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The last five years has seen a sea change in the Youth Service's recognition
that literacy is its concern. Central to this change of view was the partnership
developed within the National Year of Reading between the Youth Service
and the library service. This partnership began when the National Youth
Agency teamed up with the library development agency Well Worth Reading
to bring together youth workers and library workers to see whether, together,
a range of ground-breaking initiatives to involve hard-to-reach young people
could succeed. Projects took place in settings as diverse as youth clubs
and homes for children in care, and made imaginative use of libraries. Boox
for Us, as the initiative was called, was a great success which was showcased
at the very-well attended Reading Nation conference at the end of the National
Year of Reading as well as at a Boox for Us conference which helped to spread
the ideas throughout the service. As a consequence, training has taken place
in both sectors to build staff awareness of the issues involved.
Following this success, the Youthboox programme has been launched with funding
from the Arts Council of England's New Audiences scheme. Youthboox is an
action research programme, exploring which reading 'hooks' work most powerfully
with young people aged 13-18. The nine local projects are taking
place in Liverpool, Sunderland, Norfolk, Oswestry, Coventry, Gloucestershire,
East Sussex, Kensington and Essex. The programme links reading with
computers, live literature and other art forms and encourages young people
to share reading experiences and record their own lives as readers.
Lessons from both projects have been captured in resource packs, The Reading
Kit 1 and The Reading Kit 2, which pass on the projects' findings on creating
and maintaining partnerships. They illustrate the different approaches and
activities that can be used for reader development and show how to structure
young people's greater involvement in reading.
Young people in deprived areas are to be paid to do community work in a
government pilot to boost volunteering and civic renewal. The Young Volunteer
Challenge is designed to encourage disadvantaged teenagers to spend a gap
year doing community work before starting work, training or university.
The £5 million Department for Education and Skills initiative will
be piloted for two years in ten areas across the country, beginning in May
2003.
The DfES hopes that 1,200 18 and 19-year-olds will decide to sign up to
the scheme. To be eligible, applicants must have received a maintenance
grant to help them continue their studies after the age of 16, or have
claimed income support while undergoing vocational training. The chosen
participants will work full time - defined as more than 30 hours a week
- for nine months, earning £45 a week, with a completion award of
£750 following the placement.
Ivan Lewis, minister for young people and adult skills, launched a prospectus
in March 2003, aimed at persuading voluntary organisations to participate
in the scheme. He said: "Getting the volunteering habit early encourages
lifelong volunteering, and broadens young people's horizons, helping to
develop the skills and qualities which universities and employers value."
The prospectus, The Young Volunteer Challenge, can be viewed at
www.dfes.gov.uk/youngpeople.
(Regeneration and Renewal, 7 March 2003)
Youth charities can bid for a share of a £34 million cash pot set
up by the New Opportunities Fund for ambitious new projects. The Uproject
is aimed at 16-year-old school leavers who do not have a job or place within
further education. In summer 2002, 16,000 teenagers attended residential
week-long courses all over the country, participating in a range of activities
from white-water rafting and DJ-ing to motor maintenance and designing CVs.
Charities can apply to be lead agencies, running the activities, or to support
the project through residential accommodation or expertise. Around 100 voluntary
agencies are already signed up including Weston Spirit, the Trident Trust
and Liverpool Hope.
The Department for Education and Skills multi-million pound project is run
through local Connexions partnerships, which will cover 47 areas throughout
England by 2003. Barclays bank has given the project £600,000 in sponsorship
and provided a brand, website and merchandise for the participants.
(Third Sector, 24 July 2002)
Young offenders held in custody are to undergo parenting classes to prevent
them from fathering a new generation of criminals, under proposals in the
criminal justice white paper announced in July 2002.
The introduction of parenting classes to the 3,000 teenagers held in secure
facilities, to "break the cycle of inter-generational criminality", marks
the extension of a programme which has so far only been targeted at the
parents of difficult youngsters, but with encouraging results.
The white paper included the biggest overhaul for more than 30 years of
the way the police, the courts and the prisons work. It will include the
creation of a national criminal justice board reporting to a cabinet committee
to oversee delivery.
(Guardian, 17 July 2002)
The Prince's Trust aims to raise "tens of millions" in funding in autumn
2002 to expand a pilot project teaching literacy and numeracy skills to
young people. The trust is currently undertaking a £5 million pilot
project, funded by the Learning and Skills Council, to help young people,
including the long-term unemployed and offenders, find jobs. The pilot is
based on the Prince's Trust existing young people volunteers' programme
which has been running for 16 years, but places more emphasis on writing
and maths skills.
The pilot will be evaluated in the autumn and a decision will be made whether
to roll it out across the country later in the year. A spokeswoman for the
charity said that if the pilot did go national, it would form part of a
general revamp of the trust's volunteer programme. "We are looking for funding
in the tens of millions from the Skills Council and our corporate sponsors,"
the spokeswoman said.
(Third Sector, 26 June 2002)
The Government is proposing a radical shake-up of the youth service because
of concerns that it is providing low-quality support. There is an enormous
range in the amounts spent by authorities on youth services. The money is
not ring-fenced and the authorities decide how much they want to spend.
