Lucy Sweetman

In 2008, I spoke to a group of care and leaving care service managers and practitioners in the east of England, to report back on the findings of a project I had been involved in. As I sat during the coffee break waiting to speak, I made a few additions to my script. Read More »

Close to a million young people aged between 16 and 24 now find themselves saddled with that ghastly moniker Neet (not in employment, education or training).

A toxic combination of factors, not least our nose-diving economy, the removal of the Education Maintenance Allowance and the tripling of tuition fees in higher education, is making it near-impossible to get an economic foothold. Add to this the government’s war on vocational learning and many young people must be wondering what’s out there for them. Read More »

Tower Hamlets council in east London has announced that a valuable and successful scheme for young people has been saved from the axe through the combined efforts of two voluntary sector organisations, the Private Equity Foundation and Tomorrow’s People.

The scheme, providing coaching for young people who are not in education, employment or training, or at risk of being in that situation, will now continue for the next two years using the Tower Hamlets model, which has been hailed as a huge success. It’s been partly funded by Big Society Capital and has applied for Innovation Fund payment by results finance.

So far, so big society. Putting aside views of the funding model, it’s great that the young people of Tower Hamlets will continue to have access to such a high level of support.

Many of us who have been around long enough know that a new panacea comes around every few years and that most of them are simply a re-hashing of best practice in a different,  brightly-coloured hat.

Part of the fanfare connected with the scheme is that it has been billed as a triumph for coaching as an approach to supporting young people. Even Ernst and Young have been drafted in to “codify” what it is that the coaches do. But while reading and reflecting on the article, it struck me that, really, coaching as a method has little to do with the success of the scheme.

The success is that committed, interested adults with skills in building relationships with young people, are being paid a good salary to be there for that young person – in a relationship that sustains and supports, shows interest, love and care.

A few years ago I worked for a large, European-funded voluntary sector project, improving services and support to young people leaving care. We did some research with young people to find out what made their journey through care easier.

The most common response was a relationship with an adult who cared, who was consistent, who came back even when they were being obnoxious, who persisted. An adult who challenged them, helped them find out answers, helped them develop new skills, encouraged them, had high aspirations for them and who believed they could go far.

In the Guardian piece, the coaching aspect of the role plays its part – helping a young person understand their skills and abilities, address the self-limiting beliefs that hold them back, and set and achieve goals. But it goes on to describe the coaches who visit a young person every day to get them to school, or who text them in the afternoon to see how school has been, who badger them into action because they believe in them.

Back in that European project we had a secret short-hand for one of our main messages, that we didn’t use publicly. We borrowed heavily from President Clinton’s famous campaigning phrase on the economy: “It’s the relationship, stupid”. And you know what? It really is that simple.

I volunteer for Mentoring Plus in Bath. Adults in our local community volunteer to train and work as mentors for vulnerable young people. Mentor, coach, youth worker, personal adviser, project worker, even ‘troubled families’ troubleshooter’ – it’s the same role with a different name.

I’ll bet if you ask the young people in Tower Hamlets, “So what was it about the coaching technique that really worked for you?”, you’ll get a blank look. Ask them what they liked about their experience being coached and I’m sure you’ll hear how great it is to have a nice adult to talk to, who cares about them and shows an interest in their success.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged. Every one of us working in the voluntary sector, with vulnerable adults and young people alike, knows that the time to build a relationship which fosters resilience and self-reliance and which is caring and consistent can be the key that unlocks even the most intransigent of issues.

It’s the relationship. It’s not a new technique, or a new way of asking the same question. So why don’t we stop calling it something new every 10 years?

Let’s be the sector that says, we can help by building a relationship and let’s acknowledge that it takes a serious commitment. It’s expensive whether you’re counting time or money. It’s a lot to ask of a volunteer and, more often than not, we don’t pay those that do this work a great deal of money.

Maybe the problem we have is that we find it hard to argue for funding if all we’re apparently offering is a “relationship” with a group of clients? That doesn’t sound sexy or innovative and it certainly doesn’t sound expensive or technical enough. We need to be braver.

I hope Ernst and Young discover that it’s the relationship, stupid. And I hope that we can start to be more honest about what works.

