Services for Young People

Tessa Munt Excerpts

Thursday 22nd March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Neil Carmichael]

I am grateful. I am not entirely sure whether I can describe that as a compliment to my position, but there is much more evidence out there that we should be mindful of. That is what I shall talk about. I referred to the E-bac report not because I wanted to ram home yet again the fact that the Government are absolutely right to introduce the E-bac—they know that, and most people are beginning to realise it—but because there is more to our thinking on youth services than is contained in our report.

My other more general point is that it is absolutely right that 80% or 90% of young people’s time is spent in activities other than schooling, but we must get our education system right. That must be the top priority, and public money must be allocated on the basis of priorities. I want to make it absolutely clear right now that my priority is to ensure that our children receive an education that will equip them to deal with the challenges facing them and the opportunities and lifestyles that they wish to pursue. That is a cornerstone of my contributions to the Education Committee.

A key theme of the evidence that the Committee received in our various meetings showed that the picture is extraordinarily mixed, and it was difficult to analyse outcomes, and to elicit clear messages. In broad terms, the range of providers, the complexity of provision, and the different priorities that many providers had, made it extraordinarily difficult to make a judgment about outcomes and processes. That must be properly understood in the context of expenditure levels and the way in which the Government have reacted to the challenge of the pressures on public expenditure.

My constituency has a huge number of youth providers, and not all of them would be recognised in the context of the Committee’s report. We must acknowledge and salute those organisations that provide a huge amount of good value for our young people, and which would not normally come within the remit of our discussion today. For example, the Door project in Stroud provides fantastic support for young people who have been let down by everyone, including in most cases their own parents. The project is supported powerfully by the local community, delivers outstanding outcomes, and is a strong and useful part of our community. It is a good example of the sort of things we need.

Nailsworth has a community workshop, which I visited not long ago, where young people can learn about crafts, and to be craftspeople. It is fantastic, and is growing up from our local community. Not far away in Nailsworth is a youth centre that is very well supported by the town mayor and many others. It has been the victim of cuts by Gloucestershire county council, but nevertheless continues to deliver fantastic services that are really worth having.

In Dursley, another key town in my constituency, the Lower King’s Hill management co-operative provides great opportunities for young people to do all sorts of things, including gardening and so on. It is also where I hold some of my surgeries, so I am connected with its work, and its aims and objectives. It is yet another example of the sort of structure that we should be supporting, but which might not be covered by our report.

With that degree of diversity, we have some great structures, and I have not even started talking about some of the others, such as Outreach, which provides support for young people in very difficult circumstances. The staff’s dedication to young people, and the opportunities that they gain because of the support, framework, comfort and succour that they receive is fantastic. I applaud that.

All the organisations that I have mentioned are well supported by local people in their local communities, because they recognise local needs and work extraordinarily hard to produce outcomes that are surprisingly easy to measure. As a Member of Parliament, I visit them all, and I see the outcomes and am impressed. What often worries me is the number of people who need those services, rather than the outcomes. We must not ignore the fact that many good things are happening in our constituencies. Mine is a good example, but I think all hon. Members can say the same.

[Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)]

I agree broadly with my hon. Friend, but in my constituency in rural Somerset, one difficulty is acute travel problems. The complete lack of transport services after 6 o’clock in the evening means that only children with parents who have access to a car can access youth services. Not every village has a youth service. I have 172 communities in my constituency, and there are probably youth services in nine or 10. I accept what my hon. Friend says, but it is almost intolerably difficult for young people to access services in rural communities if other services are not in place, and my county council is cutting everything.

[Neil Carmichael]

I thank my hon. Friend for that comment. She is absolutely right that people must be able to get to facilities. In constituencies such as hers and mine, where there are many villages, transport is a factor. My son is a member of Rodborough Eagles, a football team that does extraordinarily well. He is a much better footballer than I ever could have been because he is not flat-footed and is a really good defender. The key point is that he visits many different parts of my constituency, and I join him as often as I can. That football club is a youth service, and an option for him and his friends to enjoy, and is part of youth service provision. A variety of different services can be tapped into.

