The National Youth Agency

Empowerment

The commitment in Aiming High for Young People to increase young people’s direct influence over resources is referred to as ‘budget devolution.’ This commitment is to reward the decision making ability young people have made so far through the Youth Opportunity Fund and the Youth Capital Fund.

Also of interest...

Budget devolution

The NYA ran a survey from January to March 2008 to explore the feasibility of gaining baseline data on current spending levels on positive activities for young people and young people’s current involvement in decision making on this. This was in the context of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, which requires local authorities to secure positive activities for young people as well as the targets set out in Aiming High for Young People to have ‘direct influence’ or ‘actively shape’ 5% of youth services funding by 2011 and 25% of spend on positive activities by 2018.

Further exploratory work was undertaken at a seminar in May 2008 with delegates from local authority youth services, finance services, leisure services, from the third sector, the DCSF and The NYA. The intention was to reach recommendations for the DCSF on which terms to use for both the 2011 and the 2018 targets.

Both the Budget Devolution Survey and Seminar Report Summary and the full Budget Devolution Survey and Seminar Report, which includes the summary are published and available to download (below). The Minister has received a report including progress to date and recommendations for a way forward on this policy.

Budget Devolution Report - Summary

Budget Devolution FULL REPORT

References:

AHYP – 3.6, 3.35,3.36, 6.7. AHYP Implementation Plan: 5.8-10.

Celebration Events

Aiming High acknowledged that today’s young people are faced with the challenge of growing up in a culture that has widespread negative perceptions of young people and committed to do more to rebalance the public narrative by celebrating young people’s achievements. This included a commitment to pilot celebratory events to explore how, building on the experience of the Youth Opportunity Fund, young people can be empowered to design and organise events to celebrate their transition to adulthood, working with schools, colleges, youth organisations, local businesses and the wider community. These pilots offer an exciting opportunity for local areas to celebrate the young people’s widest achievements, enabling parents and communities to recognise young people’s contribution and place in society and foster more positive perceptions of young people.

The aim of the pilots is to build on and develop good practice in young people’s celebration events, implementing this more widely within local areas in order to celebrate young people’s achievements and improve society’s perceptions of them. Pilots will receive up to £15,000 from the DCSF to help with event costs. Support an advice will be provided by The National Youth Agency who will manage the pilots and write the evaluation report. All the events should take place in the two week period from Saturday 7 February to Sunday 22 February 2009.

The required outcomes of the pilots are to:

Promote a positive image of young people locally ;
Celebrate the achievements of all young people in the 13-19 age group - recognising informal as well as formal achievements, as young people move from one important phase of their lives to another;
Empower young people to lead and participate in significant local events;
Enable young and older people in communities to come together, promoting intergenerational understanding.

The process for establishing the pilot local authorities is as follows:

25 April 2008 - Letters were sent to each local authority Head of the Integrated Youth Support and Development Service (or equivalent) to seek expressions of interest.
16 May 2008 – Responses were received from 51 local authorities
13 June 2008 – Specification and supporting information sent to all authorities expressing interest.
4 July 2008 – Closing date for receipt of proposals from local authorities – 22 proposals received.
6-7 August – Residential planning workshop for up to three delegates from each of the pilot local authority areas.

The successful bids to be the pilot authorities will be announced by the DCSF in due course.

References:

AHYP Implementation Plan: 4.1, 4.3-5.