I touched on this in a previous post here where I mentioned a campaign a group we worked with about 3 years ago which involved young people lobbying Connexions to open at weekends and during evenings. As far as I’m aware the campaign wasn’t successful in their particular area.

In an article in this months Youth Work Now Michael Bracey wrote that Youth Workers should be prepared to work weekends. Her quotes from a recent Government Report that 91% of people said “it was important that youth facilities were open on Friday and Saturday evening”, compared to just 1% who feel its important they open on a Monday night.

Bracey goes on to mention some of the reasons given for not opening at weekends including that young people are out drinking, a lack of resources and the expense of operating a seven day service, he also suggests there’s another reason - that some Youth Workers just don’t want to work at weekends - claiming that very few will work beyond 5pm on a Friday.

I picked up on this again because of a comment on the CYP Now Forums in response to an article about research by the National Association of Clubs for Young People that youth clubs ‘help curb antisocial behaviour’ (well you’d kind of hope they would wouldn’t you?!) - but that aside, Barry Walsh says in the forum “certainly where I work this could be mentioned as we currently open once a week on a Tuesday… we haven’t ever opened on a Friday.. a day generally regarded as a no go day.. as the perception is that’s when young people are at their most rowdiest… drinking and smoking”.

In the courses we’ve organised over the years theres been more than a few occasions that groups have pulled out because they’ve failed to get staff prepared to work on residentials or at weekends. I was very surprised when we first started to run courses for Youth Workers to find that apparently the best time to run them was midweek - not because they were busy working with young people at weekends, but because they don’t work weekends. Well we ran most of them at weekends anyway because they were ran by young people who were at school during the week and I’m pleased that there were plenty of Youth Workers prepared to attend courses at weekends - though it has to be said attendance by professionally qualified workers was very low (most were in related professions or volunteer workers).

My own thinking when doing youth work was that working very late hours, working at weekends and regularly going on residentials was just the way it was and that was the price I happily paid in return for an interesting job. In return I got paid a mighty salary of £4,600 per annum for 3 years for what was supposed to be a 20 hour a week job (in reality more like 45).

What I’d really like to know is what are Youth Workers doing between the hours of 9am & 5pm, Monday to Friday? Is there really more valuable stuff to do during the day than there is from 7pm - midnight + Saturday & Sunday?

I hadn’t heard of ‘Beatbullying’ before but had a look at their new website which you can find here

Slightly annoyingly on most pages on the site a video automatically plays of some person or another talking about bullying (especially irritating when you see the same film several times as you navigate through!)

What I couldn’t find on the site was a definition of what bullying actually is. There are descriptions of things to look out for that may indicate if a child is being bullied or is a bully but I couldn’t find anything to define bullying.

I’m interested because it seems like one of those terms that gets thrown around that we all know is a bad thing - but what is it?! I do wonder too where the line is between unnaceptable ‘bullying’, and behaviour that actually its quite important for children & young people to learn to deal with?

In the last post I wrote about a proposal in the US to make it illegal for school teachers to have ’social networking friendships’ with students. Personally I’ll be surprised if it actually happens and much more surprised if it happened in the UK, but I think most people are in agreement that guidance for people working with young people online is needed.

In the discussions on UKYouthOnline there were suggestions to adapt the guidelines Detached Youth Workers use. This makes good sense as a starting point with obvious similarities of workers ‘reaching out’ into young peoples space.

I think though that online working policies will also need to take into account the unique nature of ‘being virtual’ - an example I gave in the comments in the last post being that its much harder to be clearer about when somebody is actually working when they’re online compared to when you see somebody in person.

An exercise we used to run with new Trainers was that we gave them a variety of scenarios and asked them how they would deal with them. We then related their answers to our Child Protection Policy - the idea being to help them understand the policy and also to understand how to cope with different situations. The twist when we did this was that all the scenarios we used were real - they had actually happened at some time during courses we run.

I was trying to think of some online scenarios that could be used in a similar way and that might help with drawing up some guidelines - so heres my efforts so far…..

