You won't be able to tell from this very bad photo, but I spent a large part of my afternoon at the Rivoli Ballroom helping to celebrate the achievements of looked after young people from Lewisham.
As with last year the event was loads of fun, and it was nice to catch up with Rebecca who was fantastic value and seems to be having the time of her life at university.
I not only got to read out the winners of the personal achievement awards, but also got dragged into some of the 'entertainment' at the end of the ceremony.
You wouldn't believe how proud the councillors and officers and other adults who were there are of these kids.
I spent yesterday evening at the celebration event for the mentoringproject that Lewisham and the Princes Trust have been running for the last 6 or so years.
Twice a year the Council provides training to people who have about 2 hours a week that they could give to young people who are leaving care in the borough. At the moment there are about 120 of these remarkable people, who change the lives of the young people they work with, and who are changed in the process.
Regular readers may remember Safti and Rebecca who spoke at the Council's AGM this year. Yesterday evening I was delighted to see that they had both joined the mentoring scheme as mentors. They were joined by people from all walks of life, a teacher, and a film maker to name but two.
If you think you might be interested in taking on a role like this then send an email to infomentoring@lewisham.gov.uk or phone 020 8314 8083.
We now have a regular date and time for Connexions Local Management Meetings at a time that I can do and so I’m starting to get a much better sense of what the service provides for young people.
Today we got a couple of case studies which were very helpful in turning some of the dry statistics – 24,500 young people between the ages of 13 and 19, 470 or so young people between 16 and 18 who aren’t in education, employment or training, 350 or so teenage parents etc. etc. – into human experience.
One was about a teenage mother who’d left school and hadn’t had a particularly good time while she’d been there, but who’d been through a 16 week course and was now thinking about re-entering part time education and trying to get her GCSEs.
The other was still to be resolved, but involved abandonment by both parents, the father appears to have left some time ago and now the mother has left. The mother still pays the rent but the young people are living there on their own. Clearly when they got in touch with Connexions it set in train a whole set of actions, many of which it appears haven’t yet reached a conclusion.
In my experience finding a way to bring these sorts of experiences to the people who are making some of the decisions helps improve our understanding of what the decisions people in the frontline are asked to make on a daily basis.
"Lewisham's provisional figures show a rise of more than 3% - with 50% of students achieving five or more A* - C grades. The rise is particularly impressive as the borough recorded the second most improved results in the country with a 6% rise last year. "
The green paper makes a number of proposals for services for young people across England, and in particular will impact on the way that Connexions is delivered locally. Which is why we looked at it at the local management group meeting that I attend.
The main themes of the paper are:
Engagement and empowerment
Volunteering
Information Advice and Guidance
Personalised support
I have to say I'm less than certain about parts of the proposals. In particular I think that the rhetoric around empowering young people doesn't fit easily with the pressure will be on them to take part in 'positive' activities. I also tend to think that carrot and stick contained in the opportunities card proposals is unlikely to work as well as envisaged and I’ll be arguing that they try and separate the mechanisms they use to pursue reward and punishment.
There are positives, a realisation that the fewer cooks there are the less spoilt the broth might be (ie the end to the sub-regional Connexions Partnerships); the recognition that parents are central to young people’s lives; the pressure for us to make young people involved in commissioning services. These are all things I think we should welcome.
I've given you my thoughts (such as they are) on the Demos seminar I went to the other week. They have now given a precis of the paper and you can download the paper here.
The general points they make go way beyond children's services and as I've said provide food for thought
I spent yesterday afternoon with a roomful of people at Demos talking about children's services. I got the invite after leaving a comment on their blog about young people being on interview panels.
They've written a literature review, which provides some real food for thought, as did the discussion yesterday, particularly around change, risk and expectation.
Change
The paper suggests that those who propose change often only engage positively with those who agree with us - early adopters. We too easily lump everyone else as a resistant hardcore whose fears or doubts can't be met.
If this approach is pursued vigorously it has the potential to alienate those in the middle ground. The people who (in the case of children's services) worry that change could undermine things that will impact on children's life chances.
Risk
This is a tricky area for children's services, when the subject comes up the first reaction is see risk as something we should avoid. After all, we think of children who've been neglected, abused, or who have died because the state has failed to intervene and we’d all want to minimise the risks of that happening again.
But, we know that bringing children into care isn’t always the best solution to managing these situations.
The paper draws on thinking that sees risk as a potentially positive way of changing circumstances for an organisation or individual, and seems to make the point that we need to judge which risks are worth taking.
Expectation
For someone like me its frustrating how long it can take to change things, to get the solutions we think are important into the system, and then to see results. We push for solutions that are quick and simple in a system that has complex outcomes and wonder why we don’t always get what we expect.
Perhaps we shouldn’t expect too much from the short term, but the paper argues that we should have more confidence in the ability to change things over the long term.
Cllr Andrew Brown
You won't be able to tell from this very bad photo, but I spent a large part of my afternoon at the 
I spent yesterday afternoon with a roomful of people at