Introduction
This Youth Service Youth Work strategy sets out the current arrangements in place for the delivery of targeted youth work intervention, our vision, principles and priorities for 2025 to 2027.
It describes the arrangements in place for the delivery of targeted youth work across 妖精动漫 and how the Youth Service is working with our partners to meet the needs of our most vulnerable and at-risk young people.
妖精动漫’s Youth Service is responding to its statutory duty as set out in the (Section 507B, Education Act 1996) through partnership work, the lease of sixteen of its youth centres for community-based youth work and through targeted youth work intervention.
Background
In 2019 universal youth work was provided by 妖精动漫’s community youth work service and delivered through approximately 30 youth centres across 妖精动漫 open to young people of all ages.
In November 2019 妖精动漫 agreed to consult on whether they should continue to deliver universal open access youth work and whether to enable third sector organisations to use the youth centres at little or no cost.
Whilst there is no statutory duty for 妖精动漫 to provide universal open access youth work, the youth centres themselves were valued as community assets with an ability to play a larger role in achieving the Community Vision for 2030 that included community participation as one of the priorities. The aim was to increase the availability of existing youth centres for the use of the voluntary, charity and faith sector and where young people could be engaged and access a programme of activities without needing to be referred.
Recognising that many voluntary, charity and faith sector organisations delivered universal youth work already, supporting them to maximise the potential of youth centres could provide a more comprehensive range of services for young people locally within the community.
It was agreed in August 2020 that 妖精动漫 would:
- Release the use of sixteen youth centres to be leased to voluntary, charity and faith sector.
- Support the creation of management committees and providing them with a lease for the building with an agreed set of outcomes.
- Provide leases to already established organisations with an agreed set of outcomes.
Enter into a Service Level Agreement to provide universal open access youth work including covering our responsibility to ensure the services are of good quality and delivered safely.
In 2021/22 妖精动漫 undertook a consultation to remodel its remaining youth service into a targeted Service (The Targeted Youth Offer), utilising its remaining capacity and recent experience to build upon new ways of working developed throughout the pandemic to support specific vulnerable individuals and groups, including children who need additional support and are known to Children’s Services, including the Adolescent Service, Children Looked After, Youth Offending service and the police.
It was agreed there was a need for a more defined youth offer within the existing integrated approach to children and adolescents who need to be engaged in constructive activity. The Targeted Youth Offer would compliment the work of case holding practitioners, such as social workers, early help practitioners and adolescent workers and form an integral part of our prevention and early intervention to prevent children entering the criminal justice system, or from requiring statutory intervention.
The consultation concluded in 2022 and the creation of The Targeted Youth Offer was set about. Place based teams were established based around the Quadrant based location model that was in place at the time to support the best model for integrated working with those services supporting vulnerable and at risk young people. Hub locations for teams were identified but due to the limited number of youth centres the service had remaining access to it wasn’t possible to identify a hub location evenly in each of the quadrant areas.
One of the key concerns highlighted by youth offer staff is the removal of open access youth provision from SCC service delivery priorities for the service. Consequently, this could result in a reduction of service to some of our most vulnerable groups, such as it was agreed in the restructure that those priority target groups of young people; with Emotional Health and Wellbeing needs, with additional needs and disability, who were young Carers, and LGBT+ children and young people would remain priority groups within the new service. The restructure created part-time Targeted Engagement worker posts to perform the duties needed to offer continued support to these groups.
Vision
The vision is for the Targeted Youth Service to be able to play an integral role in the partnership response to improve outcomes for children and young people through a targeted response to the increasing complexity of need.
There has been a significant rise in the numbers of adolescents with complex needs and vulnerabilities and those young people being identified at risk of or experiencing Extra Familial Harm (Harm outside of the home) progressing into and through the statutory Children’s services system. Alongside that there has been a significant increase in the last couple of years of young people with complex emotional wellbeing and mental health needs requiring higher tier intervention and responses.
The vision is for the youth service to be able to work alongside partners to identify engage and provide strong relationship-based youth work practice to support and identify protective factors and strengthen existing plans to achieve positive outcomes for those most vulnerable and at-risk young people.
The Youth Offer Service
The Youth Offer Service is led by a workforce of professionally qualified Youth and Community Workers and a small number of unqualified workers. Workers are on full time and part time contracts providing a specialist targeted youth work response across 妖精动漫.
The service is comprised of hub-based teams established on a quadrant-based model located in dedicated hubs across the county. The service has a central spine for project-based group work programmes that include both statutory and non-statutory provision.