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[Pat Glass]

Sorry, Mr Betts. I am discussing services for young people, and EMA and its abolition are as much a part of that as services through youth centres or careers services.

There is clear evidence that the pupil premium, for all its good intentions, recycles money from schools with concentrations of the poorest children and young people and siphons off resources to richer parts of the country with fewer poor children. That is because the pupil premium has largely replaced additional education needs funding, which, although it was called different things in different local authorities, was needs-based funding for schools to support their least able and most vulnerable pupils. The AEN formula in each local authority was made up of different factors, but was legally required to include a deprivation factor. Some local authorities used the index of multiple deprivation while others used free school meals, but the basis of AEN funding was a needs-based deprivation factor.

AEN also had an accumulator effect. Schools with fewer than 15% of children on free school meals got nothing in most local authorities, on the basis that that was the norm and that need could and should be met from existing school funding. Schools with between 15% and 24% had a basic level of AEN funding, but then the level escalated massively between 25% and 35% in acknowledgment of the need for additional resources to deal with more complex issues in driving improvement. Any school where more than 35% of children received free school meals was given a huge step in funding, in recognition that those schools were dealing with complex issues needing additional capacity.

The pupil premium gives a basic amount per pupil, drawing money from schools and areas with the highest concentration of free school meals and of poorer children and giving it to wealthier areas with fewer free school meals. If anybody wants evidence of what is happening in their local authority and whether they are winners or losers when it comes to the pupil premium, I can give them a breakdown, courtesy of my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), who has researched the matter in detail.

[Tessa Munt]

Would the hon. Lady like to comment on the fact that a large number of schools are rural and very small? For example, I have a school in my constituency with 68 children. Surely, in that situation, if two families are not so well off, the school will quickly come to its 15% threshold. The pupil premium is directed precisely at those individual children suffering from deprivation, as opposed to thinking that it was fine to mash them in with everybody else if there were fewer than 15%. It only takes nine or 10 children—a few families with multiple children—for such a school to have a significant number of young people with difficulties, without being over the 15% threshold where something would step in under the old system.

[Pat Glass]

As an education funding geek, I have an answer for that. There was an element for small schools. For small rural schools, most local authorities had an element of funding for vulnerable and poor children that was separate from AEN funding. Those schools were already catered for by other parts of the funding formula.

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[Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)]

I have so much to say, but I will make just a few points. I want to clarify one or two things and draw the Minister’s attention to a number of issues. Will he explain, for example, the grounds on which the Government feel able to intervene when a local authority does not provide sufficient services for young people? As he probably knows, I represent a rural constituency in Somerset. I have already mentioned the difficulties with transport. There is very little transport after 6 pm and a reducing service before 6 pm. In fact, I have just received a text from my son, saying that he is stranded at school because there is no bus, which is absolutely no good as I am here. The difficulties for young people to move from one community to another are immense. It is almost impossible for them to access services in a town nearby, even if it is only three or four miles away.

The coalition’s stated No.1 social policy goal is to increase social mobility. One of the things that I want us to consider is the difference between targeting youth services, which is probably well intentioned but tends to make us think of young people in silos, and using an open-access provision. One of the advantages of youth clubs and youth services is that they give young people another chance to achieve in a different forum from their school, football club or wherever. They provide young people with another chance to max out on their potential.

If I consider my experience of youth work, I can see that there are people who might have been attracted into low-level crime, slightly antisocial behaviour or something a little more serious. There are young people who are absent from school with illness, who are truanting or who get caught up in alcohol and drug abuse. One of my particular concerns is the increasing number of young people who suffer from some sort of mental health problem that exhibits itself in the form of an eating disorder, self-harm and, in some cases, thoughts of suicide.

