I’m in the middle of a week of 1500 miles of train travel. Over the weekend I was in Scotland for a friend’s wedding, getting back late last night. And tomorrow I’m off to Bradford and Liverpool for work.
One of the advantages of travelling by train is that I get to read the Telegraph. I’m not, unsurprisingly, a natural Telegraph reader, but even I can be persuaded to buy a paper when it comes with a free bottle of water nearly twice its value. As it is, I rather like the news pages of the Telegraph; I just tend to avoid the comment and business sections.
One of it’s Saturday news features was on schools offering Saturday classes for pupils (bizarrely this is dated 20 April online, although I definitely read it in Saturday’s paper). It highlights the positive results that pupils are achieving by making these classes compulsory.
I’m rather ambivalent about Saturday schooling – I grew up in a town with four big private schools that each had Saturday morning lessons and I remember being somewhat amazed that the kids dutifully trotted off to these lessons.
Undoubtedly providing extra tuition for children can be hugely beneficial, and Saturday seems as good a time as any to do it. But the question has to be at what cost?
My concern is that in making them compulsory, and as one teacher says “if they don’t, then Mrs Laycock will come around to their house and pull them out of their smelly pits”, we’re getting obsessed with exam results as the only thing a child has to achieve before they reach adulthood.
I haven’t got particularly high GCSE results, and if I’d really been pushed I probably could have got a couple of grades higher. But that doesn’t seem to have blighted my subsequent university and career prospects. In fact, although I’ve been required to list my GCSE results on application forms, I’ve never knowingly been rejected as a result of them. Equally, as an employer, I can’t say I’ve ever looked at GCSE results as a guide for the suitability or otherwise of a candidate.
So what did I get instead of a set of high results? Well, I could dutifully tell you I spent my Saturdays involved in a number of extra-curricular activities that taught me about communication, teamwork, leadership and lateral thinking. And although I was involved in loads of different things, in reality I probably spent many Saturday mornings hanging around with friends or watching the telly or playing on the computer.
I’d never want to deny young people who wanted to have extra tuition or an opportunity to do their homework away from home. I’m also not totally convinced that compulsory schooling at the weekend on top of compulsory schooling during the week is a good idea. Do we really want a generation of young people who only know the four walls of their classroom, and haven’t had the opportunity to develop their skills outside of an education environment?
Image courtesy of Wesley Fryer. Used under licence.
On Wednesday we had a meeting at work to discuss recruiting new trustees for YouthNet, and in particular the desire to get “youth trustees” onto our board. We’ve been having similar discussions at the charity I’m a trustee of, the Citizenship Foundation, where I think I am if not the youngest, I’m certainly not that much older than the youngest.
It’s an issue that a lot of youth charities are trying to tackle. The perception is that traditionally trustees were the great-and-the-good, retired professionals brought in for their contacts, experience and (often) wealth. It was therefore reassuring to see that of the 10 people sat around the table at our meeting on Wednesday, all but two were trustees and none of those were over 40 (I think). It’s worth saying that it was a self-selecting group, so I guess people interested in developing our board are more likely to be trustees themselves. And YouthNet has a pretty proactive workforce.
Like many youth charities, YouthNet already has ‘user panels’ that help guide staff how on decisions that affect the services we provide. We also regularly receive feedback from users, undertake consultations and surveys and get out and meet young people (although possibly not as often as we’d like). So why, in addition to this, is there a feeling that young people should also be involved as trustees of a charity?
Trustees provide the governace of a charity; they are there to keep it accountable. It makes sense that a charity should be accountable to its benefactors. Many charities also see being a trustee as a development opportunity in itself. Charities like the Young Achievers Trust and British Youth Council recruit only young trustees for those reasons.
But for other youth charities, having young people on their board ensures the other trustees can fuse their knowledge and expertise with the benefactor’s personal experience. Young trustees often help remind everyone the real reason the charity exists. My previous employer, Headliners, had ‘graduate trustees’ – young people who had recently been benefactors but were then recruited on to the trustee board alongside other trustees.
