Its a constant challenge for people working with young people in projects and activities to be able to prove the value of what they’re doing - especially if many of those benefits are in so called ’soft skills’ - things like confidence, working relationships, being organised etc.

They’re called soft skills but they’re towards the top of the list of things that employers look for, so they’re very important. We had the same issue for our Apprentice Trainer Programme - if you speak to the young people involved with that many of them will talk about all sorts of benefits the experience had for them - but we never had any way of measuring this - even the research that was done on the programme doesn’t really give a true picture.

A main feature of our Prospective resource is the process of linking up young peoples skills and interests with other peoples needs. Prospective ends with young people identifying various’ actions’ they would like to take, and these Actions can be group or individual actions. The Outline resource includes ‘Personal Record Cards’ - these are things we developed because we recognised that many youth workers weren’t taking advantage of the opportunities available during a project to help young people develop personally - there was a tendency to just see it as a ‘group thing’. So we developed Personal Record Cards to allow young people to give themselves Continue Reading »

When we first started designing training programmes for young people one of our biggest concerns was to make the courses practical - we didn’t want to hear comments about our courses being “too much like school!” (funny that this is actually used as a criticism!)

What we didn’t want to do though was end up running activity breaks. PGL and Outward Bound are brilliant experiences but this isn’t what we were aiming to be. Our main onjective was to support young people to organise community activities and projects and so a degree of planning was inevitable and so therefore was a some paperwork.

So our challenge was to provide ‘real training’ including some paperwork, but to keep an overall practical feel to the experience.

I’d been on, and seen lots of ‘youth training’ (or training for young people) and largely the tactic used seemed to be to balance traditional Continue Reading »

I was reading a blog earlier by the Young Adult Library Services Association about ‘What is Youth Participation‘.

It interested me because it advocates a project based approach to youth participation which is pretty similar to our own approach. I was disappointed though to read towards the end of the article Continue Reading »