I am deeply concerned that young people in my constituency are unable to access child and adolescent mental health services. Just last week, a young person spoke to me about the fact that she had reported how she felt at school. The school was not allowed to give her any counselling, even though the person to whom she would have spoken is actually involved in the youth service and is trained to give such advice, so she had to be referred to CAMHS, which said that a representative would phone her on a certain day. They did not phone. They then sent her a text message, saying that she had been referred as an emergency, but as she had not been available to take the call—she had removed herself from her class to take that phone call—she was shovelled off the list. They sent her a text message, saying that they assumed that she was no longer a priority case because she had not been there to take the call that had never come.

When young people get to the point that they are actually reporting that they feel dreadful—it often takes them a very long time to get to that point—my sense is that they need help right then. They do not need help in three weeks’ time or in six months’ time; they need help now. My strong sense is that the youth service is often another outlet for young people. There is someone whom they can talk to and trust—not one of their teachers or parents, or a member of the family, but someone who is independent and has specialist knowledge of how to deal with young people. I am concerned that young people in my part of the world do not have access to that expertise, except through the youth service.

The other benefit of the youth service comes from the fact that it is a universal service. Young people have the opportunity to meet people who are different from themselves. That can help to expand their ambitions, expectations and their ability to explore. Certainly, things such as careers advice can come from a trained youth worker who can direct young people to other places, expand their horizons and make the world a much bigger place. That happens in rural Somerset. A young person might not go to university because they cannot anticipate how they will be able to afford to pay their accommodation and living costs in a university town or city. The likelihood is that they might do exactly what their parents, other members of the family, or previous generations have done and not look outside at what they might potentially want to do.

I have been asked to draw the Minister’s attention to the Hughes report of July 2011. Importantly, the whole business of careers help, advice and guidance can be done on a face-to-face basis by those people in the youth services and the youth clubs who may be in a position of authority but who are incredibly accessible to young people. They can give young people a bit of a lift and a shove in the right direction to do something different and to expand their horizons.

I worry that specialist staff in areas such as Somerset feel under threat and are leaving because the services are being withdrawn or significantly reduced. They cannot be re-employed easily. They are well trained and have loads of experience. When the county council invites volunteer groups, such as Church groups or the young farmers’ club, to take on the services in a village, they will not have the ability to employ someone with the expertise of a youth worker because they will be deemed to be expensive, even if it is for one night a week. So I worry that we will lose those skills and that experience in places such as Somerset.

We should look at some of the barriers that young people feel exist when accessing services that are run by certain organisations, including religious organisations. For some young people, there are some barriers to accessing any sort of service that has a faith heading. I must say that a strong exception to that is a service run by a Church-led organisation in one of the communities in my constituency. The service that is offered is absolutely superb and certainly not overtly religious in nature. There is little connection between the young people who use the service and the Church that runs it. So it is not always the case that there is a difficulty with religious organisations running youth services, but we must be very careful.

In summary, youth services are very important, particularly in rural areas. In places with no school sixth form and where a lot of people’s ambitions are limited by the situation in which they find themselves, I am very keen that we continue to provide youth services. We must always remember that for young people to blossom, we must help them to get past the survival basics and ensure that they have someone good, sound and solid to whom they can talk and with whom they can make friends, so that they can receive advice and help all the way through their youth.

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[Tim Loughton]

That is a strange thing for the chief executive of the Scout Association to say, because it relies on no public money at all, so why is he saying that he could use that money for something else? The Scout Association is completely different.

We want NCS to be the recruiting sergeant for the Scouts, the Air Training Corps, the Army cadets and all sorts of youth organisations. They are not there to recruit people for NCS; they are recruiting people for community-minded organisations that are doing great stuff in their local communities—and the Scouts and Guides just happen to be two such organisations.