Ultimately trustees are there to prevent the organisation from abusing its charitable status. They are financially liable for the decisions that the charity makes and as a result can’t be aged under 18 [Edit: see comments]. Charities with multi-million pound turnovers need trustees who can scrutinise complex spreadsheets, understand employment law and hold senior management to account. They need to think strategically, take an external view of the charity, ask difficult questions and challenge perceived wisdom within the organisation. Whilst there are undoubtedly young people who can (and do) do that adequately, those are big asks for anyone who doesn’t have significant experience in management.
So how do you ensure that young people are involved in the governance of charities, without it becoming tokenistic or simply involving high-achieving young people? And should the organisation be involved in supporting the young person who is a trustee, or should that be down to the trustees themselves?
I have my own views, but I’d be grateful for others thoughts on involving young people as trustees.
Photo courtesy of IRRI Images, and shows the International Rice Research Institute Board of Trustees, presumably with some benefactors. Used under licence.
And this, which is a year old but I only discovered today at work (I was doing some research on knife stats among young people, which for obvious reasons are difficult to confirm). If you read Speak Your Branes you probably end up wondering what the point of Have Your Say style comments on the bottom of news stories are. Well, I found the answer this morning. The top response on this article in the Telegraph, from Ruth Ray, is beautifully written and a brilliant assessment of what is happening to young people on our inner city estates.
Gordon Brown has announced that he wants to require young people to undertake 50 hours of community service, and that this will form part of Labour’s manifesto for next year’s (presumably) general election. It’s not particularly surprising; David Cameron and the Tories have long been floating the notion and Gordon Brown was responsible for the setting up of youth volunteering charity V and generally pushing for young people to be more active in their community.
But I think it’s a horrendous idea. The suggestion is that it will help charities, but personally I can’t think of anything worse than third sector organisations being expected to provide opportunities for young people mandated to do “goodly works”. Compulsory volunteering is a total misnomer.
There’s loads of reasons why I hold that view.
Firstly it will force an unnecessary formalisation of community service. Alongside the (disgracefully) large number of young carers in this country, there are many other young people who help others in their community by running errands, visiting, looking-out-for or taking them on trips. It’s unlikely that these activities will count towards compulsory community service, and if they do they will have to be formally assessed, agreed and recorded in a way that destroys both the relationship the young people had with the person they were helping and the reason they were helping them out.
It removes any form of social entrepreneurship: how are you going to be able to prove your community service if you have set up your own activity. Setting up an online support site, tidying up somewhere close to your house or running a street football league: these are all legitimate community activities that a young person could do without any involvement of an official organisation to oversee their contribution. Why should a young person be told that these are not acceptable activities but joining an organisation is? And if these are acceptable, how are you going to ensure that people are actually doing these activities and not just saying they are? How are you going to ensure the scheme recognises social entreprenuers but isn’t used by those wanting to duck out of getting involved?
My concern is that this creates a dangerous connection between the government and the third sector. Just as no-one is forced to give to charity, there is something wrong with government forcing people to volunteer.
Secondly, what is the scope for deciding what and what isn’t community service? Is being involved in your school council? Is being involved in a political party community service? Is playing in a community orchestra, football team or performing street dance community service? If it isn’t, is tutoring or mentoring others in those activities community service? (and if so does your training count in those hours?).
Thirdly, only this week a story broke that many teachers think that the efforts to increase literacy have led to children losing the enjoyment of reading for pleasure. I think the same will be true of compulsory community service.
Many young people volunteer to improve their CV or to develop a skill, but many more volunteer because they want to make a positive contribution. They don’t want to undertake volunteering to tick boxes or simply get a record of their achievements. This was one of the failings of Millennium Volunteers, repeated with V and going to be far worse where there is a mandatory requirement to do this. From a personal perspective, one of the reasons I didn’t want to do my MV was that it seemed to be more about achieving a set number of hours than the value you added to a project.
