The National Youth Agency - Sixteenth round Joint Area Reviews (JARs) (February 2008)

Sixteenth round Joint Area Reviews (JARs) (February 2008)

A further round of Joint Area reviews (JARs) has been published by Ofsted which continues to include an encouraging number of positive references to the role of youth services. JARs explore the extent to which children and young people are healthy, safe, enjoy and achieve, make a positive contribution, and secure economic wellbeing.

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They focus specifically on children with learning difficulties and/or disabilities, those who are looked after and children at risk or requiring safeguarding. They evaluate the collective contribution made by all relevant children’s services to outcomes for these groups. There are further sections on equality and diversity and safeguarding, and additional investigations are carried out into issues such as child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), other health inequalities, and the 14-19 strategy.

A total of nine reports have been published in this round which show that youth services are contributing in particular to young people’s health and wellbeing and to helping vulnerable young people make a positive contribution.

While it is sometimes difficult to detect youth services’ contribution to partnership work, scrutiny of accompanying youth service inspection reports reveal instances where youth services are involved in multi-agency work highlighted in JARs.

Equality and diversity

The report on Bracknell Forest notes that the ‘embedded inclusive practice and outreach work of youth services’ ensures that all young people in the area are well served. In particular, it states that good practice in youth work incorporates anti-racist and strives to tackle homophobic harassment. The Shadow Board in Derby is described as providing ‘imaginative strategies’ to help raise young people’s awareness of racism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination, and the report notes that ‘several young people interviewed provided poignant testimony to the effectiveness of this work’.

Safeguarding

The Shadow Board in Derby is also described as a ‘particularly good example’ of how the council works with children and young people to develop and monitor services. The report uses as an example a meeting organised around the theme of staying safe, where young people were able to use their own direct experiences to enable officers to gain a better understanding of issues relating to gang culture.

Being healthy

In Derby, the youth service works together with family nurse partnership practitioners to provide young people with information about safe sexual health behaviours, and the report notes that evaluation of case histories shows that this is having a positive effect on the lives of individuals. The youth service is also involved in Spaceman, a boys and young men’s sexual health project; the Angels project for girls and young women; and Delay training, focused on preventing teenage pregnancies and promoting sexual health. All these initiatives have proved popular with young people – for example, in 2006-07 over 200 young men attended Spaceman sessions.

Two partnership projects between the local Primary Care Trust (PCT) and the youth service are highlighted in the report on Knowsley. The THINK clinics deliver a wide ranging programme of health promotion and are well regarded by young people – over 2,700 young people used the clinics in 2006-07. The mobile clinic ‘Clinic in a Box’ is described as ‘excellent’, targeting geographical hotspot areas and working effectively in youth work settings.

In Bracknell Forest, a range of individual support, mentoring, group work and coaching sessions on social skills, bullying and relationships education are provided by the NRG youth project in partnership with CAMHS, the Behaviour Support Team (BST) and an educational psychologist. The youth service in Wandsworth is involved in promoting healthy eating, through breakfast clubs and cooking sessions, particularly for young men. Hammersmith and Fulham youth service, along with Connexions, provides young people with ‘good support for emotional health problems’.

Making a positive contribution

Local democracy

The report on Leicestershire notes that the children and young people’s partnership takes young people’s views seriously and ‘uses a good range of formal and informal means of gaining them’. The annual ‘Vox Pop’ event for young people has been established for ten years and enables young people to meet directly with elected members and senior officers to raise issues and concerns. The report describes how at the latest event, young people from Loughborough raised concerns about a lack of facilities which led directly to a £600,000 investment to extend youth work facilities at a local community centre. In Derby, young people are provided with ‘extensive opportunities to contribute to service development and review’ through the Shadow Board, neighbourhood fora and school councils, all of which actively include young people with disabilities. In Gloucestershire, the youth service ‘has successfully engaged with young people to help develop its services’. Young people in Liverpool were involved in the development of an anti-bullying strategy for the authority.

Anti-social behaviour

The multi-disciplinary ‘Hustle’ initiatives involving youth workers in Knowsley, are described as providing ‘effective diversionary activity for large groups of young people at weekends’. Targeted street work is also highlighted as being ‘of good quality and responsive to incidents of anti-social behaviour’. In Liverpool, the youth service works with the police to deliver a targeted project which addresses racially aggravated offences. The report on Wandsworth notes that young people perceive anti-social behaviour by gangs in the area to be an urgent problem. In response, the authority plans to relocate its youth facilities into more central areas to help combat the problem and encourage inclusiveness.

Supporting vulnerable young people

In Bracknell Forest, young people with learning difficulties and/or disabilities have access to leisure and recreational opportunities specifically to meet their needs through holiday youth schemes run in partnership with Disability Challengers and the Kerith Konnections youth club. Groups of young people with learning difficulties have also been supported to apply for Youth Opportunity funding to organise and develop their own activities. In Leicestershire, voluntary groups and specialist youth workers actively promote participation in both specialist and integrated settings, and the report notes that participation by young people with learning difficulties and/or disabilities has increased by 32 per cent in the last year. The report on Knowsley states that children and young people with disabilities have ‘good opportunities to contribute their views’ through the youth forum and the youth parliament. Others are supported to act as mentors to younger children in out-of-school activities. The Fusion and Splice projects in Liverpool have helped youth centres and other partners develop skills and training to support young people with learning difficulties and/or disabilities.

The youth service in North Lincolnshire is described as providing ‘a good contribution’ to the opportunities available to looked after young people, and their voice is promoted through the X-press Forum. The youth service also funded a trip to the Beamish Heritage Museum and a residential break in response to requests from siblings of children with learning difficulties and/or disabilities. In Derby, looked after young people are described as making ‘a valuable contribution to the work of the Shadow Board and to the consultation activities organised through Kids In Care In Control (KICK)’, which led to equal pocket money allowances for all looked after children. ‘Very good work’ is also undertaken by the youth service to provide opportunities for young deaf people to meet together and to access universal services.

The report on Leicestershire states that ‘the youth service effectively meets the needs of priority groups such as BME young people, young people from Traveller communities, young carers, young people who are lesbian, gay or bisexual and refugees and asylum-seeking young people’. The youth service in Hammersmith and Fulham ‘is reaching high numbers of young Black men, who are achieving well’. In Liverpool, youth workers engage successfully with young Somalis and Yemeni. In Gloucestershire, ‘youth services have delivered effectively in rural areas’, where young people are helped to access information by a telephone helpline and texting service.

Economic wellbeing

The youth service in Liverpool contributes to the programme of activities provided by the Ethnic Minority and Traveller Education Service (EMTAS) which is described as effectively supporting young people newly arrived in the country. In Hammersmith and Fulham, the youth service is one of a number of partners working ‘very effectively’ with specialist personal advisers at the One Stop Shop, ‘providing good links between the education service and other specialist agencies’.