Humanity works. It’s that simple.

These are grim times. High inflation, lower salaries, rising unemployment and a lack of investment are the ingredients of economic torpor, and we are being fed them in shovelfuls.

Most of us would be hard pressed to find someone in our lives who hasn’t been affected by the gloom – unless you have a wide circle of wealthy hedge fund-supported pals, that is. Some of us have taken some pretty hair raising decisions over the last few months; my partner and I have just downsized to protect ourselves from the continuing depression. It’s been traumatic and difficult but at least we had the means to us to do it.

The ones who are really suffering are the young. While those of us who are older and more experienced in the labour market can bounce back after a period of unemployment, not working at the beginning of a career has far reaching consequences.

The economist, David Blanchflower, expands on this issue in an excellent article based on his research and published by the Royal Society for the Arts two years ago.

“For the young, a spell of unemployment does not end with that spell; it raises the probability of being unemployed in later years and carries with it a wage penalty. The consequences of unemployment are thus more far-reaching than for older people.”

Blanchflower goes on to say that this is everyone’s problem. High levels of youth unemployment are bad for all of us, creating low morale in the country and the economy. Our happiness quotient drops enormously when our children aren’t reaching their potential.

So what are we going to do about it? One of the pressure points for youth unemployment is that entry level jobs are being taken by graduates who can’t find graduate-level employment opportunities. Another is that, increasingly, opportunities are offered as unpaid internships which are therefore only available to those who can self-fund valuable work experience. This is an unsustainable mess and harms the prospects of thousands of young people who need access to work experience to help them on their way.

Since 2009 a brilliant project, led by the National Care Advisory Service, has been working to improve the employment prospects of care leavers. From Care2Work has recruited employers from across the economy (including the voluntary and public sectors), to offer work experience, employment opportunities and apprenticeships to young people leaving care, recognising that this particular group faces an even bigger struggle to find their way into work. The success comes from wrap-around support and offering a range of opportunities to young people that increase their exposure to the workplace, but also from training employers to understand the unique barriers that care leavers face when trying to find work for the first time.

Only this week, New Deal of the Mind have published an evaluation of their Future Jobs Fund scheme, which showed that a small amount of investment in providing work experience for young people in the creative industries has paid huge dividends: three quarters of their participants have gone into work or learning.

Good practice abounds, let’s put it to work.

We now have thousands of young people who are struggling, some facing more complicated barriers than others, some who simply cannot find a job after hundreds of applications.

It seems to me that the voluntary sector could do its bit to help. Perhaps it’s time to step away from offering long-term unpaid internships and instead move into offering short, paid work placements and traineeship opportunities, or working in partnership with job centres to provide work experience for young people who are claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance.

Isn’t it possible that the voluntary sector, always so keen to innovate, can find a way to help our young get the work experience they need while paying them a training wage to do it? Even short periods of work experience can have a huge impact on a young person’s ability to secure a position, as well as building their confidence.

And for those who are living in areas where jobs really are impossible to come by, work experience with a supportive organisation can be the difference between despair and hope.

Even in hard times, don’t we have that in our gift?

Lucy Sweetman is a freelance writer, speaker and consultant with 20 years’ experience in services for disadvantaged young people

After Mencap’s ‘Don’t Stand By’ report and the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s release this week of ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’, it is very clear that we have a serious problem in this country with hate crimes, bullying and abuse directed at disabled people.

The case studies described in the EHRC report cast a long shadow over any claim our country might have to being an open and accepting society. This kind of harm, directed at a single but diverse group, has gone unnoticed for too long.

Worryingly, the perpetrators of some of these attacks and campaigns of abuse and bullying, have been young people. Why is that and what can we do about it?

For three decades, disabled children and young people have had the right to be educated in mainstream schools with their non-disabled peers, if it meets their educational needs. Under the last government this entitlement was strengthened, as it had been by the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. However, there has always been a strongly pro-special school movement among parents of disabled children, partly out of anxiety about bullying.

The Coalition agreement presented after the general election in 2010, had a very clear policy on the issue. The assumption of inclusion in mainstream schooling for disabled children was to be removed and all regulation and policy around Special Education Needs would be reviewed and new proposals made in a green paper. This was a policy strongly backed by the Prime Minister as a parent of a disabled child, although he discovered on the campaign trail that not every similar parent agreed with him.