Indeed, Volunteering England wrote something similar last month (about using volunteering as a way of assessing people applying for permanent UK residence):
Active citizenship activities should be meaningful and enjoyable to present a good image of community participation in the UK and not imply that volunteering is purely a means to an end. If activities do not serve a community need or if the verification arrangements are too simplified, the process could become a “tick-box exercise” and provide the applicant with little benefit.
Finally, why is it just young people? What message are we trying to convey if we say that only those under 19 should be mandated to be involved in community service whereas everyone else only needs to choose to?
And I as every youth organisation will tell you until they are blue in the face; the lack of the young people isn’t the problem: it’s the youth leaders needed to support them. I volunteered for many years as a youth leader, but I don’t think I would have done so had I had to work with young people who didn’t want to be there apart from whatever threat the government will use to get them to complete their community service.
Yes, I definitely want more young people to volunteer and be involved in their community. But I don’t think it’s through forcing them to complete a certain number of hours or tick a particular set of boxes, any more than using volunteering as a stick to reduce student tuition fees etc.
Young people need to be engaged citizens, active in their community, not because they are forced to but because they want to. It would be so much better if Gordon Brown and David Cameron both changed their pledges from making every young person undertake community service to making a society where every young people wants to undertake community service.
Having grown up watching those public appeals on daytime ITV (best example I could find is at 3:23 here) I, like many people, was aware of the name but knew little about the organisation. Indeed, until recently I couldn’t have told you if it were a government agency, a part of the police or something totally independent. Apparently I’m not alone in this lack of knowledge.
Crimestoppers is, as I’ve since discovered, an independent charity that initially was set up to solve one murder: that of PC Keith Blakelock who was killed during the riots on Broadwater Farm estate in 1985. People had information about the killer, but for a variety of reasons didn’t want to approach the police direct. The organisation had one simple mission: collect information anonymously, and then pass it on to the police.
But since then, nearly 90,000 people have been arrested and/or charged as a result of Crimestoppers information, and on average 17 people are arrested every day thanks to information provided by Crimestoppers. One in five murders in London is solved thanks to Crimestoppers. All impressive stats.
The day was actually about strategic planning for Crimestoppers London, although given the significance of the capital it involved people from the national office as well as the local volunteer board. And like many similar organisations, one of the key concerns was getting the Crimestoppers message to younger people who didn’t necessarily know about the organisation, and can’t be targeted in the more traditional ways that charities feel comfortable with. I was there as a representative of YouthNet, to try and bring some of our expertise from that field.
I’m not quite sure how much I helped beyond throwing a few ideas and comments in, but from a personal point of view it was fascinating seeing an organisation at the very early stages of youth engagement try and grasp what it was about. It made me realise how far down the path (not surprisingly) YouthNet is, as is Headliners. Even the charity I volunteered for, St John Ambulance, whilst not a model of best practice has the feel of an organisation comfortable with the notion of young people making strategic decisions.
And what I think I benefitted most from the day was that it reinforced the notion that young people, like everyone else, respond to things that they feel are genuine. Making a MySpace page, creating a Facebook page, adding yourself to Twitter: these things mean nothing if you don’t embrace the culture where these things live. Of the things I remember saying on Thursday, one of them was that “online and offline don’t exist in separate entities” and I think that patently true. There’s no point in having a fancy-pants online operation if those values aren’t reflected in your offline offer as well.
My only other contribution of note was, when asked to describe what I wanted the organisation to look back in 2012 and say “this is how we did it”, is that it defies convention. (I initially suggested ‘breaks the rules’, but that’s probably not a good message from Crimestoppers!). Doing things differently is a sign of an organisation confident about what it stands for, and gets ‘cut-through’ in a saturated enviornment.
As an example of an organisation prepared to do something differently, I told them to search for Mystery Package on YouTube. Because I think it is possibly the best video of 2008 (even if it is a bit long), I’ve added it here:
