Live

Tom Wylie, Chief Exec of the NYA is calling for a Youth Board to be set up chaired by a government minister. Young people now featued the call in this article last week.

After his keynote Tom said "The issues and views of young people as young adults are lost in the focus on 'children's services' 0 - 19 years"

So - we want to know what you think...

Should there be a national Youth Board set up chaired by a senior government minister? Vote here and add your comments to the discussion...

It has to be worth mentioning to all present at the Youth Summit that the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child has come of age and is now 18! So what can we say has changed during that time? This is an excellent example of Article 12 in practice - young people having their say and being listened to, what we need to do is make sure their requests are acted upon! Good luck to all present!

The Youth Summit has begun...

Delegates have just had an introduction to the day with the video from Parmjit Dhanda MP's UK Tour setting the tone for the day. This is about listening to young people and improving services.

Our roving reporters team have been out and about - and have already captured some people's expectations for the day.

Keep checking back, as we're hoping to have a new poll online soon to see what you think of some of the issues raised in Tom Wylie's keynote speech due to take place shortly...

The first questions of the day! The reporters have been out asking young people who are involved in the conference and delegates who are arriving what their expectations of the conference are and what they are hoping to achieve.

What are your expectations of today? What are you hoping to achieve?

10am Monday

Young People: 

• I expect a high standard.  I want to let adults know about how we do things differently to other people.
• I’m looking forward to seeing other people’s presentations.
• I want to use this opportunity to reach the right people to improve facilities to children and young people and to get better opportunities

Others:

• I’m hoping to get an insight as to where the 10 year strategy might take us.
• To get an insight into how the current political changes may affect youth work and the roots into policy agendas for young people.
• To see what NYA’s done and achieved and how they’re going to build on this for the future.
• Find out how talk’s going to change into actual action.
• I want to see vigorous debate across a range of issues and the structures affecting children and young people.
• On a wider scale to find out what’s happening for children and young people on a policy and participation level and to know what support services are out there for young volunteers.
• I want to learn a lot from young people – it’s very important to listen to learn about what they need.
• I want a genuine dialogue between young people and service providers on policy for young people.

Long journeys, bad traffic, crowded trains. But we've made it. In a basement of the Russell Hotel, 25 young people and adults have gathered to put the finishing touches to the Youth Summit.

Over the next two days, this crack team, plus assorted others, will be leading workshops, providing expert input, listening to discussions, recording views, advocating, activating and generally making sure the Youth Summit is a high-impact event.

It's going to be an exciting two days...

On Monday and Tuesday next week I'll be at the Youth Summit co-ordinating 'Youth Summit Live'
- an online space for capturing input from the conference, and opening
up the conference to a wider audience and range of inputs.

The billing for the Youth Summit sets out a big challenge:

The Youth Summit will herald the new era of service provision
for young people with emerging priorities from the Government’s
ten-year strategy for children and young people and the Comprehensive
Spending Review. The event will explore the Government’s ‘youth offer’
and map out the policy landscape for outcome-driven services for young
people and their communities. It will hear directly from a wide range
of young people as experts by experience.

This two-day event will bring together Government Ministers,
senior officials, leading policy makers, service providers and a panel
of 100 young people from across England, forging dynamic links between
young people, communities and government. Delegates will take an active
part in moving from words to action to help ensure improved services
and outcomes for young people.

And the plan is that Youth Summit Live will create a platform to capture the mapping, whilst also recording and opening up to wider dialogue, plans for action.

The platform itself is a quickly put together Drupal
website set-up with four types of content which both those at the
summit and interested parties who aren't there on the day can
contribute to:

• Blog posts - inviting narrative and free comment
• Where are we now? - Assessment of provision for young people at present (linked to the workshop discussions on day 1)
• Where do we want to be? - Space to identify priorities for action (linked to the workshops on day 2)
• Supporting Evidence - Additional content which can inform the dialogues at the Summit

The Summit itself is structured around the Every Child Matters
(ECM) outcomes framework, with workshops taking place on each of the
five ECM outcomes on both the first and second day. Content submitted
to Youth Summit Live
can therefore be categorised by ECM outcomes and the plan is to pull
out all the content under each heading at the end of day 1, and make as
much of it as possible physically present in the workshop rooms for day
2.

I'm also on the look out for good visualisations that can be
projected up on walls to help the information collected make a big
impact straight away. Suggestions on that front welcome. I'm making use
of the timeline widget for drupal, and news bubbles, and I'm exploring some RSS screensavers - but I've so far failed to find an easy-to-implement system to convert rss feeds to newsmaps.

