Who will win and who will lose out of the ‘Big Society’ agenda?

After there have been so many cut backs in the funding for youth and community projects all over the UK both within the public sector and within the voluntary sector it has come as a low blow to may organisations that the government may end up financing private sector projects instead…

Within funding available for working with young people as part of the big society agenda Serco and co have applied for  what may be £100m for two years. So where are youth and community services going now? Will private and voluntary projects work together in areas where public services have been taken? Or will voluntary and public services all buy into the private sector? One issue that cannot be ignored is that ‘One in 10 charities told researchers for a report by New Philanthropy Capital that they could close within the year due to cuts.’

All of the information above is a summary of issues within a Guardian article written by Daniel Boffey, the article can be found here http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/aug/05/serco-bid-national-citizen-service.

Injustice and inequality I hear you cry? No it’s only young people’s wages

‘A very hard decision’ has been made to freeze under 21’s minimum wage in Britain.

Here are the new minimum wage brackets; minimum wage rate for those aged 21 years and above will increase by 11p to £6.19 an hour from October, the rate for 18- to 20-year-olds will remain at £4.98 an hour, and at £3.68 for 16- and 17-year-olds. The rate for apprentices will increase by 5p to £2.65 an hour.

Some individuals I know have stated that it is an outrage that young people were being paid so little in the first place, I can’t say that I disagree with this opinion having previously been a 17 year old minimum wage fully self sufficient worker.

But what does everyone else think?

I have taken the above information from a Guardian article which can be viewed here: https://apps.facebook.com/theguardian/society/2012/mar/19/minimum-wage-frozen-for-under-21s

Are we at risk of a NEET overload? All I hear is NEET, NEET, NEET here have some facts

This time a year ago I think the word ‘NEET’ was a purely professional or academic term that I had personally had heard about 3times now it seems to be everywhere;

In the news…

In my work meetings…

In youth conferences…

On the television…

Within schools…

Articles, books…you get the picture

So what does ‘NEET’ mean and what exactly is this ‘NEET phenomena’ that is exploding across news papers, funding bids and social policy agendas costing tax payers and British society a lot of money I’m sure.

The following is Information from my Literature Research that I thought I’d share, please feel free to add and comment!

NEET= ‘Not in employment, education or training’ some others may refer to this as NETLE= ‘Not in employment, training, learning or education’ whichever way you look at it means someone who is not earning or learning (theoretically). However I’d like to mention that NEET’s include people who volunteer of their own accord and do many things outside of earning and learning and so it in no way means that for people to be NEET they are doing NOTHING. In fact I’m sure many NEETs are learning very valuable life lessons everyday unless they are literally doing NOTHING AT ALL in which case I’m sure they will disappear entirely.

NEET is just a current term for social exclusion; social exclusion has been on the political agenda since the early 1990’s. Labour made social exclusion a focus of their campaign into office in 1997 and have aimed policy around supporting those who were socially excluded since. Bridging the Gap was a huge step into the socially excluded correctness zone which aimed to defend the Nation against social exclusion and was a big convincing reason to fund targeted youth services in Britain (the tail end of this may be why I have a job today in fact)!

Social exclusion and NEET seem to be terms that refer to something a person (or people) need to correct immediately why? The reason for this is that being a NEET or socially excluded person creates a higher risk factor for individuals to be involved in substance abuse and criminality. NEET’s are also more likely to be a long term cost on taxation.

Before social exclusion was ‘youth unemployment’, which was a huge political agenda during the 1880’s.

Currently Britain has 260,000 ‘core’ NEETs which means individuals that have been out of employment, training or education for a year.

NEET usually is a term which applies to young people with the majority being 16-18 (except in Wales which last year had a higher 19-25 ratio of NEETs).

I hope this information will be useful to people to other members of society I for one have found it useful in my understanding and placement of political agendas, funding, young people and the current economic climate. I do hope that those who are NEET or NETLE find things that they enjoy doing and perhaps gain employment or seek training in these enjoyments with or without support from government funded schemes, teachers, training providers, learning coaches, youth, social or community workers.

Thank you

Here are some references so that you know I didn’t make all of that up!

Department for Education and Skills. (2002) Estimating the Cost of Being ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training’ at age 16-18. DfES Publications: Nottingham.

Furlong, A (2006). Not a very NEET solution: representing problematic labour market transitions among early school-leavers. Work, employment and society (20) pp553-569.

Hills, J and Steward, K. (2005) Access on-line here: http://www.jrf.org.uk/publications/policies-towards-poverty-inequality-and-exclusion-1997

Rose, J. (2008) Youth Policy in Wales. youth and Policy (56) pp 55-63.

Steward, K. (2009) A Scar on the soul of Britain: child poverty and disadvantage under New Labour. In Hills, J Sefton, T and Steward, K. Towards a more equal society? Poverty, inequality and policy since 1997.

Welsh Assembly Government, 2008, Delivering Skills that Work for Wales: Reducing the proportion of young people not in education, employment or training in Wales.

Yates, S and Payne, M. (2006) Not so NEET? A critique of the use of ‘NEET’ in Setting Targets for Interventions with Young People. Journal of Youth Studies 9 (No 3, July) pp. 329-344.

Children eating, cooking and creating their own future? That’s right we don’t always have to do it for them!

The BBC News has reported on two studies which show that cookery classes encourage pupils to recognise and become more accustomed to ‘healthy’ foods resulting in a desire to eat more fruit and vegetables. Cooking isn’t just a fun, social activity it’s a skill which can be used again and again, making it a very productive form of education. Within this article a survey of 2,500 participants of the ‘Let’s get cooking’ project showed that 92% of them used their learnt skills at home.

