Youth centre game changer

Although it is the best part of four decades since Jeremy Glover began his career in youth work, the similarities between then and now appear striking. “The political and economic environment was virtually exactly like today,” he says.

“We were just going into a big recession and it was the last death throes of the manufacturing industry. There was massive, sudden unemployment in northern towns. White working-class males found it impossible to get work for the first time in living memory. It was very hard to motivate and inspire them.”

Fast forward to 2012, and much the same can be said of the situation today – numbers of young people not in work, education or training are around the one million mark and a raft of reports and studies in the wake of last year’s riots pointed to young people being disaffected and disengaged.

But chatting in the morning sunshine, dressed in a smart suit, Glover is anything but despondent. Indeed, after overseeing a revamp of youth provision in a number of northern towns in recent years, he is confident there is scope for similar achievements throughout the country.

State-of-the-art youth centres
Glover is currently chief executive at OnSide North West, a charity that works to establish state-of-the-art youth centres, but it was at Bolton Lads and Girls Club that he made his name.

He began volunteering with young people in the 1970s after briefly working in personnel with a lighting company, a position he “didn’t warm to”.

Instead, helping out in youth clubs where he was living led him in 1975 to Manchester Polytechnic – now Manchester Metropolitan University – to undertake a course in youth and community studies. This in turn led to a full-time job with Bolton Lads and Girls Club, where his desire to provide outstanding buildings for youth work took shape.

In total he spent 32 years with the organisation, eventually helping secure funds from the National Lottery for a new building so the club could move from a derelict mill which it had occupied since 1888.

“The new building was a game changer,” he says. “We used to have 400 visits a week but overnight that changed to 3,000 visits a week. It felt fantastic; nobody was expecting Bolton would have anything like that.

“We quickly got to a place where other professions came to us all of a sudden. Rather than child and adolescent mental health services being delivered out of the local surgery, they came and delivered it here, and partnerships with other professions in the town blossomed. It took us all by surprise. We very quickly became 100 times better than we had ever imagined.”

“We always knew the building was holding us back – we were there to inspire young people to help them believe in themselves but it’s difficult to do that in poor surroundings. Nationally we got a bit of a reputation and I’d like to think it sowed the seeds of the Myplace initiative.”

Under Myplace, started under the previous Labour government, a total of £233m was set aside to create 63 outstanding youth venues, more than 30 of which have been completed.

It was this initiative that Glover, and others at OnSide North West, were able to capitalise on, after he was approached to head the new organisation with a view to replicating the club’s success elsewhere.

“It led to me getting a new job after 32 years,” he says. “I thought I would have stayed at Bolton Lads and Girls Club for my whole career.”

OnSide managed to secure Myplace funding of £20m to build four more “youth zones”, based on the Bolton model, in Carlisle, Blackburn, Oldham and Manchester, each of which now work with around 2,000 young people every week.

Despite the recession and a lack of central investment in new youth facilities, Glover wants OnSide to carry on building more.

He is already experiencing some success. A new centre will be opened in Preston next year – half of the £6m cost is funded by the council and the other half by private individuals.

Youth zone model
Meanwhile, the charity has raised £4m of the £4.5m it needs to fund a new club in Wolverhampton, and is making progress on two other youth zones, one in Chester and one in the Wirral.

“Youth zones are a great model,” he says. “All we have to do now is access capital. There is no reason why we can’t build 50 or 100 over the next 10 years.”

To achieve this, he says, forming alliances with businesses will be essential. The notion has proved controversial in the past, but Glover says those that scoff at the idea are “barking mad”.

Illustration of the possibilities that can be created by linking up with businesses comes in the form of Blackburn Youth Zone, which opened in April this year.

OnSide has already secured running costs for the building for the next three years, totalling £1m annually. The largest slice, £500,000 a year, will come from businesses, with £400,000 a year from the council and £100,000 a year from charging young people entry fees of 50 pence each night.

“One of the most exciting things we have found is the willingness of companies who have never invested in young people before but who have started investing,” he says. “I have never come across anyone with dodgy motives for investing in young people. They genuinely want to invest in the community and young people. The problem is that so often no one goes and asks them. Often the first time people make a proper pitch they say ‘yes’.

“Business is going to be the future of youth work. If there is one thing that is absolutely sure it is that services are not going to be funded 100 per cent by local authorities.”

OnSide is also exploring other potential methods of funding, including through the Big Society Bank and social investment methods, but concedes that youth work must get better at measuring outcomes to stand any chance of funding services that way.

“In Bolton we were absolute bobbins at measuring work,” he says. “We didn’t do anything. I just used to tell anecdotal stories, but that is not enough. In a year we would like to be able to provide hard evidence of how youth zones can bring benefits to young people and the savings councils can make by investing in youth work. That is then a route to more meaningful conversations with social finance houses.”

Aside from encouraging youth services to explore the use of different funding models, the coalition government has heralded a new approach to services for young people in its youth policy statement – Positive for Youth.

Glover says he has “a lot of time” for children’s minister Tim Loughton, praising him in particular for defending Myplace funding when the coalition government took office, but he labels Positive for Youth as “a tad vague and a tad too easy for it to fall between the cracks”. However, he is markedly more enthusiastic about the National Citizen Service.

“It has brought a wealth of young and interesting people into full-time youth work,” he says. “You could be snooty and say they are not qualified or experienced but the work I have seen them deliver has been great and has been a breath of fresh air.

“My worry about it is that it should be the icing on the cake of brilliant universal and targeted services. But the cake has nearly disappeared. The cuts have been tough. But I do believe youth work will bounce back and be different in 10 years’ time.”


Jeremy Glover CV

• After studying business at North Staffordshire Polytechnic in the early 1970s, Jeremy Glover took up a personnel role with Thorne Lighting
• Deciding it wasn’t the career for him, he began working with young people in a voluntary capacity before returning to college, studying youth and community studies at Manchester Polytechnic in 1975
• On leaving, he secured a full-time job with Bolton Lads and Girls Club, where he spent 32 years, eventually becoming chief executive
• In February 2010, he joined new charity OnSide North West as chief executive
• OnSide’s youth zone clubs offer a wide range of activities, from sport to arts, charge nominal entry fees, open seven nights a week, and feature targeted projects such as mentoring for the most vulnerable young people