The Hub locations across the county are:
- Shepperton Youth Centre - Spelthorne
- Focus Youth Centre – Epsom and Ewell
- Ash Youth Centre – Guildford
- The Malthouse Youth Centre – Mole Valley
- Addlestone Young People and Family Centre - Runnymede
The Youth Offer leads in the engagement, support and development of children and young people who are deemed ‘at risk’ or identified as vulnerable. This response complements the casework models of aligned services and partner agencies.
The Youth Offer works alongside the 妖精动漫 Youth Justice Service, the Adolescent Service and partners in health and education services, ensuring responses to emerging need are timely, child centred and tailored to meet the individual’s needs. This may include access to targeted group work, one to one support, and/or outreach programmes in 妖精动漫’s local communities.
The youth service provides a targeted support service for young people between the ages of 11-18 (up to 25 for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities). The service supports those vulnerable young people with multiple complex needs who are most at risk.
Common presenting needs of the young people the service supports are:
- Young people missing education
- Young people post school age who are Not in education, employment or training (NEET)
- Young people at risk of or experiencing Extra Familial Harm (including exploitation and serious youth violence)
- Young people who go missing
- Young people who have committed crimes
- Young people with substance misuse needs
- Young people with additional needs including speech and language and communication needs
- Young people at risk of Permanent Exclusion
- Young people with complex emotional wellbeing and mental health needs
The goal of the work provided by the Youth Service is to address emerging needs, improve life chances and positive outcomes and reduce escalation to more expensive and intensive statutory services such as the Youth Justice Service, Children’s Services / Child In Need, Child Protection or Child Looked after teams, Mental Health Services at Tier 3 and 4 and Education Inclusion services.
Direct work with young people is provided through relational based youth work delivered through a strength-based approach working with the partnership around the young person to strengthen their existing plans and provide support in achieving identified positive outcomes.
Intervention is delivered through targeted group work, targeted community-based projects, targeted outreach programmes and one to one work. The focus of intervention is on the development of personal, social and emotional skills, building resilience and protective factors, promoting engagement and re-engagement across their wider network, gaining employability skills and gaining recognised accreditations (AQA Accreditation scheme).
The Youth Service Currently supports the 妖精动漫 Youth Justice Service through providing the facilitation of the Community Reparation element of court orders through the coordination and delivery of dedicated Community reparation projects and interventions that demonstrate repair within the community. This work makes up around 30% of the Youth Service’s weekly intervention delivery.
The intervention within the Youth Service is delivered through a few different delivery models that all work together to provide a joined-up support offer for young people enabling a seamless transition through the service.
Partner services and organisations can request a consultation with the service and or make direct referrals into the service for youth work intervention to support in achieving the identified outcomes for the young person they are working with.
Intervention is then put in place based on the needs of the young person, their interest and the medium in which the outcomes can best be achieved. The interventions are focused on engagement and re-engagement, strengthening the existing plan and are designed as short- term youth work interventions (reviewed at six-week intervals) for young people.
Interventions are delivered through a number of dedicated project-based interventions or 1-1 intervention where this fits the young person’s needs better.
This is a partnership model between the Youth Service and 妖精动漫 Police with the focus on engaging young people at the point of arrest in Police Custody to support them and engage them at a reachable and teachable moment.
The Engage work seeks to offer a timely response to young people and their families at the point of arrest where the initial assessment of risk of offending/re-offending and/or safety and well-being is assessed to be high.
This preventative response enables an offer of support to any child who may have been identified as being at risk of entering the criminal justice system and/or exploitation, whilst feeding into their wider support plan.
The engagement work with young people utilises the wider intervention offer across the service as a stepping stone into positive activities and the vehicle for strength based relational practice work to be undertaken with the young person to support diversion away from entering further into the criminal justice system and to provide support and strengthen any existing plan that is in place for them.
This model provides community-based group interventions for a number of protected characteristic groups of young people. These group interventions are accessible by direct referral from young people, families, and professionals and are aimed at being preventative diversionary interventions.
The groups are delivered during the evenings from community-based youth centres and are accessible for young people in and out of education.
The targeted groups of young people the interventions provide for are:
- Young carers
- SEND young people
- LGBT+ young people
The Youth Service holds the Sect 75 contract commissioned by the Integrated Care Board to deliver preventative Emotional Wellbeing and Mental health youth work interventions to young people at risk of escalating into Tie 3 and 4 mental health services.
The delivery of this contract is through dedicated Drop in services spread out across each quadrant in the county delivered over 5 sessions a week. A dedicated telephone support line for young people and families and targeted group work interventions based around wellbeing and therapeutic interventions.
Community Empowerment work
The Youth Offer service continues to provide support within the community to its third sector Voluntary, community and faith partners thought the Community Empowerment work we deliver.
We have a dedicated senior worker committed to supporting our third sector partners with any consultations, discussions and support needed to support them in being able to build, develop and set up community-based youth work provision.
