Cabinet Office – Youth Policy

LiverpoolThursday 10 December

Youth Policy Team

● Providing high quality social action opportunities that enable young people to build their skills and networks outside of school - including National Citizen Service and Step up to Serve

● Supporting young people’s voices to be heard

● Supporting the youth sector and local authorities to deliver high quality youth services

National Citizen Service

● By the end of 2015, 200,000 young people aged 15-17 will have participated in the programme, with 5 million hours of volunteering donated to local communities

● Last month’s Spending Review, reconfirmed government commitment to supporting young people through continued investment in NCS

● Expansion to 300,000 places per year by 2019/20

Two or three week full-time programme, where young people can sign up for the part-residential experience. NCS is designed to be accessible to everyone, and never costs more than £50.

Participants will: • Meet other young people from all backgrounds and tackle

outdoor challenges on a week away from home• Join with local businesses and social leaders to discover more

about their local community • Make their mark by developing and delivering local

volunteering projects that matter to them

In June 2013, the NCS Trust was established to manage NCS in England.

The standard programme model run in summer is 3 weeks full time followed by 30 hours of social action. The ‘scaled model’, run for the Autumn and Spring programmes, takes place during half-term and the Easter holiday.

Phase 2 Phase 1 Phase 3 Phase 4

Activity based residential

Team Building

What happens on NCS?

Description

Purpose

Community based

residential

Developing new skills

Learning about the local

community

Social Action project design and delivery

Planning and delivering Social

Action

Graduation

Rite of passage celebration

Step up to Serve and Youth Social Action Fund

● We support Step up to Serve to deliver the #iwill campaign, which aims to increase the number of young people aged 10-20 years, taking part in social action by 50% by 2020

● We are also investing £1m into a Youth Social Action fund in 2015/16 to provide even more opportunities across England

● A national fund, matched by Pears Foundation will provide opportunities in rural and deprived communities

● A local fund, matched by UK Community Foundations, will provide opportunities in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire

● The successful applicants of the National Youth Social Action Fund are Blackburn Youth Zone; Building Futures East; Leonard Cheshire Disability; National Federation of Young Farmers’ Clubs; Peabody; The Key; UK Youth; Whole Education and Youth United.

Impact of Youth Social Action

• Participation not only develops vital skills for life and work but also helps young people to feel connected to the communities in which they live

• Recent study carried out by the Behavioural Insights Team demonstrates across a range of measures, the link between social action and improved educational attainment as well as enhanced employability skills

• It is one of the largest pieces of research conducted in this area using randomised control trials

• Research will be published shortly

Supporting young people’s voices to be heard

● We support the British Youth Council to deliver the UK Youth Parliament and other youth voice activities

● This includes the Make Your Mark campaign, where young people discuss, debate and vote on issues that matter to them

● Target for this year of 1m participants voting in the Make Your Mark campaign, making it the biggest ballot of youth views in the UK

● The House of Commons has voted to allow the UK Youth Parliament to use the House for its annual sitting until 2010

Supporting the sector to deliver high quality youth services

● Centre for Youth Impact was set up in September 2014 as a sector-led initiative, with grant funding from Cabinet Office

● CYI is promoting the importance of evidence in designing, delivering and funding high quality services for young people

● acting as a central point for information and a forum for discussing impact measurement practice in the youth sector

● providing an online source of impact measurement resources for youth sector organisations, with guidance on how to use them

● In the pilot phase (14/15) they worked with early adopters (Brathay Trust, Foyer Federation and London Youth) to support them in improving their own impact measurement practice and to spread their learning throughout their networks

● Three new early adopters are being supported in 15/16 (Ambition, South West Learning and Oasis)

www.youth-impact.uk

Supporting the sector to deliver high quality youth services

● Through last year’s Delivering Differently for Young People (DDYP) programme we provided funding to 11 LAs to enable them to explore new models for delivering sustainable youth services (such as Mutuals, Joint Ventures and Independent Trusts)

● External consultants worked with the LA and stakeholders in each area to develop and options appraisal and implementation timetable

● Supporting six more areas this year – details to be announced soon

● Sharing learning from the DDYP programme will be a priority in 2016, as we follow the journey of participants from last year and those joining the programme this year