew by 12 per cent in 2012/13 and that he plans to expand the social enterprise further so it can do more to support those in need of its services.

“I’ve been around the system for a while and I worry that it has ended up serving itself, not the people it’s designed to mentor,” he says.

“We’ve built huge levels of bureaucracy and process into service delivery and the needs of the service itself and that’s where a lot of the cost is.

“We’re looking to continue to develop as a social business; to be recognised as a provider of high-quality, user-led services; to become an organisation that people want to talk to because we have something interesting to say; and to be seen as a disruptor that’s prepared to take some risks recognising that it’s going to get some things wrong.

“We want to do something about the lives of those we work with so they have a better life.”