Scenarios:

• In an instant messenger conversation a 14 year old young person reveals they are planning to go out later and get drunk
• A young person replies to a blog/forum post and includes their mobile phone number
• The profile picture of a 16 year old female on an instant messenger shows her naked
• A young person comments on photos they have seen on one of the youth workers social network profiles in which the youth worker “is pissed out of their face”
• One of the young people in your ‘friends list’ appears in the news feed requesting that a photo another young person has put up is removed because it shows her underwear - the person who posted the photo refuses and the photo is highlighted on your feed
• A young person contacts you because they are in an online conversation with another young person who is threatening to commit suicide imminently and they don’t know what to do
• A parent complains that a youth worker has been having conversations with their child very late at night online

Some more simply dealt with than others, but all things that have actually happened! I’m sure there are more too and no doubt plenty of other people have had their own experiences. Maybe it would be good to think up some worst case scenarios and from that figure out the things that would need to be in place to protect both young people and workers?

There were some good discussions over on UKYouthOnline about developing policies for interacting with young people online.

In particular there was a debate about whether youth workers should separate their personal social networking profiles from their ‘professional’ persona’s (and profiles) that they use to interact with young people professionally.

Well over in the US theres a proposed law to make it illegal for school teachers to have ’social networking friendships’ with children and young people. CNN has an article online including an interview with a teacher who does use a Myspace page to allow students to contact him.

The proposed law has come about following fears that ’social networking sites are breeding innapropriate behaviour between teachers and students’. In the CNN article an Education Lawyer says that having clear professional boundaries are important “You’ve got to establish it from Day One and say, ‘I’m not your buddy, I’m not your friend, I’m just your teacher.”

I wrote something similar in ‘What Makes a Good Paid Youth Worker‘ - that relationships with young people need to be on the basis of what you can professionally offer them - not just ‘friendship’. But of course social networking is all about how many ‘friends’ you have and now that services offer to show how many of your email contacts are registered with them it means that any person you’ve had email contact is likely to easily find your profile.

Of course you don’t have to accept ‘friend requests’ providing you can get over the fear of causing offence! I’m not quite sure what I think about this yet - on the one hand some good clear rigid guidelines could work fairly well, on the other hand there is a point that its similar to saying if you work in an area you can’t also be seen to socialise there.

Actually that reminds me of a situation I found myself in when I first started as a ‘Youth Development Worker’ on an estate. I also played for the local cricket club and through one of the players I became friends with somebody who invited me for a meet up in their house which happened to be on the estate where I worked. I did attend, only to discover it was his parents house and his little sister was a regular member of one of my youth clubs - she wasn’t there but I did wonder about how weird it would have been if she’d been at home while I was getting drunk with her brother and his mates in the back garden!

For youth and community work the boundaries will always be a bit more blurred than teaching but it will be interesting to follow what happens in Missouri and whether or not it has any impact over here.

According to the Office of National Statistics 15.23 Million households (61%) in the UK had access to the internet in 2007 and this was rising at roughly 1 million a year. Of these only 10% didn’t have broadband (down from 17% the previous year).

At the time of their survey 4% of 16 - 24 year olds had never used the internet, 90% had used it recently. Overall 16-24 year olds use the internet more than any other adult age group.

Of those that use the internet 70% of 16-24 year olds use it every day and 92% use it at least once a week.

18% of adults had accessed the internet via a mobile phone (no breakdown of age for this but I bet its higher for younger age groups - and I bet its increased rapidly since last year!)

Reasons given for not using the internet more (%) (by adults 16+):

Some stats taken from the IPPR report ‘Behind the Screen: The hidden life of youth online’

• 80% of 12 to 15 year olds own a mobile phone
• 80% of 5 to 15 year olds have access to the internet at home
• In addition to home access young people have access in schools, libraries, internet cafes as well as through digital TV, mobile phones and games consoles
• 99% of schools have internet access (access is largely restricted but restrictions like filters are seen to be easily bypassed by young people) Continue Reading »

A while ago I downloaded an audio book of Richard Dawkins ‘God Delusion’ - so far I haven’t got past the first couple of chapters but he makes an interesting point early on that children shouldn’t be referred to as ‘Muslim Children’ or ‘Christian Children’, but instead ‘the children of Muslims/Christians etc.’ - this part of a wider point that children aren’t capable of making decisions about their spirituality and are in effect indoctrinated into religion.