The green paper was delayed and then published. The proposals are still being reviewed and consulted on and there is yet to be a firm set of proposals from Sarah Teather, the minister responsible.

This area of policy is fraught and there is no denying that there strong feelings on all sides about the benefits and drawbacks of inclusion which are also mired in the complicated processes around assessing, meeting and paying for each individual young person’s educational needs.

Putting the educational issues to one side, the social principle is an important one. We have had an assumption of inclusion but more often than not, and particularly for those with complex physical or emotional needs, special schooling has been the parental preference for many children and young people. There have also been cases where schools have actively resisted enrolling children because their physical needs (such as wheelchair use) have been argued to be a health and safety concern for others in the school community.

The consequence has been that many non-disabled children and young people have no experience of sharing their immediate community with their disabled peers. They have never had the opportunity to know, understand and build relationships with disabled students. We surely can’t be surprised, then, that for some non-disabled children and young people, disabled adults or other children in their communities are targets for the kind of bullying and harassment born of ignorance and fear.

As the government removes the assumption of inclusion, we can only expect this situation to get worse.

So it seems to me that it falls on our sector to address this issue. It’s time for our numerous disability charities to come together not just to raise awareness through publicity and marketing campaigns but to create the programmes for children and young people that will bring them together from all their backgrounds, with all their abilities and capacities, whatever they are.

There is a social purpose to it that sits at the heart of our sector: to help people understand each other, to ensure that opportunity is available to all, and to enable people to build relationships that create the stronger communities we all crave.

Last week, the writer Tobias Wolff said in a Guardian interview that he expected one day to be found out as a fake, as though his renown and talent were imagined, his success fabricated.

Once thought only to affect high-achieving women, Imposter Syndrome is now known to be common in both sexes. Many people in positions of authority or influence have, at the back of their minds, a nagging worry that one day someone will unmask them, revealing them to be ill-qualified for their senior position or power.

But perhaps it’s something we all worry about, whatever our responsibilities, or gender. Increasingly, we are defined by the work we do or the work-related attributes we have. As a job or even a career for life gives way to ‘portfolio’ working, our individual characteristics, attitudes and skills become the headlines through which we sell ourselves. And, as ‘personal branding’ becomes an even greater concern for young people entering the job market (children at primary schools in the US are hearing these messages too), we stop being a workforce and instead become a sea of individual mini-brands, vying for the attention of employers as jobs become more scarce.

In a changing economy, all the talk is of ‘soft’ skills: social and communication aptitudes, emotional intelligence, leadership, collaborative and creative abilities. These are the attributes that employers seek in a modern workforce for our information-driven age. For the well-educated and advantaged, a plethora of character-building extra-curricular activities provide some of these skills for the young to brandish on their UCAS forms. For the less well off and disadvantaged, the youth clubs and schemes that offered opportunities are dwindling, placing them out of reach.

But even if we mourn the loss of opportunity for so many young people (not to mention those adults forced by economics into a career change), should we not also worry about the commodification of those attributes? Once, an individual might have sought to be a collaborative and cheerful team player because that was a nice thing to be, a quality apparent in the sort of person that other people like to have around. Instead, it is imperative to have the skills of a team player for the edge it will give in a competitive employment process.

Have we really commodified some of our best human qualities? Or does business finally understand that success is built on relationships, not bullying? The continuing rise of Imposter Syndrome suggests that we are spending so much time trying to convince others of our talents, we have stopped believing our own publicity.

As the government concentrates on its welfare to work programme and those of us concerned for the wellbeing of young people find ways to help them develop these personal skills and attributes, we would do well to remember that we are human, after all.

Our sector must firmly root itself in a belief in our attributes as valuable in their own right; not to be developed simply to secure personal, economic advancement but to be used collaboratively to improve our world and our mutual experience of it.

The acreage of theorising about the causes of the recent riots and looting around England, is giving way to postulation about the solution.

Unfortunately for young people, a popular idea appears to be the rolling back of 20 years’ worth of progress in children and young people’s rights and participation.