Read the full article here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-16854572

How can this be related to our current climate?

Cooking is a great way to educate children, young people and even adults on what food choices they have available, where to get them, how much they cost, what exactly they can do with them and how to use ingredients. Young people at the centre where I work love to cook, however we don’t just run cooking sessions due to the recession and budget cuts we tend to run ‘cooking on a budget’ sessions. Where we make wholesome meals (and sometimes desserts) which cost less than £5.00 for a group of people (on average I’d say around 10 people but it depends on what we cook)! So far we’ve made wonderful rice, potato and pasta dishes as well as experimenting with pancakes, chocolate, honeycomb and porridge (not all at the same time I might add!) The young people who participate are now experts at flavouring rice dishes, in love with porridge and can make their own oven chips from scratch, this week we plan to be making chicken burgers which I hope will go well (even if a session doesn’t go a 100% to plan it’s still a learning experience which can be built on).

If no-one in the group has experience of cooking a particular dish we use this website http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/. If anyone can suggest any other sites please comment below, and especially mention it if you know a recipe which will cost less than £5.00 to feed a group (we’re always on the look out for new things to try).

Thank you

Speaking out about the recession and cuts affecting young people

Cuts to youth and community services are an emotional topic for me both as a young person and as a youth worker. Due to these two factors I know that I am bias within this topic and so below I will try to construct a piece of writing on the youth service cuts using others opinions and provide links so that anyone who views this can look up the topic for themselves.

In October BBC news and other newspapers reported how 1000 young people had gone to London and protested against cuts to their youth services (find BBC link below). This article aims to explore young people’s opinions on youth club cuts and the reasons behind their feelings.

On July 31^st 2011 the Guardian made a video report of how young people felt closure of youth clubs would make local teenagers bored and possibly give people or ‘gangs’ a reason to be violent. One week later Riots broke out in London, so what did young people express on the Guardian’s video report?

‘People are intimidated by us like, there’s nothing to do, if all my friends was here you would see the type of behaviour I’m talking about,’ Young male (1).

‘When they did close their youth centres and they didn’t even elect young people, so it was like one day the youth centre was there and then the next day it was gone,’ Erika Lopez.

‘It’s another thing when youth clubs and all that get shut down it cuts Kids roots off and links, they don’t have anywhere to go,’ Chavez Campbell.

‘There’s nothing here for us,’ Young male (1).

‘Everybody used to go to youth clubs, it’s not even like they made youth club and no-one used to go,’ Young male (1).

There seems to be two issues within this video report one is the closure of youth clubs and the other is gang-crime, which the video expresses will be further influenced by the closure of youth clubs. Young people express that with the current economic climate it’s harder for people to get jobs and money –so they may take things from others.

One of the young people Chavez Campbell from the video has a second video made after the riots that you can access here http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2011/aug/12/i-predict-a-riot-video?intcmp=239.

Young people not having the opportunity to go to a place which is fully theirs and which they can use to make friendships with peers and experiment is one of the issues of taking youth clubs away from young people.

Yes I did say ‘taking youth clubs away from young people’ because young people feel targeted, this becomes apparent during the BBC article on young people protesting over the cuts to services.

“I think they’re cutting young people’s services because we’re easy targets – because we can’t vote and we can’t hold them to account,” Deyontae James.

“The government always complain that all young people – us – are out committing crime or on the streets, but if they’re going to close our youth services, where do they expect young people to go?,” Group of young people.

“They talk about gangs on the streets and giving people something to do – this is a place where we can go and keep out of trouble. They’re going back on what they’ve said.” Nickisha Sutton.

“It’s not fair that everything is happening so quickly and all at once, and young people just feel that they don’t really know why this is happening,” Thomas Ryan-Moulder.”(There were) cuts to EMA (Education Maintenance Allowance) and (now) cuts to youth services – but there’s no reason behind why youths should be targeted so harshly.”

With a change of times economically and a change in government  which seems to be the forefront of the cuts it is obvious young people feel they are getting a raw deal and being ‘targeted’. Aside from youth club closures here are some other issues young people are facing in our current climate:

Youth unemployment is 21.3% -double the rate for the UK as a whole which is was 8.1%. This is the highest youth unemployment rate since records began in 1992 (Guardian.co.uk, 12.10.11).

During Capita’s ‘Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET) Wales Conference (22.09.11) Careers Wales stated that in 2010:

11.5% of people aged 16-18 and 23.2% of people aged 19-24 were NEET in Wales,

7.1% of people aged 16-18 and 19.8% of people aged 19-24 were NEET in Northern Ireland,

13.8% of people aged 16-18 and 18.4% of people aged 19-24 were NEET in Scotland,

10.7% of people aged 16-18 and 19.3% of people aged 19-24 were NEET in England

And the 2010 European youth unemployment rate was 20.8%.

So with fewer services for young people and growing youth unemployment how will young people react? Will we see more people voicing their opinions and asking for a change, more protests or riots? (Please note I am not suggesting the riots 06/08/11 were or were not a result of cuts to youth services or lack of employment).

Thank you

 

Choose Youth rally: ‘Cuts are causing failing generation’ BBC.co.uk (25.10.11)

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15446724

Haringey youth club closures: ‘There’ll be riots’ – video, Guardian.co.uk (31.07.11) http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/video/2011/jul/31/haringey-youth-club-closures-video

‘UK unemployment total hits highest in 17 years’ Guardian.co.uk (12.10.11)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/oct/12/uk-unemployment-highest-17-years