Youth matters

Please Specify: Chair of the Institute for Outdoor Learning: the UK Professional Body for those involved in outdoor learning

The Institute represents over 1200 people and organisations that work with young people. These include those working in local authorities, statutory youth services, FE, HE, and private, voluntary and community youth work organisations.

• Deciding what sort of person they want to become
• Withstanding market and peer pressures to spend their money on expensive fashion goods instead of on positive developmental experiences
• Access to and affordability of a wide range of positive activities
• Living in a society that accepts poor behaviour and lack of respect for others and stigmatises young people
• The need to adopt a healthy life-style as a habit
• Learning to recognise, assess and manage risks against benefits
• Coping with failure
• Taking responsibility for self and others

13-16 is a particularly formative time for addressing the first issue above.

Transition from primary to secondary school is also an important formative stage.

17-19 year olds are more independent

Teenagers who come from families content to live indefinitely on state benefits, with no incentive to earn a living, are particularly at risk of not being in employment, education or training.

There are too few opportunities for spiritual development (by which we do not mean religion) – an area scarcely touched on in the Paper (see recent briefing paper, Spiritual Health and the Well-Being of Urban Young People, The Children’s Society.

Young people can be the victims of adult intolerance. They often have chaotic life-styles, so need access to training in self-management and coping skills.

The U-project and similar PAYP initiatives aimed at tackling challenges such as disaffection and disengagement

Promote and help them to develop a set of values that include balancing rights against responsibilities. This is especially important at ages 12-16.

Develop and project positive role models (peer leaders) who take their responsibility seriously and can encourage others to do so.

Incentives: developmental (rather than indulgent) rewards for good behaviour, including volunteering. Eg free or subsidised access to an outdoor residential experience.

Society should acknowledge, show interest in and reward well-behaved young people, instead of focusing so much attention on poor behaviour, and showering resources on those who exhibit it.

Sanctions: negotiating and enforcing contracts to improve, with clear ground rules and clear consequences when they are broken. Acceptance of such sanctions should be based on a experience in a well controlled setting, such as an outdoor residential planned for the purpose.

Example: the PAYES scheme (Merseyside Police in partnership with Brathay Hall Trust)

Risk-taking and pushing boundaries are a natural and healthy part of growing up, and should be encouraged through challenging activities. Promoting easier access to other, more positive, adventurous activities will help to divert, and will deepen their understanding of the causal link between risk-taking and its adverse or beneficial consequences

The need to link local need with high-quality distant provision (eg outdoor adventurous learning) is both a benefit and a challenge.

Creating a common philosophy between different agencies working with young people is a challenge. Partnership working is key.

By ensuring that 1:1 guidance covers the full range of developmental opportunities and their distinctive benefits

• List outdoor centres among the agencies that provide positive activities not only in summer but throughout the year
• Convert the aim of ‘exploring the scope’ for giving more young people the opportunity to take part in summer residential events into a plan for causing it to happen – with clear, quantitative measures of success in achieving the plan
• Promote to Children’s Trusts the distinctive positive benefits of outdoor residential adventurous experiences
• Ensure that opportunity cards facilitate and promote the uptake of such experiences, whether provided by large organisations or small
• Ensure that outdoor adventure pursuits rank pari passu with team games in gaining advocacy and sustained funding – bearing in mind that active participation in the former endures for longer
• Stress to Children’s Trusts the importance of providing plenty of wholesome risk-taking opportunities with the object of challenging young people. Deploy convincing arguments such as those collected by the Education and Skills Parliamentary Committee
• Establish synergistic links with other initiatives, such as 14-19 curriculum, extended schools, early years and Sure Start
• Recognise that these significant changes require adequate, sustained funding to achieve the required outcomes
• Ensure better workforce development by resourcing staff training properly

There is a downside. Young people may not be aware of the full range of activities available beyond their local areas, or of the relative value of different activities in contributing to their personal growth. Organisations such as the National Youth Agency or the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services have a broader and deeper perspective of what constitutes an effective youth service. Manifestos and statements of entitlement can also be used to inform and shape local services.

Support champions among young people who have experienced the benefits of different developmental activities and who can advocate them to their peers and Children’s Trusts.

Youth Councils can play a part, but they need to be guided and informed about what various activities are designed to achieve.

Schools Councils, Youth Parliament, Youth Clubs an uniformed groups can all help to shape services.

Some types of opportunities are provided to young people on a national basis. Central government should ensure that such national provision qualifies on an equitable basis for inclusion in local opportunity cards and in other schemes

No comment

Those aimed at developing the whole person and evoking lasting beneficial behavioural and attitudinal change. Interactive, experiential programmes, especially in an outdoor setting, are very powerful, especially if long enough to make a real difference, and followed up back home afterwards.

Their equitable provision, up to a high standard of effectiveness, is not affordable within existing youth service resources. This is partly because cost/benefit analysis data are not available for the full range of available activities.

The duration of engagement must affect likely outcomes. Extended projects appear to be much more successful and cost-effective.

