In Sunday's post we discussed the funding cuts facing the youth services, and made a whistlestop tour of a handful of the opportunities and schemes that the Essex Youth Service provides for young people across the county.
Bear in mind that the money doesn't just pay for these services - it pays for the workers who run them. Cut enough of the funding and you can only afford a limited pool of youth workers. The result? They'll either be forced to spread themselves thinly between a number of low-quality projects, or focus on a very small group of targeted projects. It's clear that, in either scenario, a lot of young people would lose out.
In defence of the Councillor Ray Gooding, he has not made any spending decisions yet. What he has done is flag up a number of possibilties for the future of the youth service. One of his proposed plans, which he spoke about on the radio, is less destructive - in the short term.
He is suggesting that the council hands over the running of many of these youth groups and services to the voluntary and private sector, with funding distributed by local youth strategy groups rather than a large central organisation.
Norfolk County Council enacted a similar scheme in 2011, by devolving nearly all spending power to 'youth advisory boards' where young people, councillors and workers meet to allocate funding to different projects. These appear to be the same as the existing youth strategy groups in Essex, which work very well provided they have sufficient scrutiny, input, and enthusiasm - and money!
Theoretically, this could mean that most clubs can continue operating, but would have some worrying impacts: it would mean that many youth workers would have to perform their capacity in a purely voluntary role.
Youth workers with Councillors Kay Twitchen and Ray Gooding (source)
Youth workers: the backbone of the service
Norfolk County Council continues to employ some youth workers centrally but since they scrapped their youth service most workers have to be provided on a voluntary basis, and this could be the same in Essex.
Given how difficult this job can be - handling the emotional issues of some young people is no easy task - this will place our youth workers in a daunting situation of significant emotional investment, outside of work hours, for minimal pay.
Moreover, in the long term, parceling out the budget in this way leaves no central funding for training new youth workers. Where will we be a few years down the line? No matter how well-meaning the volunteers, handling complex emotional issues is something that requires well-trained workers - and that in turn requires investment on a wider scale, rather than by the competing interests of cash-strapped local strategy groups.
The Colchester Youth Strategy Group has funded a scheme for training new workers but the question rests (sadly enough) on the costs and benefits - not only is it taking a significant chunk out of their allotted money, it is worth investigating whether two or more local authorities paying to train youth workers delivers comparable results to if it were done centrally. When I get the chance to talk to figures such as Michael O'Brien (head of the youth service) and Cllr Ray Gooding, important questions like these will be asked.
These are some of the economic arguments to retain the youth service. It is, at the end of the day, an argument about money - the Council has to make £215m of cuts, and these have to come from somewhere. Mr Gooding is entirely right when he says that we're in "unprecedented times". But stripping something as vital as the youth service down to a skeleton is not the way forwards.
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