(a)

the Youth Services restructure review had resulted in on-going activities in an effort to continue to improve the quantity and quality of opportunities for young people within the city. On-going activities included –

·         improving volunteer provision across the service,

·         enabling a consistent key-worker system in all city schools,

·         establishing better links with family support services;

·         re-instating a missing persons’ service within the department;

(b)

the culture of the Youth Service was changing with more of an emphasis placed on key working with young people as well as dealing with increased targeted referrals;

(c)

the number of referrals over the past 12 months had significantly increased, with increased referrals being received from schools, the Police and Children’s Social Care;

(d)

increased referrals have been largely due to the increasing challenges and issues facing young people in today’s society including unemployment and the impacts of welfare reforms on young people and their families;

(e)

schools identified in the review that the Youth Service needed to provide better support and information sharing to schools, which had been addressed by developing an improved and consistent key-worker system available to all schools. This would improve support and assist schools in dealing with the increased issues and the subsequent increase in referrals from schools, which equated to 44 per cent of all referrals to the Youth Service;

(f)

city-wide safeguarding issues including missing people and child sexual exploitation had resulted in the Youth Service establishing a Missing Persons’ Team, this was identified as a priority following the review and the service had worked closely with Children’s Social Care and the Police in establishing this new team;

(g)

the Youth Service was committed to continuing to maintain and improve the services offered, whilst also facing difficult financial challenges through a reduced budget; this would be achieved through improving community levels of support by recruiting and training committed volunteers and by continuing to review the service through providing a greater voice for young people to comment on the services provided;

(h)

first time entrants into the Youth Justice system had reduced by 20 per cent in the past year, which was very encouraging, although it was acknowledged that the service could still improve to ensure that vulnerable young people, such as young offenders, were provided with the opportunities to improve their life chances;

(i)

in general, and despite the increased challenges facing the service, the Youth Service was delivering an excellent service, had become an integrated service which provided further benefits for young people, particularly in the transfer of young people between services, and was far exceeding benchmarking targets and the required levels of youth participation.

(j)

the Youth Service was assessing its practice of dealing with missing young people when they were returned to their homes to ensure an improved service was delivered in the future;

(k)

there was a genuine interest from volunteers in working with Youth Service, which ensured the service was in an enviable position of not needing to undertake volunteer recruitment campaigns as volunteers approached the service. All volunteers undergo a six week training programme and were always supervised by qualified Youth Workers when volunteering;

(l)

the service was maintaining its targeted youth support grant to the voluntary and community sector, with 52 grants being provided to this sector over the past year;

(m)

a civil society policy was being explored which would provide an approach ensuring each community had the correct facilities in the most appropriate locations to enable increased participation and community involvement;

(n)

the service was committed to developing apprenticeships which had proved extremely successful and there was now plans to employ a further four apprentices;

(o)

the service would be seeking to make better use of social networking in developing its publicising of the services offered and would consider the use of a smartphone ‘app’.

(1)

a further review of the Youth Services is provided to the Ambitious Plymouth panel at a future meeting in early 2014;

(2)

John Miller is to provide a briefing paper to all members of the Ambitious Plymouth panel covering aspects including the types of services offered across the Youth Service, the service’s staff structure, budget and budget pressures, the percentages of referrals and the numbers of volunteers active within the service;

(3)

John Miller is to provide an analysis and summary of the results of the Youth Service’s youth survey to all members of the Ambitious Plymouth Panel when the survey has been completed;

(4)

the Youth Service arrange regularly meetings with ward councillors to ensure that councillors know their local lead Youth Service contact and are aware of what youth services are offered in their wards.