Agenda item

Catherine Underwood, Corporate Director for People, and Wilf Fearon, Head of Early Help Services spoke to the Committee about the work of Play and Youth Services and how provision is targeted to support those children and young people most in need of support.  They highlighted the following information:

a)  The service delivers a whole range of social and recreational activities to children and young people aged 5-16 years.  There has been a recent reshaping of the service to look at a more targeted approach to delivery in the light of the available budget and concerns about serious youth violence.

b)  County Lines has been a concern for a while. Those who have had contact with the Police are from a range of ethnic and social backgrounds, but there is limited knowledge about young Asian boys.

c)  The Exploitation and Violence Reduction Hub works with partners to map and understand young people and how to share intelligence and engage with them.

d)  Play and Youth Services delivers activity from a number of venues in three localities, covering the north, south and central city. 

e)  Covid has impacted on the Service, for example in quarter 4 last year (January – March 2020) the service had approximately 8,000 attendees.  In quarter 3 this year (October – December 2020) this was down to 2,000. 

f)  Two members of staff are seconded to the Exploitation and Violence Reduction Hub to ensure closer working and sharing of training and experience.

g)  Other partnership working includes working closely with voluntary groups and Area Based Grant partners, the Youth Justice Services, which has just received a grant for youth work, some of which is being used to develop a detached youth team, which will work closely with Play and Youth Services staff to support the work they are doing with children most at risk across city.  The fund will also be used to support other partners to increase their capacity to work with children and young people.

h)  The Youth and Play Service works with children and young people in schools and alternative provision, particularly in the area of knife crime and serious youth violence, to let them know how they can engage with support and get to know staff.

i)  The Service is also involved in family support work, offering constructive activities and interventions to those referred via targeted youth support.

j)  To ensure that work is aligned with partners, Play and Youth Services staff attend a range of meetings to share and receive information, for example the Child Criminal Exploitation Panel and the Out of Court Disposal Panel.

k)  Joint training is undertaken with partners, including training on young women and gangs, targeted youth work and sexual exploitation.

l)  In full lockdown staff are liaising with children and young people through online activities.  Those regarded as vulnerable are seen more often and staff have dropped off resource packs to support them to stay engaged.

m)  The Service doesn’t record if a child or young person has been excluded from school unless there is a safeguarding issue.

n)  Staff are trained on signs of safety and how to identify risk and needs.  This includes how to build trust and relationships with young people to encourage them to talk should there be a safeguarding concern.

o)  The Service focuses on the child or young person. It does not have a specific whole family approach. If family issues are identified, then staff  signpost and/ or refer families to appropriate targeted services.

In response to questions from the Committee and in the subsequent discussion the following points were made:

p)  In response to a question about what the Service is doing to reach out to young Asian boys following a stabbing incident in Berridge Ward, it was noted that this is an area where more work is needed. Staff know that they need to work on liaising with Asian communities to attract Asian boys and they are looking at how to do more targeted work.

q)  To try to prevent such incidents as this stabbing, partners are working together.  The Youth and Play Service does not have the capacity to do it alone. Area Based Grants (ABG) are used to secure the most appropriate service and this includes activity geared towards this sort of need.  There is ongoing consideration to introduce a quality mark as an assurance that the work of ABG partners meets the standards and requirements to achieve agreed outcomes.

r)  It was suggested that youth networks within each area, including partners and residents would be helpful to share intelligence and tackle the challenging issues. This could then be shared across the three areas. This was acknowledged as a good idea by Wilf Fearon, although he expressed concern about the capacity of the service given current proposed budget reductions.

s)  The Play and Youth Services workforce is representative of the community it seeks to work with, but this does not mean that the service can provide all that it would like to. Every member of the workforce is not necessarily skilled to work with specific groups. As well as Asian communities, there are other pockets of the community where the Service needs more knowledge and insight, eg the Somali community.  The Service is always mindful of what skills it needs when recruiting, but is also difficult to get into those communities and build relationships.

t)  Play and Youth Services staff are not trained to work with adults and wider families but rather the service is designed to be delivered to 5-16 year olds from specific buildings (when not in lockdown).  Wider family events are held so that children and young people and their families can work together. However, targeted family work is carried out by other agencies. Youth and Play Services works closely with other agencies to ensure a joint and holistic approach, for example, the MST (the Multi Systemic Therapy) team will do the therapeutic work but will refer the child or young person to Youth and Play Services to provide additional support.  Youth and Play Services is not designed to work with a caseload as other services such as the Youth Justice and Social Care, but is engaged with all services which surround children, young people and their families.

u)  While the Service does collect data, it is difficult to quantify this and there is currently no hard data to measure impact.  The Service is also likely to be very different in the near future if the budget reductions are agreed.  Evaluating how good the service is and whether it is making sufficient difference will be essential to assess whether activity delivered is working well.

v)  The size of the Play and Youth Service means that it cannot do all of the work it wishes to do.  It cannot record exclusions or the assessments which may or may not have taken place in relation to these.  There is not the capacity to work more with County Lines on youth violence, so the Service focuses on working the children and young people who attend the Service’s centres for both fun as well as targeted work. The service will need to continue to work closely with the Area Based Grant funded voluntary sector to deliver.

w)  The Portfolio Holder for Regeneration, Schools and Communications, who was in attendance, noted that, having been a portfolio holder for youth services for over a decade, he has seen the challenge the Play and Youth Service has faced. From when he first started working with youth services the workforce has been reduced from approximately 100 to 30 following several reorganisations; and services are now facing further reductions.  This does not mean that the workforce is not doing a good job with children and young people, but roles have been changed so much over time that it has become difficult to define the approach to take.

x)  It was noted that in the light of budget reductions it is even more important to work closely with other organisations to bridge gaps created by reduced capacity.

y)  It was also noted that services need to be designed to avoid duplication in some areas and lack of support in others. When allocating Area Based Grants, the Council should be satisfied that organisations are delivering what is wanted to the standard required.

The Chair thanked Wilf Fearon for his work and recognised the pressures he and colleagues are working under.