The standards do not refer to the quality and impact of the activities.

There is too much emphasis on sport and not enough on personal, social and spiritual development.

See above. The resources promised are palpably insufficient.

Even the most astute reshuffling of existing resources will not permit a full-ranging provision to meet all young people’s needs, nor will over-reliance on lottery funding for what should be enduring support.

If existing DfES resources are capped, then there should be a large shift of resources from cognitive, formal education (schooling) to affective, informal, experiential education (youth work).

Not necessarily: local communities will want to see tangible evidence of large numbers of young people volunteering to contribute to their communities. There needs to be renewed emphasis on the responsibility of citizens to provide a service to fellow members, as in the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme.

The importance of public service has long been a feature of the uniformed voluntary youth service and the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme; these should be supported.

The behavioural outcomes of citizenship education, whether provided by formal or informal education, need to be recorded, quantified, publicised and celebrated, so that it becomes the norm to contribute positively.

The projection of positive images of young people in the media should be managed, to countervail the often negative images that sell newspapers.

However, rewards should take the form of positive development opportunities, and not be simply indulgent. They should include opportunities to BE and DO rather than to HAVE.

Virtue is its own reward. The importance of values education and spiritual development cannot be over-stressed.

By having knowledgeable and enthusiastic champions in each community.

Multi-agency working should be encouraged.

Knowledgeable and motivational; readily accessible, on their terms and in their language, empathetic.

By training those who provide it.

Support young people to make informed choices.

There is a downside. Local agencies are apt to be blinkered and often do not see the big picture. A national perspective of what is needed (eg the NYA Youth Manifesto) should be used to inform and shape local decisions. Members of children’s trusts, schools and colleges should take full cognisance of good practice elsewhere. They need to know ‘what works’ and to emulate it locally as appropriate.

However, the proposed expectations do not explicitly cover spiritual and values issues in young people’s lives: eg what is their life purpose, mission or calling; how will they leave the world a better place than if they had not been born.

Faith-based youth agencies have much to offer here. See Spiritual Health and Well-Being of Urban Young People (Children’s Society)

They should cover effective methods and suitable settings for opening up the issues listed in 19 a above.

OFSTED should use quality standards, agreed with the sector, for monitoring outdoor education of young people.

They can be made affordable by transferring resources from cognitive (didactic} to affective (experiential) learning. Educational institutions get too great a share of the available resources, for knowledge learning. The informal learning provided by the youth service, focusing on whole person development, is the Cinderella of the DfES.

Pressure on workforce resources is inevitable because there is a shortage of people who can do this well.

Probably

As long as ‘health’ is construed holistically, to include not just physical, but also mental, emotional and spiritual health.

Some children may require help in developing transition management skills to enable them to cope positively with a novel social environment and with their fears of the unknown. An outdoor residential setting is particularly conducive to this.

This intervention may be more appropriate at age 11, depending on the child’s emotional maturity.

But it could be strengthened by ensuring that local decision-makers are well informed and well qualified for the task. There is a risk of the blind leading the blind.

By setting and monitoring achievement of appropriate national standards.

The role responsibility needs to be clear, and powers and resources granted to commission support from the most appropriate agency, whether local or distant.

Provide experiences from the age of 11 upwards which develop coping skills in managing life transitions, uncertainty and the unknown – such as a progression of outdoor adventurous experiences.

Just before their children become teenagers.

How to cope with ‘difficult’ teenagers and tendencies to anti-social behaviour.

How to deal with the adverse effects of a change in peer culture which sometimes occurs when children move from primary to secondary school.

Faith communities and organisations like the YMCA which are in close touch with young people’s mentality and outlook have an important part to play.

By providing opportunities for informal advice and discussion.

(a)  We are disappointed that no new money is promised for implementing such fundamental changes. According to the National Youth Agency, youth work is chronically under-resourced and geographically patchy. In particular, there has been no sustained funding for working with young people in outdoor settings – especially residential settings. The English Outdoor Council has been consistently campaigning for this, and has gained the support of the Education and Skills Parliamentary Committee (see report on Education outside the Classroom).

(b)  The observation in the recent OFSTED report on Youth Work, that there is a correlation between the quality of the service delivered and the resources invested in it, is not taken up.

(c)  A thoroughgoing review of youth work would attempt to address the question of whether the desired outcomes of DfES expenditure would be more effectively delivered by transferring some of the expenditure on formal education (schools, colleges, universities) to informal education (youth work and experiential learning}.

(d)  There is only one mention of spiritual development, yet this plays a vital part in helping young people to become ‘whole persons’.

(e)  We regret that outdoor centres are not listed among the many agencies that ‘provide millions of opportunities for young people each year’ (para. 55) and that only summer residential events are mentioned in para. 19 and on page 26, whereas such events take place all the year round.

(f)    The Paper is unduly issue-focused and outcome-focused. It pays scant regard to the often intangible benefits that accrue from ‘ordinary’ heuristic youth work with ‘ordinary’ young people. There should be an entitlement for all, eg to a series of residential experiences.