Interesting point for me anyway as I had a very heated discussion with a Priest prior to getting married about my refusal to agree to bring up my children as Catholics. My wife is a Catholic and I’m not, so we had to jump through a few Catholic hoops to get married in a Catholic Church - part of which involved signing a form promising to bring up any children we had as Catholics. I disagreed because my opinion is that they should have the right to choose what if any religion they will follow when they feel they’re old enough to do so.

Indoctrination seems a pretty strong word but then I did agree with the points Dawkin made except that maybe for many people spirituality is a part of their overall culture and there are good arguments for encouraging people to ensure children understand their families culture. Anyway that’s not the point I was trying to make - I got thinking about the indoctrination thing because earlier today I found I’d got a song stuck in my head thanks to Radio 1, and then I realised what the song was - “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry. Well this was all the more annoying because I remembered some weeks ago I commented on Jon Jollys blog that ‘surely young people over here have better taste‘!

Well maybe they do because what I was wondering is if I can get the song stuck in my head (and I really don’t like it), does the radio also unduly influence us about what we listen to/buy (I don’t doubt that it does), but does this also go further and could those songs influence the behaviour of children/young people? Is it possible that young women actually will now go out and ‘kiss a girl’ when they otherwise wouldn’t have?!

I don’t suppose this really classes as ‘indoctrination’ - more likely ‘influence’ except perhaps for the fact that Radio 1 in particular is notorious for hugely overplaying songs to the point you can’t help but get them stuck in your head, so maybe its somewhere in between indoctrination and influence (maybe somebody cleverer than me knows a word for this?).

So now I’m wondering what other things have these kinds of influences on children? I’ve noticed for example the ‘eco message’ on BBC childrens programmes which is maybe a more positive example.

Tristan Donovan wrote an interesting Opinion piece that you can see here. His original question was

• Are we getting older sooner or staying young longer?

I thought it interesting anyway because I think maybe the answer is both. Often I’ve wondered whether children “grow up” too fast, I also sometimes question if youth work may even hasten this with so much emphasis on ‘empowering’ young people.

In the rest of Tristans article he discusses how proposed restrictions on under 18 year olds seemingly contradict the campaign for 16 year olds to be able to vote. I’d agree that it would…… that is if you agree with the premise that you should reach a magic age and then all the entitlements of adulthood are yours. On the otherhand you may argue there should be a gradual transition of responsibilities - in fact perhaps there already is if you look at this post showing the different ages at which young people gain legal responsibilities.

Although reading through that list doesn’t give the impression that it was planned to be a system to support young people to take on increasing responsibility until becoming a ‘full adult’ - instead it looks more like people randomly deciding ages they think may be suitable for certain things.

Arguably this is also whats happening right now - on the one hand theres the camp that argue young people should be able to vote at 16, and then there are those saying 18 year olds are not yet capable of drinking alcohol responsibly or purchasing knives etc. Nobody though seems to have taken an overall view and said what is the best process through which we can support young people to take on all of these responsibilities, and in what order or priority are they handed over to them?

Thanks to a 4 hour delay at Luton Airport I bought myself a lads mag a couple of weeks ago and within was a feature article about a festival organised by V - the volunteering charity for young people (aged 16 - 25) - the ‘article’ was slanted towards showing how funky modern volunteering actually is (Its not about beards & sandals - learn dj’ing etc. & so on) - except that it wasn’t an article by the magazine at all - it was a full page advertisement in one of the biggest selling monthly magazines and I suspect a very expensive one too.

I remember a couple of years ago being shocked when I first saw an advert for Connexions at the Cinema and then later on TV, plus of course plastered all over billboards, buses & the various media. I say shocked because at the time I wondered how much bloody money is being spent on that?! and at a time when I was trying to fundraise for our own youth programme.

Well I felt similar with the V advertisement, except I can perhaps see a better argument for V who are ‘in the business’ of trying to recruit more young people to volunteer. My question though is given the huge amount of costs of using Continue Reading »