This community empowerment work is partnered with our commissioning officer and oversight of the youth centres in 妖精动漫 to work with partners in the community to help support access to existing centres where possible to help enable the facilitation of community-based youth work provisions.
A core element of the senior workers role is around quality assurance and ensuring that partners have access to the correct information, tools and resources to be able to set themselves up in the correct way, aligned to the National Youth Agency so that they can deliver a youth work provision that is run safely and of quality.
The Adolescent Service consultation undertaken in Jan 2024 included within its proposal for consultation that the existing Youth Offer Service be bought into alignment with the new Adolescent Service and be bought into being part of the Central Hub function of the new Service.
The consultation was concluded in April 2024 and the proposal around aligning the Youth Offer service within the new Adolescent Service was adopted.
The Youth Offer now sits centrally within the new Adolescent Service as part of the Central Hub function. This enables the youth offer to be closer aligned to those partners referring to the service, facilitating better joined up partnership working and strengthening of existing plans. The ability to share local intelligence around extra familial harm with the right partners quicker and responses to be more joined up and sequenced to responding to the needs of young people as they emerge.
Priorities
Aligning with the new Adolescent Service:
The service will continue its close partnership working with statutory services and adopt the principles of working as set out in the guidance by the Department on Education, December 2023.
The noted responsibilities include:
- Understanding and navigating the referral process to submit referrals to the social care team (page 57).
- Providing support in child assessments through their comprehensive knowledge of the child, family, and their circumstances (page 61 and 86).
- Contributing valuable context and understanding in cases where a child is experiencing harm outside the home (page 86, 69 and page 123).
- Participation as essential practitioners in strategy discussions whenever they possess pertinent knowledge about the child or children under consideration (page 59, 86 and 123)
We will undertake a service review around a proposed re-model to the existing service structure to better align with the new Adolescent Service Regional Hub model. Adopting the new regional hub model based around the three police areas within the county would enable the service to have better streamlined partnership relationships with the police and avoid any risks of intelligence and mapping around Extra-familial harm (EFH) falling through the gaps between the current overlap of police areas with the existing quadrant model.
We will continue to strengthen our provision to increase our identification and engagement of priority young people early in order to provide diversionary and preventative activities alongside existing partner agencies.
Quality Assurance, Impact and Outcomes
We will develop a quality assurance framework for the service that is aligned with the National Youth Agencies ‘Quality Mark’ framework, ensuring consistency and quality across all provision within the service.
We will develop a cohesive framework for monitoring and measuring outcomes for young people and the impact interventions have made. This will be a partnership framework involving responses and evaluation from; referring agencies, the allocated youth worker, the young person and their family.
This will enable us to be responsive to local needs and to continually review, develop, and improve the service offer.
Community empowerment
Building on our community empowerment work and or work with partners in the Voluntary, Community and Frontline Sector (VCFS) we will continue to strengthen relationships and move towards the blended approach of third sector and community organisations co-locating not only with our adolescent services but also other stakeholders and partners such as 妖精动漫 Police and Health delivering a wide, diverse range of universal and targeted services based in the community and within the same space.
Offering support, training, upskilling and inclusion to our third sector providers of data sharing, consultation, sign-posting and sustainability within the community to deliver quality assured universal services of benefit and in addition to the targeted services that will offer a range of support for children aged 0 to 18 and their families.
Aligning with internal directorates including Community Engagement and Prevention, Youth Services and the newly formed Adolescent Services are/will be part of the Hub programme group, with the aim to extend delivery of our adolescent and youth services through a wider range of local based spaces and venues, in partnership or collaboratively or through empowerment within communities as part of alignment with other strategies such as the Community Vision for 2030, carbon reducing and greener futures, place based community assets.
In addition with the strategic objective of a hub-community based approach as a golden thread, we will continue with the proposals for 妖精动漫 held youth centres to operate as a managed building multi-agency delivery centre offer co-production and co-location of a wide and diverse range of services based locally for the benefit of children and their families including universal youth work.
Workforce development
Staff across the service will be adequately skilled, equipped, and motivated to best support young people. This means that staff will know the training and development opportunities that are available to them, and access what they need.
We will work towards the whole workforce becoming qualified youth workers at the relevant levels for each worker, from level 3 through to Professionally Joint Negotiating Committee (JNC) Qualified.
Mental Health
We will continue to deliver on the Section 75 Emotional Wellbeing and Mental Health contract if the contract is renewed from the Independent Care Board in March 2025.
Through our alignment to the central hub within the new adolescent service we will centralise a preventative response to the ever-growing complex mental health needs for adolescents through increasing our profile across existing services, centralising our response through alignment with the central hub and working in partnership with the soon to be centralised Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) social worker posts with the central hub.