What is the Young Mayor Network all about?

By Yasmin Rufo

My name is Yasmin Rufo and a few months ago I was elected to be Ealing’s 5th Young Mayor. So, what is a young mayor? Put simply, a Young Mayor is a young person who is elected by other young people and my job is to make sure that they are fully represented in all local decisions affecting them. To achieve this I regularly attend meetings with councillors, work with other local community organisations, and help the youth council consult young people.

Young mayors are important in local communities as they raise the visibility of local young people and awareness of the issues affecting them. They are a high profile demonstration that the local authority is serious about changing the lives of young people in the borough.

At the Speak Out 2013 conference in Ealing

A Young Mayor acts as a stimulus for corporate commitment to and action on involving and taking account of young people within an authority. The act of having a Young Mayor crystallises the need to reference young people across services and departments. Young Mayors link individual – and communities of – young people directly with their elected representatives. They increase the influence that young people have on local decision-making: direct access to a high profile young person who has been democratically elected across the borough is a powerful tool to change the minds of opinion-formers.

Overall having a strong youth service in any local authority can have many benefits. The young people involved in the projects learn many new skills and have the opportunity to get an insight into local and national politics. Not only do the young people involved in the youth service benefit, but so does everyone else. Schools, youth services and young people themselves can get involved in electing their local youth representatives and are therefore already getting involved in the political system by voting in local elections.
I want to give young people in my community a voice, and as youth mayor, with the support of my local council, I can.

The importance of police working with young people

By Daniel McKenzie

Budget cuts, youth crime going up – something has to be done! I go to an all-boys school, and most of them are at risk to falling down the route of crime. I started to work alongside the police to help stop this and to make the police more aware on what issues are facing young people nowadays. I spend most of my time helping one young person who is at high risk of going into crime – yet he has so much potential! I’m spending nearly every half-term holiday on patrol with the police to keep a measure of this: helping the police to get an understanding of what’s really happening with young people.

Out on patrol

Two weeks ago, I went out on patrol again with the police; and apart from being called thugs, threatened to be taken to court and having a firework chucked at us… it was really interesting! We went patrolling around an area that has quite a high rate a deprivation and we kept on coming across this one group of young people that were being intimidating from a gang in the city. They were out on the street corners during the half-term holiday when it was pitch black and their Youth Centre was closed!

Now in London they have a scheme called the Volunteer Police Cadets and this is something I'm trying to replicate up here in the West Midlands because it's such a valued scheme – that has changed nearly 2,100 young people’s lives!

I’ve put this to both senior officers in West Midlands police and the front line officers (who interact with young people every day) - and they love this idea! Work is on-going on this scheme, but it’s something I have to do: making connections with senior police officers to make sure young people’s voices are heard. I'm always in direct communications with senior officers because they are the officers who make the decisions that can HELP you get your voices heard!

 With Chief Superintendent Sally Bourner

But don’t think that the police are out of touch with young people - because they’re not! Last Thursday I spent the morning with Chief Superintendent Sally Bourner (Local Policing Unit Commander for Solihull) at the World Skills show and it was amazing seeing how many young people were coming up to her and asking her questions on policing nowadays. We went round each stall seeing the opportunities that we have was amazing young people were signing up to apprenticeships, joining up for college placements – and all this from one show!

"There is no greater opportunity for young people to get into employment and training than at the skills show." Sally is a great advocate for young people and always wants to engage with young people in everything she does. That’s why she attends the skills show every year to meet young people. She has established many youth engagements schemes on the borough too - it’s important that the police take this approach as we are the next generation!

It’s so important that as young people we are taken seriously and not stereotyped - and the police listen to us - because at the end of the day, we have a voice and we have rights too! 

Youth Service Cuts: The Norfolk Alternative

By Jack Swan

Last Friday, I made the journey up to the first ever Norfolk Youth Summit, held in Kings Centre, in Norwich. It was, all things considered, an informative, enjoyable and valuable day (and one that was totally worth the fact I had to get up early to catch the right train).

I spent the day as a research opportunity, learning all I could about the provision of youth services in Norfolk. The county scrapped their own youth service wholesale in 2011 and transitioned to an entirely new model - and, importantly, this new model is very similar to one of the plans Councillor Ray Gooding has proposed as the future of Essex's own setup for supporting young people.

The Norfolk Youth Summit saw well over a hundred people attending [source]

What is Norfolk doing?

Norfolk's alternative to conventional youth services is an interesting system, based around the 'YABs' - Youth Advisory Boards. Each district in Norfolk runs a YAB, which are composed of representatives of local youth initiatives and charities, young commissioners, and larger organisations which are 'in charge' of catering to young people in an area.

