The Youth Matters Green Paper set out a range of proposals for developing an integrated youth offer. The government implemented a full consultation period to enable young people and all those affected by the proposals in the Green Paper to voice their opinions. This consultation period ran until 4 November 2005 and Make Space submitted a comprehensive formal response to government, incorporating the views of our member clubs and the young people that attend them.
Make Space believes that significant investment and reform is long overdue. In our policy document, Youth Offer for the 21st Century, the case is made for a new universal youth offer. This would involve an alignment of existing systems and funding streams, to end fragmented spending on services for young people.
This requires the strategic direction of a national young people’s agency which, it is proposed, would involve young people at the highest levels of decision-making.
Our 2005 research, Youth Provision Counts, showed that every teenager in need in England might be on the receiving end of services from up to 17 different agencies and that local authority youth services do not feel that they are as ‘joined up’ in their approaches as they should be.
We are also calling for government to increase the total funding for young people to £2 billion each year. This would fund a national network of contemporary Make Space style clubs as an integral element of a national young people’s programme – a Make Space club in every community.
The Make Space Campaign is based on research undertaken during 2002 to examine what young people of secondary school age do out of school. It considered in particular the issue of boredom and its links with anti-social behaviour. The research, which was carried out by MORI and BMRB, went on to explore the needs of young people and to establish the concept of Make Space. The findings were published in the Nestlé Family Monitor in October 2002.
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