I am not sure what to do, because I have not actually started the speech before me. I will try, however, to deal with some of the points made by members of the Select Committee. I ought to give my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Tessa Munt) a look-in, because she has had the courtesy to stay throughout the proceedings. She made a number of points, in particular about transport and its availability to convey young people to certain facilities, notably in rural areas. That is exactly why I welcome the work of the United Kingdom Youth Parliament, which we are now helping to fund, in setting up a select committee on transport, this year’s favoured UKYP campaign. I have hosted some round-table meetings, one involving the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), on transport to schools and other educational facilities and on transport for young people. I am particularly sympathetic when 16-year-olds complain, quite rightly, that they have to pay adult fares on buses and public transport. I want to find solutions to ensure that we are not laying on facilities that the very people whom we want to access them are prevented from doing so because of transport logistics.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wells also mentioned social mobility and mental disorders. Having seen some good examples, I can recognise a good youth organisation —a feeling of belonging, I think she said—which can give people confidence that they have a place in society, helping their health, and not least their mental health. The problem has been under-appreciated, with one school-age child in 10 suffering from some form of mental illness, so I welcome the Government’s paper “No health without mental health”, which has, for the first time, placed mental health on a level playing field with physical health. We need to ensure that they are getting the right interventions—early and appropriate—which in too many cases they are not. That is an important part of youth engagement as well.

[Tessa Munt]

Is the Minister also cognisant of the fact that people who have mental health problems when they are very young almost invariably go on to have significant mental health problems later on in life? That is at enormous cost to society and, eventually, to the state through the health services and every other way.

[Tim Loughton]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend’s point.

I had better quickly mention the hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass), who made some good and legitimate points, although she also said that she was present to “verbally duff up” the Minister. I am not entirely sure that that is why we hold our debates. We are having a full and frank exchange of views, and a constructive engagement on an important subject.

The hon. Lady mentioned the real problem of young people not in education, employment or training. Ensuring that our young people are engaged in some way is probably the single biggest challenge that we face as a society, which is why the youth contract—that £1 billion investment—is so important. An extra £123 million has been earmarked for 16 and 17-year-olds, for the 55,000 of that age group who do not have good GCSEs. They will now be engaged through that part of the youth contract that is about to be tendered.

Initial expressions of interest—by a whole range of voluntary organisations and others, in particular those with expertise in young people—have been exceedingly encouraging. It is not only, “Here’s a young person, get them into a job,” but getting a young person to know what a job is all about—giving help with, for example, personal presentation, writing a CV, doing interviews or turning up at 9 o’clock for the training exercise or whatever is required. That is why it is so important to use those organisations with expertise in dealing with young people, from whatever sector—using Myplace centres and other facilities—to ensure that we try to give those 16 and 17-year-olds a decent chance to go back into education properly, if they have dropped out earlier; get on a meaningful training scheme, or apprenticeship; or get into some sustainable employment. The organisations will be paid for that on a payment-by-results basis, so this is not just a short-term displacement scheme; it is about sustainability.

I will deal with one last point made by the hon. Lady before I sit down to give a right of response to my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness, the Chairman of the Select Committee. Some of the payment for the national citizen service was mentioned in the report, and that is a legitimate area of debate, because fewer than half of the providers last year levied a charge, and half of those in turn made it a refundable charge when the young person turned up. What we have said, and what is part of the tendering process for those who come forward to offer such places, is that charging should be done in such a way that no young person is deterred from an NCS course by financial considerations. The course needs to have a value, however, and what some of the research shows is that for those providers that levied a charge, in particular if refundable, people turned up and valued the course more. That is purely about ensuring that people do not feel, “Oh, I can sign up, it doesn’t cost me anything,” and that they need not bother to turn up—so they turn up and value it, making the most of the experience. If it turns out that that is discouraging people, we have pilots to inform how we roll out NCS in future.

We could have discussed a range of issues and a range of related things that I hope the Select Committee will return to on youth services and youth affairs generally. They are among the most important things that we deal with in Parliament, because they are one of the best investments that we can make. Therefore, I have unashamedly named and shamed local authorities, and will continue to do so, if they are being short-sighted, cutting disproportionately or not seeing the bigger picture on youth services. Positive for Youth is about ensuring that young people are empowered to have a strong voice to point that out. They are the most important customers of youth services and they must have the loudest voice about where we are doing well and where we are not.