The Government is to increase the number of inspections by the Office for
Standards in Education and introduce a more robust follow-up system. Of
the most recent 29 inspections, Ofsted considered nine youth services to
be good or very good, nine satisfactory, and 11 to be unsatisfactory or
poor. But only nine of the 150 youth services offered by authorities are
inspected each year.
(TES 6 April , 2001)
For years evidence has been mounting to show that when children transfer
from primary to secondary school, academic achievement falters. It is in
this period that the performance gap widens and the behaviour of a growing
minority of children deteriorates.
The British Household Panel Survey charts the rise in alcohol consumption,
smoking and contact with drug users, as children enter their teens. Boys
are almost three times as likely as girls to say they have committed vandalism
in the past year. They are also far more likely to have been suspended from
school.
After transferring to secondary school the proportion of both girls and
boys expecting to leave school as soon as possible rises sharply - a classic
sign of unhappiness or loss of motivation. But while girls steadily recover
so that by the age of 15 only 6% expect to leave at 16, boys do not - three
times as many boys as girls say they intend to drop out at 16.
While girls and boys from unskilled families have roughly equal expectation,
girls with professional, managerial and skilled parents are far more likely
than their male peers to expect to stay on.
Middle class boys are much more disaffected than middle-class girls - a
fact that helps to explain why young women are now beginning to outperform
men at university. The annual British Household Panel Survey began in 1991. It tracks
the progress of the lives of over 10,000 adults and 1,000 children living
in 5,500 households across the United Kingdom. It is funded by the Economic
and Social Research Council and conducted by the Institute for Social
and Economic Research at Essex University.
By Dr Jonathon Scales, a sociologist at Essex University, and Rachel Taplin,
project manager at Braintree District Council.
(TES, 23 February 2001)
Mentoring schemes, seen as a useful way of working with pupils at risk of
educational failure and disaffection, have proliferated in recent years.
The Commission for Racial equality has secured £4 million funding
for its Millennium Mentors Awards Scheme, aimed particularly, but not only,
at helping young black people who have begun to get entangled with the police,
to get involved in community life.
The project is to be run by training agency RPS Rainer through racial equality
councils. The Government supports mentoring as a tool for raising aspiration
in Afro-Caribbean pupils, and in other groups of at-risk pupils. The Government-sponsored
National Mentoring Network, established in 1994, now has 600 member organisations,
a third recruited in the last year.
The National Mentoring Network, which has information on new and existing
schemes and issues a quarterly bulletin can be contacted on 0161 787 8600.
The Divert Mentoring Handbook, on how to set up and run a mentoring project,
is available free (plus £1.50 p&p) from Divert Trust, 33 King
Street, London WC2E 8JD. Tel: 020 7379 6171.
The African and Afro-Caribbean People's Advisory Group, a south London charity
helping families with school issues, which has run over 300 mentoring schemes
can be contacted on 020 8667 9222.
(TES Friday Supplement, 21 January 2000)
In December 1999 the charity Communities that Care published A Guide
to Promising Approaches that highlights the approaches that work best
with deprived and disaffected young people.
A wide spectrum of approaches have been tried to tackle such problems as
educational underachievement, disaffection and truancy, teenage pregnancy,
youth violence and crime ranging from pre-natal services to youth mentoring.
The guide aims to identify which approach has been shown to work. It lists
some which have been effective and produces the evidence for that success.
In areas where little evaluation has taken place including many youth work
and regeneration intiatives it indicates what is considered to be good practice
by those in the field.
Education-related initiatives such as family literacy schemes and after-school
clubs dominate the guide.
The guide's author, David Utting, commented that the charity depended on
a holistic approach tackling several problems in parallel. The guide is
endorsed by the government's social exclusion unit.
The guide lists programmes which have proved effective with young people,
divided into four sections:
- Families: prenatal services, family support using home visitors,
detection and treatment of post-natal depression, screening for delayed
language development, parent support, handling childr4en's behaviour.
- Schools: High-Scope nursery practice, family literacy, Reading Recovery,
literacy hour, Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education anti-bullying,
family links.
- Youth: after-school clubs, mentoring, youth employment with education,
peer-led community programmes.
- Community: community policing, Communities that Care, housing management
initiatives.
(TES, 17 December 1999)
Britain's first "second chance" school was launched in March 1998,
to pioneer a helping hand scheme for the country's 45,000 young people who
leave school each year without qualifications.
Entry to the pilot college in Leeds offers priority to the most disadvantaged
applicants aged 18 to 24 - for example, previously disruptive pupils,
truants and dyslexia victims. The school has £150,000 European social
fund grant. The school has a strongly vocational element and aims to restore
pupils' confidence and build links with local employers.
Students will be entitled to remain on benefit while studying on the basis
that they are available for work, and that the curriculum has been tailored
to link with the Government's welfare to work programme for the young jobless.
The school will be monitored by the DfEE which will sanction further
centres if it proves a success.
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