Youth activities review
Friday 7th February 2014
You may like to encourage your pupils, from year 6 upwards, to take part in the current consultation about local youth activities. The consultation can be found on the Wiltshire website for young people - Sparksite:
http://www.sparksite.co.uk/entries/positive_leisure_time_activities_young_people_wiltshire_review
People across Wiltshire – particularly young people – are being consulted on what activities they would like in their local communities as part of a wide-ranging review.
The voice and influence team have recently written to schools and would like to run focus groups in Wiltshire schools.
The 10-week public consultation exercise on the future of youth activities gets underway on Monday 3rd February 2014 and will involve schools, young people’s groups, voluntary organisations and local communities. The consultation asks for their opinion on four options for future provision:
- Retain the current in-house service but reduce the value – a number of options would be considered to make the required savings and deliver a service that meets the needs of young people in local community areas.
- Outsource the service – this option would involve developing a new service specification for the provision of positive leisure-time activities; shaped by key stakeholders, including young people based on the resources available.
- Encourage and support staff to form a Public Service Mutual (PSM). A mutual can deliver a public service involving a high degree of employee control. It can operate for profit, not for profit, charity, social enterprise and community interest company.
- Develop a community-led approach which will empower communities via community area boards, with funding from the council, to develop and make available positive leisure-time youth activities within their local area
Whichever option is agreed for future provision a key aim is to target funding and resource more effectively and to continue to protect services for vulnerable young people. The council’s preferred option at this stage is to develop a community-led approach (option 4) and to tie-in with the emerging campus programme – an innovative scheme which will deliver services which communities want to see in their area developed in multi-purpose, modern community buildings. The first of these will open in Corsham at the end of June 2014.
Currently a relatively low percentage of young people aged between 13-19 access the council’s youth activities while the majority are likely to be involved in other community, voluntary and commercially provided activities.
