Government-backed scheme fails to engage hard to reach
Lauren Higgs
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
A million pound government-backed scheme to raise the achievement of disengaged young people has failed miserably, according to an evaluation published last week.
The two-year Re-Ach project, funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), was beset by problems. The project was supposed to reduce teen pregnancies and the number of young people not in education, employment and training in Barking and Dagenham, Hillingdon and Leicester.
But the two-year scheme, which was led by charities, Youth at Risk and Hanover Foundations, did neither.
The report found that the pilot failed to engage the target group of hard-to-reach young people, and instead focused on young people who were in education.
York Consulting, which conducted the evaluation on behalf of the DCSF, said in its report that "participants illustrated minimal evidence of disaffection and disengagement. Consequently, the pilot was unable to make a significant contribution to two of the three outcomes that were identified."
Peter Warren, spokesman for Youth at Risk, admitted the programme did not engage the right young people.
He said: "The programme was not able to impact those young people who were hardest to reach as powerfully as we would have liked. We believe this was due to the inflexible nature of the enrolment process and limitations that prevented us from applying approaches we would normally use."
Paul Fletcher, director of youth engagement at Rathbone, said the programme was fundamentally flawed. "Hard-to-reach young people cannot be referred by agencies. You can't send them letters. You have to send staff out onto the streets if you want reach them."
He said that workers at Rathbone, which has a track record of engaging disaffected young people, go onto estates and into parks to build relationships with young people, before inviting them to join a project.
"The hardest-to-reach young people are by definition found in places where Joe Public isn't," he said.
Warren claimed the programme was beneficial to most of the young people who took part. "It helped to prevent a decline in engagement and improved attitudes towards learning," he said.
