In the middle of a consultation just six weeks long, it's easy to panic. Sometimes, you'll latch onto things you aren't sure about, and others, you'll be paralysed and afraid to do anything until you know you've got your facts straight. Neither of these are going to help us properly understand or fight these cuts.
The Chelmsford Youth Council, understanding these problems, decided in their very first meeting after finding out about the cuts to get in contact with as many people in the know as we could. I was tasked with arranging these meetings and so, last Thursday, the youth council was delighted to host Michael O'Brien, the head of the youth service, in a question and answer session regarding the cuts.
Understandably, Michael - who is in charge of the youth service - was just as unhappy about the cuts as we were!3x
Thanks to him, we got a lot of useful advice about the consultation procedure. We raised our concerns about the consultation to Michael - such as its poor language making it difficult for young people to understand, its repetition, and its other flaws discussed in the last post - and asked him what we could do to edit it.
Unfortunately, Michael said that it was too late to change the questionnaire; at that point, some 1,500 responses had been received. (Apparently, this is far more than the council were expecting! It just goes to show the strength of people's feelings for the youth service.) Any changes to the questionnaire at this stage would render the results so far invalid, and since we're nearly half way through the consultation period, this wouldn't help us have a positive impact on the future of the youth service.
However, Michael did say that if we felt the questionnaire was just that bad, we could run our own one instead, which Cllr Ray Gooding and the other people making the final decision would be obliged to take into account.
Despite the short timescale, it would definitely be a good idea for any interested youth councils to try and create a more useful and young person-friendly questionnaire. Since that the current consultation was created over a very short timescale with no input from young people whatsoever, the teens who are filling in the questionnaire are being given the short end of the stick and it means that their views aren't being properly represented.
The best way to get their views across is to create and distribute a questionnaire which is genuinely useful - and since many youth councils have said that they're interested in running presentation days over the next few weeks to show off why their youth service is so important, these would be the perfect places to share out these revised questionnaires.
Michael also helped the youth council understand the scale of the cuts, reiterating the £235 million budget loss that the entire County Council was facing, and shared his own personal concerns of the scale of the 'savings' that the youth service had to make.
The meeting was invaluable for making sure that the entire youth council was on the same page when it came to information about the cuts, and where to go next. Michael helped us get a proper view on the issue and made sure that when we come to facing the people who actually will make the decisions - chiefly, Cllr Ray Gooding - we have all the facts necessary to put together the most powerful case for saving the youth service.
Thanks to him, we got a lot of useful advice about the consultation procedure. We raised our concerns about the consultation to Michael - such as its poor language making it difficult for young people to understand, its repetition, and its other flaws discussed in the last post - and asked him what we could do to edit it.
Unfortunately, Michael said that it was too late to change the questionnaire; at that point, some 1,500 responses had been received. (Apparently, this is far more than the council were expecting! It just goes to show the strength of people's feelings for the youth service.) Any changes to the questionnaire at this stage would render the results so far invalid, and since we're nearly half way through the consultation period, this wouldn't help us have a positive impact on the future of the youth service.
However, Michael did say that if we felt the questionnaire was just that bad, we could run our own one instead, which Cllr Ray Gooding and the other people making the final decision would be obliged to take into account.
Despite the short timescale, it would definitely be a good idea for any interested youth councils to try and create a more useful and young person-friendly questionnaire. Since that the current consultation was created over a very short timescale with no input from young people whatsoever, the teens who are filling in the questionnaire are being given the short end of the stick and it means that their views aren't being properly represented.
The best way to get their views across is to create and distribute a questionnaire which is genuinely useful - and since many youth councils have said that they're interested in running presentation days over the next few weeks to show off why their youth service is so important, these would be the perfect places to share out these revised questionnaires.
Michael also helped the youth council understand the scale of the cuts, reiterating the £235 million budget loss that the entire County Council was facing, and shared his own personal concerns of the scale of the 'savings' that the youth service had to make.
The meeting was invaluable for making sure that the entire youth council was on the same page when it came to information about the cuts, and where to go next. Michael helped us get a proper view on the issue and made sure that when we come to facing the people who actually will make the decisions - chiefly, Cllr Ray Gooding - we have all the facts necessary to put together the most powerful case for saving the youth service.
Michael O'Brien speaks with the youth council on 24/11/13
really enoy reading your Blog Jack, well done today - you conducted yourself really well and put some very challenging questions to Cllr Gooding.
ReplyDeleteThis is an excellent blog Jack. My County Councillor colleague Jude Deakin and I are members of Chelmsford Youth Strategy Group (overseen by Wendy Bailey at Chelmergate) and would be happy to meet there some time. We were at the demo yesterday. You can email me at stephen@stephenrobinson.org
ReplyDeleteGood luck!