The YABs - which are broadly similar to the Youth Strategy Groups that already exist in Essex - are given a single budget with which to fund local youth services. This budget is then divided up equally amongst them, which for 2011-2012 was £45,000 each, and the following financial year was raised to £115,000.

This money is then spent on targeted local projects, responding to the needs of young people in an area. The progress of new and existing projects are investigated by adult and youth commissioners, who ensure that the projects are delivering their service appropriately, whether they're engaging young people, whether they're making an impact, whether they're sustainable, and so forth. The young commissioners receive some training in their role in order to inspect properly - and they also get practice in representing young people in the process. In a sense, it's vaguely like an empowered youth council.

The backbone of the system is the reliance of the YABs on the large scale local youth groups in order to support it. These organisations - such as the YMCA - bid for the contract to run the YABs within a certain district. This ensures that the projects automatically have expertise and connections which allow them to operate more successfully.

Does it work?

The system sounds encouraging. Indeed, based on the conversations I had at the Youth Summit, there was a lot of belief in the effectiveness of the YABs. They do seem to have had some great success in ensuring targeted youth service provision is effective, and making sure that a real change is made - not to mention that they do an excellent job of training up and involving young people in the process. In fact, the whole arrangement itself sounds pretty successful on paper, and this translates pretty well in reality.

But despite everything, they are not the model that Essex Youth Service should follow.

Whilst £115,000 per district sounds like a lot, when multipled by the number of districts - seven - we can see that in reality funding for the entirety of youth services in Norfolk comes out to just over £800,000. This is £3m lower than the £3.8m budget the county's youth services had back in 2010, and with a difference that big, it becomes a matter of plain and simple logic. Even with all the connections that a big youth charity attached to a YAB can provide, no matter how good the targeting of services, and no matter how well these services are inspected, the old youth service's provision cannot be matched.

Professional youth workers have lost jobs because of this transition, and therefore, young people have lost out on crucial expertise. MTM, a community initiative company, has been set up in Norfolk by former youth service employees in order to provide them with employment on a case-by-case basis. I was able to talk with Sam Mason, one of the co-founders of MTM, and she explained that while it's been very successful - 43 youth workers have been retained and helped into self-employment via the company - there are a few who have slipped through the gaps.

What MTM does do, and by the sounds of it does very well, is ensure that youth workers who have particular training in a certain area are employed by targeted youth programs that are set up by the YABs, which therefore means that expertise is located where it is needed. But (and here is the problem underlying the entire YAB structure): it is only the targeted services that benefit.

The division of Youth Advisory Boards in Norfolk [source]

Where it fails

The fundamental flaw of the YAB structure is that broad, universal schemes for young people are not provided for.

Currently in Essex, 'universal schemes' range from drop-in centres to the Duke of Edinburgh Award, and incorporate areas such as complimentary and alternative education, Prince's Trust, and much more. Under the Youth Advisory Board structure, funding for these services would not be guaranteed, and even if some of these services received funding, the eventual provision would be patchy and dependent on which district a young person lives in.

Whilst targeted youth services are no doubt important, and make a big difference, a real youth service must provide to every single young person in its area to be a truly legitimate and effective one. The only way to ensure this is to ensure centrally-provided youth workers who are able to maintain a consistent quality of service to young people across the county.

Now the Youth Advisory Board system is not without merit. In fact, I think that if our own Youth Strategy Groups were reformed to look and act more like the YABs then targeted youth provision, engagement in local communities, and so forth, would be much more effective.

I made a point of seeking out young people at the Youth Summit who had experience of the Norfolk Youth Service both before and after its reorganisation. One of them, Chloe Donovan, told me that the YABs have definitely had a positive impact, by encouraging youth projects to think hard about impact, cost-effectiveness, quality of service, and self-funding. She adds that they are doing 'the very best they can' with the budgets they have available.

But Chloe also said, utterly clearly, that the overall quality and range of the youth service these days was 'worse' than before.

By all means, we should look to the YABs to inspire the Youth Strategy Groups to take more action. Partnered with youth councils and given more funding, they would be able to have a much greater impact on ensuring quality services on a district-by-district basis.

But dispensing with central youth services entirely, in favour of Norfolk's model, will leave the Essex Youth Service patchy. And most importantly, it will let down young people - the young people that it exists to serve.

Q&A with Cllr Ray Gooding

By Jack Swan

Last Thursday was definitely a big day in the fight against the youth service cuts!

I was honoured to be asked to chair a meeting with none other than Councillor Ray Gooding himself, the man with the ultimate responsibility of deciding what stays and goes in the youth service. Ray, whose official title is the Cabinet Member for Education and Lifelong Learning, joined Michael O'Brien, and some fifteen young people from across Essex in the session. Representatives of young people came from youth councils in Chelmsford, Basildon and Colchester, as well as from the National Citizen Service and Prince's Trust.