Challenges
One of the challenges we face is that the conference centre WiFi is too
expensive to be made available free to delegates, so we have relatively
conduits for content input and output. We've got paper versions of some
of the 'Where are we now?' and 'Where do we want to be?' input forms -
so we can capture content directly from workshops and then convert it
into a digital 'live' record - and we'll be running a small blogging
station when laptops are not being used by workshop fascilitators - but
we are limited in the chanels through which we can invite input and
share live feeds of content from the Youth Summit Live site. That said,
we will have a team of young roving reporters
with us at the event creating an overnight newsletter - so that should
provide some extra space sharing the outputs of Youth Summit Live - and
I'm off to explore mobile-phone enabling the website...

Opportunities
Whatever the challenges, Monday
and Tuesday are certainly set to be really exciting (if exhausting...).
We've got over 100 young people taking part in the Youth Summit, and
we've got a number of digital and social media activists joining us,
including DK from Mediasnackers, Steve Moore from Policy Unplugged,
and a group of young people from a radio project linked to the Ministry
of Justice. There is a lot to go into the mix - and, as the youth
summit billing says, we quite probably are on the edge of "a new era of service provision for young people"

The Youth Summit will herald the new era of service
provision for young people with emerging priorities from the Government’s
ten-year strategy for children and young people and the
Comprehensive Spending Review.

DK from MediaSnackers will be at the Youth Summit giving a keynote on digital
media at the Youth Summit - but he has also thrown in some wider throughs about
the event in this post on his
blog about the justification of a 10 year strategy for youth. DK writes:

I also believe that a 10 year strategy for young people is not credible.
The world is moving at such an extreme pace it's simply isn't viable (unless it
is one that is fluid in it's design and focus).

Which raises an interesting set of questions. I find the idea of
having a 10 year strategy quite appealing in some aspects, not least because of
the pace of change. Long term visions with a strategic edge have a lot to add to
making change happen. They can act as a focus around which changes can be
analysed, understood and responded to. They can make sure activity doesn't move
off track. For this they need some considerable structure and stability. But, as
DK rightly notes, rigidly applied as a set of 'plans for action' without taking
into account dynamic changes over their lifetime - 10 year strategies could do
more harm than good.

So - it seems to be that we need to be able to think carefully about
what should and shouldn't be fluid in a strategy - and, particularly in the case
of a youth strategy, we need to explore how space to listen to young people and
to continually refresh our understandings of contemporary events and dynamics is
built into the core of a strategy.

As a starter for 10*:
(*Alas I'm not sure the examples I give will be
reflected in any way in the Youth Strategy... although I would be extermely
happy if they were...)

• The top-level goals need to be fixed: Ending child
  poverty. Promoting children's rights. Addressing inequality of opportunity and
  access to services. These are the sort of goals that can only cease to be goals
  when achieved - and even then they continue to need monitoring...
• The headline strategic actions need a 10 year lifespan:
  The value in a 10-year strategy is it provides space for action that
  neccessarily takes a long time. Building a sustainble transport system is going
  to need significant investment and time to develop. If we look at a policy like
  this over a 2-year horizon many of the changes we need will get ruled
  out.
• The steps to achieve the strategic 10-year vision need to become
  less prescriptive over time: both because the outcomes of the previous
  step, and the context into which that step will be taken, are uncertain. If we
  see a description of exactly how youth provision will look in 10 years, rather
  than a description of how close it will be to respecting rights (alas unlikely)
  or how close it will have come to meeting outcomes (more likely) - then we're in
  trouble.
• The strategy needs to explicity recognise the importance of
  listening to children, young people, and those who work with them: and
  it needs to think carefully about the questions. If the strategy sets out a
  vision - then there is little point in engaging young people in two years time
  to simply ask about their visions for the future. The dialogue needs to get into
  the detail. It might be that a yearly review of the way provisions are
  implemented and communicated needs to take place to help policy makers and
  practioners regularly revise the detailed design of activities in light of the
  rapid changes that DK is concerned about.
• Listening needs to lead to evolution not revolution: As
  it's put into action, a strategy should be open to the possibility that as
  society and key contexts change, some of its plans cease to lead to the outcomes
  desired (or the fail to achieve from the start) - but, if the dialogue about the
  details is working correctly, then it should, in most cases, be possible to
  evolve provision, rather than have revolutions in service provision that have
  the potential to create more problems than they solve.

Watch the video for quick introduction to the site...

Welcome to the Youth Summit Live website

From here you can:

• Follow what happens at the Youth Summit
• Record your reflections and inputs into the summit if you are present
• Add your voice to the summit if you've not been able to make it
• Share and view a range of supporting information that can inform dialogue at the Youth Summit and beyond.

For more information, find the Youth Summit Live team at the event, or call/text Tim on 07834 856 303.