After the sight of children and young people (and plenty of adults, frankly) running wild in our cities and exiting broken windows with televisions and trainers, the media and some politicians’ first port of call for blame was the parents.

But the parents weren’t having it, instead numerous of them have appeared on television and in the press over recent days to tell us that the problem is that they are scared to ‘discipline’ their children, for fear of retribution from the government, that a culture of young people’s ‘rights’ has led to an out of control sense of entitlement and the rejection of adult authority, including that of parents.

We are at serious risk here. Over the last 20 years, we had begun to establish a political and policy culture in which it was recognised that the engagement of children and young people in decision-making has a positive impact on their self-esteem, skills and sense of community, as well as creating better services.

Efforts were made at all levels of government to work alongside children and young people in the planning and in some cases, delivery of services to their users. The Children’s Commissioner was established, obligations to consult and engage were included in legislation. Importantly, years and years of evidence was building to reinforce a message that it works, that the impact on young people and politics is positive.

Participation helps children and young people understand their place in their communities, it shapes a feeling of responsibility for each other, it helps young people experience self-efficacy, and the ability to affect their surroundings. It teaches them about politics and the importance of political engagement, it teaches them about the impact of their actions. It helps them to make an argument, not throw a brick. It tells them that they are valued. It tells them that they have responsibilities, not a carte blanche to do as they please.

The third sector, alongside colleagues in local government youth services, has been at the forefront of the promotion of children and young people’s rights and participation. Now that local authority youth services are being gutted or, in some cases, obliterated, it is left to the voluntary sector to stand up for young people and make a case for the continued commitment to participation and engagement. In the case of the young people who rioted and looted over the last week, it is to make the case that this is needed now more than ever.

If we don’t, the ‘discipline’ lobby will win. Let’s be clear what that means. These are people who still believe that the best response to their children’s violence and disorder, is more violence, not love.

We must stand up for what we know is true. We cannot let them win this battle, we must not let them roll back years of progress.

Lucy Sweetman is a freelance writer, speaker and consultant with 20 years’ experience in services for disadvantaged young people.

Last week, hidden beneath one of the most inflammatory political public scandals of this century, another story was unfolding.

On Tuesday, David Cameron launched his very late Open Public Services White Paper. The Prime Minister chose to launch his proposals on opening up public service delivery to “any willing provider” with some fanfare at one of his favourite think tanks. He took the time out of his day to make a bit of a speech, highlighting his own commitment to this agenda. Unfortunately for him, no one was particularly interested and he spent the following 20 minutes being bombarded with questions about Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks.

Although some among you might enjoy seeing the Prime Minister squirm, the contents of his white paper must be analysed and his mission for the delivery of public services confronted.

Upon its launch, Labour was quick to point out that the white paper did not contain any new announcements and that much of it had already been trailed or announced. In fact, they argued, it was considerably watered down, perhaps to avoid another NHS-style rearguard action.

That may be true, and it must be said that there is little in the white paper that we haven’t heard before. But maybe that’s the problem. The key message from the government is very much still at the heart of this document: public services will be delivered by a range of providers, including an expansion of the role of the private sector.

Painfully for Mr Cameron, the day he announced the white paper was also the day Southern Cross, the care home provider, announced it was going into administration. It was a perfect example of a profit-making enterprise responsible for delivering a public service collapsing, leaving thousands of people with an uncertain and frightening future.

It was an object lesson in the problems we will face if the market, with all its uncertainty, becomes the determining force behind the delivery of our most personal public services.

There was pain for me too. My own employer, a private sector apprenticeship provider, had also gone into administration the week before, leaving young people and staff in disarray.

I’ve never worked in the private sector because I have always believed that public services should be provided through the state, or at least not for profit. I hadn’t found myself in the private sector by choice.

Southern Cross’s demise and my personal experience of the last few weeks, are stark reminders of the vagaries of the market. David Cameron argues that opening up public service delivery to the private sector will improve efficiency and service quality. I am yet to see the evidence of that. What I can see is the vulnerability it creates for people who rely on personal services such as these to secure their wellbeing, their care or their future.

Lucy Sweetman has spent 20 years developing, delivering and supporting services for disadvantaged young people. She is a freelance writer, speaker and consultant