Aiming High

Update for NATT+ members on Aiming high for young people - three years on.

This document gives GRT practitioners the evidence needed to continue outreach and inter-agency development work with the GRT communities.

It outlines the achievements against its original ten-year strategy of the same title. It measures progress made against the three main Aiming high principles: 'empowerment', 'access and inclusion' and 'capacity and quality'. The focus of Aiming high was to increase young people's participation in positive leisure-time activities. This was supported by strong evidence showing how getting involved can help teenagers to develop important social and communication skills, build their self-esteem and self-confidence, improve their attitudes to school and help them avoid taking risks such as experimenting with drugs, or being involved in crime or anti-social behaviour.

Three years on

By Mark Warburton

Overview

The document below sets out how the previous government intended to support local authority services for all young people and maximise resources available to make sure they reach out to teenagers in need. Local authorities and their partner organisations may find it a useful basis for reviewing their activities in this area at a time when the new government has yet to determine its future direction on youth policy.

Background

It is almost three years since Aiming high for young people: a ten-year strategy for positive activities was published. It set out the previous government’s long-term vision for services for young people. Since then the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) has outlined plans for both the education and training opportunities available to young people through 14 to 19, with legislation in place such that every young person will be in learning until at least age 18.

The focus of Aiming high was to increase young people’s participation in positive leisure-time activities. The evidence shows that helping teenagers to develop social and communication skills builds their self-esteem and self-confidence, improves their attitudes to school and helps them avoid taking risks such as experimenting with drugs, or being involved in crime or anti-social behaviour.

Aiming high split into three strands of action:

Empowerment: Experience shows that giving young people genuine influence over local services is the most effective way of increasing participation
Access and inclusion: Ensuring all young people are able to access the opportunities available to them, with a particular focus on removing barriers to access for those facing disadvantages
Capacity and quality: Raising the quality of services and opportunities for young people by investing in building the capacity of the very best providers from the public, voluntary and community sectors, as well as supporting those working with young people to employ the very best practices

Positive effects so far

There have been a number of positive outcomes since the initial project started three years ago. These include:

2.5 million young people had already benefited from new positive activity provision through the Youth Opportunity Fund and the Youth Capital Fund
90 per cent of young people are participating in up to two hours of sport a week
Over two thirds of young people aged 11 to 15 are already enjoying cultural activities
Before the reform started, one in three local authority youth services were judged by Ofsted to be failing their young people; now none are.

Changes needed to the three core strands of action

Empowerment

The report argues for a continued effort to make youth engagement central to the design and delivery of positive activities and services locally. Local authorities are expected to expand effective approaches, including:

putting resources and responsibility in young people’s hands
putting young people in the lead
young people as active citizens
improving perceptions of young people.

Increasing access

The report advocates a concentration of investment to reach out to those most in need. At the same time there is a need to ensure that all young people are able to participate in every community drawing from the best provision across sports, arts, culture, youth work and volunteering organisations. More priority could be given to making this a reality in the most deprived communities through better outreach and much more provision on Friday and Saturday nights. Additional factors include:

ensuring young people are aware of what’s on offer
world-class youth centres
enabling every young person to participate
young people contributing to their communities
reaching out to engage and support the most vulnerable young people.

Building capacity and quality

Local authorities are advised to commission the highest quality activities from those organisations with the strongest track record of working with young people and, increasingly, third sector organisations delivering government-funded programmes, with local authorities making a reality of their role as strategic commissioners with support from the Children’s Trust Commissioning Support Programme. Other possible avenues include:

driving up the quality of services for young people
supporting excellent voluntary and community organisations to reach out to more disadvantaged young people
supporting organisations to work together more effectively
strengthening accountability
equipping the young people’s workforce with the skills they need.

Aiming higher

There are still a large number of teenagers who say there is nothing for them to do and nowhere for them to go, and significant numbers are still not participating in any constructive activities in their free time. In addition, the most recent Tellus survey shows that there is some way to go before the 2020 ambition of all young people participating could be realised. Set against a backdrop of spending constraints and fiscal uncertainty, achieving this ambition will be even more challenging.

Empowerment

An important aspect of taking the role of schools and colleges further will be improving their collaboration with local youth support services to ensure that efforts in and out of formal learning are joined up and achieving maximum impact. However, there are a number of challenges going forward including how to:

mainstream the best approaches to youth empowerment to ensure that more young people have genuine influence over a wider range of budgets for positive activities
increase efforts to reach out to engage more disadvantaged and marginalised young people who have the most to benefit from taking part in positive activities
increase the involvement of voluntary and community sector organisations who have been effective at reaching the groups of young people least likely to get involved.

Access

Many young people do not participate in any positive activities in their free time or get involved as often as they should. The reasons for this differ across the country but there are some common problems:

young people still say that they do not always have basic information about what is on offer and when, and that services are not using the right communication methods to reach them, or giving them the information they need
in some communities, including the most deprived neighbourhoods and estates, there is still a lack of places suitable for young people to go and socialise with their friends, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights
for some young people, cost and lack of support are still preventing them from enjoying the opportunities available to them, and they do not always have a clear sense of what should be available in their area
some local services are still not making full use of positive activities as a way of preventing young people from, for example, engaging in anti-social behaviour and crime or misusing drugs and alcohol.

Capacity and quality

There are still a number of barriers to achieving high quality services for young people in every area:

there remains a lack of a clarity and therefore expectation of what good provision actually looks like
there are variable levels of partnership working between local authorities, schools and colleges and wider services, such as the police and voluntary and community sector organisations
the pace of reform of the young people’s workforce needs to increase to ensure teenagers benefit support from well-trained staff.

Comment

This report provides a helpful overview of the challenges that face local authorities in delivering positive activities for young people, in particular those most in need. It is a useful basis for local authorities that are reviewing their activities in this area.

Some caution needs to be exercised with the specific priorities that the report identifies as the new government has yet to determine its policy in this area. The emphasis on a bigger role for the third sector and value for money, however, seem in keeping with current trends. The Children's Minister recently indicated that youth services were "not a luxury add-on" but also that "some local authorities need to be more adventurous in finding new partners".

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