Youth Service 

It would be wrong to say the Schools and Learning Committee meeting last Thursday was anticlimactic, because there was a lot of interesting information. But as indicated in the ‘Noises Off’ posting below, as far as the Youth Service is concerned the Committee appears genuinely to be being brought into the process before it has reached its end point (even if we suspect that quite a lot of ground has been covered without us) which means much of the thinking at this stage will remain outside the public domain.

 Anthony Durno, Principal Youth Officer of the Youth Development Service, brought no further papers or presentation beyond the scant two sides of A4 in the published papers. He spoke about the ‘roots of the process of the way forward’  and said that the Youth Service ‘had been debated over a number of years’ but in recent months it had been ‘brought into focus’.  There is a ‘clear steer around [the] £500,000′ allocated in the recent budget, that its giving the space to ‘answer three fundamental questions’: ie the three questions in Conservative Leader Nick Skellett’s budget statement that:

 ’In the coming year we will need to decide what kind of youth service we need, who will provide it and how much we can afford. During this period of decision I believe there is the need for a cushion so I propose next year to add £500,000 to their budget.’

We learned from Anthony Durno that ‘A project has been set up … there’s a project intiation document that scopes that out.’ The next steps are for ’stakeholders [to] scope the project with us … we need to set up appropriate milestones.’ 

One stakeholder group is members of the Council, through a task group set up by the Schools and learning Committee, but including other interested Councillors as well. This has been a cross-party issue, and with concern shown by more Councillors other than those on the Schools and Learning Committee.

So ‘the next phase is to establish that task group and use it [for consultation, working] … behind the scenes.’

The gap between the expectations of the public and the role the youth service is given by Government and sets itself was acknowledged: ‘if there is a vacuum, how is it to be looked at in the round … there is a number of stakeholders … [we] don’t at this point wnat to exclude.’

The extent of the project, who it would include - Connexions? The Youth Justice service? - was one on the next questions asked by the Committee.  ‘You’ve got the  nub of it there,’ Anthony Durno said, but we had to start with the ‘envelope of what is available’ and then ‘look wider … to the voluntary sector’, but ‘but we have to get that core right … ‘.

Naturally I have asked to be on that task group.

How Surrey is Doing at GCSE Level

The recent press release from SCC suggests everything is wonderful. The whole statistical story is more complicated. We’ve had a very good series of papers under the banner ‘School and Pupil Performance’ presented to us going through the key stages, now reaching Key Stage Four. Surrey is a ‘high-performing’ county, but so it should be, since school performance correlates so strongly with socio-economic class. Work has been done in decreasing the gap between girls and boys results, with some success. It’s hard to draw conclusions about the small cohort of Looked After Children, but while results are improving, they are not catching up with their contemporaries.

The weak points are ’Contextual Value Added’, and the wide range of outcomes between different schools. ‘In the middle there is some coasting going on,’ we were told.