The aim was for young people to voice their concerns and fears about the result of the cuts straight to Ray. (We've discussed the flaws of the consultation and the worries that it won't pass across young people's views properly, so being able to express our feelings directly to him rather than through the questionaire is understandably important.) At the same time, young people would be able to get answers immediately and get a better understanding of the process.

Ray deserves a lot of credit for answering the questions very honestly and very positively. He stressed that he was relying on our feedback, both through the consultation and through direct meetings such as this, to inform his choice. Further, when he didn't know something, he was very honest about it and was fully prepared to look into it.

But I couldn't help but feel, however, that in some cases, there were things that Ray just couldn't answer - things that really needed answering.

One of the most poignant questions was about the provision of mental health support. A friend of mine from the YMCA told Ray very earnestly that the support she had received from youth workers was invaluable, and that she couldn't have got the same support from elsewhere.

Ray pointed out that parallel schemes existed, such as CAMHS (the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) but the response was clear: CAMHS, schools, parents - no one could provide the same kind of rounded and, importantly, judgement-free support that came from youth workers.

It's a story I've heard many times over from other young people, and you won't find it hard to find a young person who thinks the same. You can substitute 'mental heath' with nearly anything - drugs, drink, crime, bullying, housing, sexual health, unemployment; the youth service has changed and saved lives because it understands and works with teenagers in a way that no other organisation can.

When questioned, Ray defended the quality of the voluntary and private sectors as alternative providers of youth support. Certainly, there are organisations out there that do great good. For example, the Essex Boys and Girls clubs provide several social hubs and adventure activities. But we cannot expect these charities or companies to be of universal quality throughout Essex. We can't even expect them to reliably be in every town, or to provide youth buses to get out to young people living in the county's rural areas.

Whereas now you can expect to find a youth hub in every town in Essex, or a youth bus going out during the week, what would happen if these services and facilities were cut back?

Duke of Edinburgh would be restricted only to schools that provide it. Drop-in advice centres would only be available during school hours and would be dependent on the quality of local schools (and would be completely inaccessible to young people outside of the school system). And without impartial careers advice or the Prince's Trust, young people who are NEET (Not in Education, Employment or Training) would face incredible difficulties getting their lives in order.

Cllr Ray Gooding, Cabinet Member for Education and Lifelong Learning [Source]

Looking deeper

The most powerful questions were those regarding how the youth service would be able to function with such drastic cuts in the number of workers. For these, Ray had no convincing answer. This is worrying because while we fully understand and appreciate that no decisions have been made yet, it appears that there is no consideration of possible structures of the youth service in future.

The scariest part of this is that, following the end of the consultation, the time taken to make the decision over what will and won't be cut will last just over four weeks. The reason for this? If redundancies are made through the cuts, then these will come into effect at the end of March, which is the end of the financial year for Essex County Council; since workers must have three months' notice before they are laid off, the choice of who stays and goes must be made, at the latest, in mid-December so the messages can be circulated in time.

I do not envy Ray's position of having to make cuts in all the areas he is responsible for. After all, as Cabinet Member for Education and Lifelong Learning, his duties extend into adminstrating schools, adult community learning, and several other areas as well as the youth service.

But because he will have to make cuts in all these areas, we can be sure that he will have to divide his time and his focus between all of them.

The future of the youth service, for years to come, will be based on a decision that has been made in a matter of days.

I do not mean to suggest that Ray will put any less time into the decision than he can afford to. The fact that he made time to get into contact with young people, and is continuing to do so throughout the county, shows that he is paying strong attention to the issue. But the fact is that the time allotted to make the final decision is simply not enough; and to add insult to injury, he will be making that decision based on a consultation that has been rushed through the drafting procedure and been given to the public for a paltry six-week period.

The fate of the Essex Youth Service is a decision that is being hurried on every level. When you are dealing with the future of a whole service and, more importantly, the futures of young people, you cannot afford to make such a vast and critical decision in a process that takes less than three months.

Final thoughts

There are two final points I would like to make. The first is that the link to a petition to save the youth service has been provided at the bottom of the page, which I would extremely appreciate if you could sign.

The second is a point raised by Ray's answer to one question - asking why, if the County Council must make 10% cuts overall, the youth service is facing 60% cuts. Ray replied that this is because some services are statutory - that is, requried by law - whilst others, such as the youth service, are not. Though this does not justify such a huge margin being taken out of our budget, it does provide inspiration for further action.

I would strongly encourage anyone reading this blog to write to their local MP and lobby them to introduce a bill that would make youth services a statutory provision of councils in the UK. Because at the end of the day, it's not just Essex Youth Services at risk. This problem is nationwide.

Sign the petition:

http://cmis.essexcc.gov.uk/essexcmis5/Petitions/tabid/106/ID/36/Save-our-youth-service.aspx