Hansard

I thank the committee for asking us to come along to talk about our reports. I believe that committee members have received a copy of the report of the excluded young people action team. It is the glossy document. Members should also have received a short handout, which, I hope, will assist with our discussions later this morning. The five action teams began their deliberations in March this year after the launch of the Government's social inclusion strategy. The membership of the excluded young people action team is at the back of the report. Suffice it to say that people were drawn from a wide variety of backgrounds who had a strategic vision of the needs and concerns of excluded young people in Scotland. I introduce members in particular to Rozanne Foyer from the youth committee of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, who is a member of the action team and is here to help with your questions. We were aware that we could not deliberate in isolation. That would have been entirely inappropriate. We decided therefore to put in place a consultation process. A number of organisations involved in youth services, services for children and local authority departments became what I euphemistically called the doughnut group—we were the jam and they were the doughnut around us, although that is no reflection on the density of those involved in the consultation process. But seriously, we wanted to engage with people in a consultation exercise. The people in that group were aware of all our deliberations all the way through. They received our minutes and papers.In our wider consultation, we had a letter in the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations' weekly newspaper, "Third Force News", which invited any individuals or groups with an interest to write to us. We also commissioned two pieces of work: a literature review entitled, "Excluded Youth—What Works?" and a report entitled, "Social Inclusion in Rural Areas". Both accompany our "Excluded Young People" document.Members will see from our remit that we were asked by the Scottish social inclusion network to make recommendations on what more could be done to tackle the social exclusion that is faced by young people in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on people aged between 16 and 21. We had considerable discussion about that age limit. You will see from our report that we have not confined our recommendations to 16 to 21-year-olds. We were all aware—and became more aware when we spoke to young people, organisations and departments during our consultation—that, for some young people, things began to go wrong, or off the rails, before they were 16. We therefore made some recommendations, which I will come to shortly.We were aware that we could not engage in that process of consultation without talking to young people themselves. Our visits are detailed in the report. Wherever possible, we spoke to young people. There was only one exception—when we spoke to Dr Pamela Munn about the Scottish schools ethos network. Everywhere else, we met young people and deliberated from their perspectives as well as from others. I record my thanks to those young people, who gave much of their time and talent to inform us.Because of the breadth of our remit, we have not attempted to set out a comprehensive review of policy. Neither have we set out detailed proposals on the way in which a particular aspect of policy or service provision should be developed. Rather, we have tried to exploit the uniquely broad range of perspectives that are represented on the team, and in the work that we have done, to set out what we consider to be the main issues in youth exclusion, and to outline some steps that we believe will help to address those issues.We began with an examination of the key themes, which are set out in the report in considerable detail, before our recommendations. The first theme is empowering each and every young person. We met young people who, unfortunately, did not have the personal resources to manage successfully the transition into the rights and responsibilities of adulthood. The areas on which we need to focus are self-esteem, self-confidence, aspiration and practical life skills for every young person. We met young people who were leaving the school system and, particularly, who were leaving the care system, who did not have the practical resources to take on board the responsibilities that were expected of them in the adult world.We met young people who were discriminated against because of their age, circumstances, gender, race, disability or sexuality. For some of them, that set up a double discrimination. I would put it in these terms: we met people with very little or no stake in society. As they believed themselves to have no part in society, it was not surprising that they did not feel that they had much to offer. We have made recommendations about empowering each and every young person. I will come back to them in a moment.In the report, the second theme is called "Better structures, better services". We met organisations, youth workers and local authority departments that are involved in the delivery of structures and services for young people. I am afraid that, in the majority of cases, we discovered that the present system of service and support is extremely disjointed. We met individuals who provide invaluable support but, time and again, we encountered situations in which the system—whether because of funding mechanisms, barriers within or between organisations, or conflicts between agencies' working practices—hindered efforts and harmed the young people who needed help. We therefore opined that we need to work better to understand one another's values and principles. We also need to be supported by a national legislative and fiscal framework that promotes effective joint working.The final theme was getting policy right. Again, we encountered a number of situations in which aspects of Scottish Executive or UK Government policy were either unhelpful to excluded young people or could be improved. For example, there are inappropriate balances between conflicting objectives and unintended effects of poor co-ordination between policy areas. In particular, the report mentions the benefits system, to which I shall return. What have we recommended? In the handout, there is a list of recommendations, and the report illustrates the recommendations in relation to each of its key themes. On the empowerment of young people, I mentioned our need to consider what happens to young people before the age of 16. We believe that personal resources must be developed in the school curriculum. Schools must become more inclusive. The team did not believe that there was a fundamental tension, as some have suggested, between an inclusive school helping young people to develop self-esteem and self-confidence and a school that seeks to maximise academic achievement. We were impressed by the projects that we visited, on alternatives to exclusion. The flexibility to provide an individualised curriculum should be extended to young people who are identified in every school as vulnerable to social exclusion. The individualised curriculum should seek to meet all the individual's needs, including the development of life skills. Thus we have made recommendations about the inclusiveness of schools.We were very disturbed to hear from young people and from some of those working with them about the place of young people within the power structures of society. We heard of professional as well as lay attitudes that seemed actively to discriminate against young people, based on prejudice and stereotyping. That was compounded for some young people by their ethnic identity, gender, disability or sexuality. For those young people, there was very little stake in society. We have therefore recommended a national publicity campaign to tackle the stereotypes of excluded young people. With regard to better structures and services, we found that much good work was hampered by difficulties within and between organisations. We have made a number of recommendations to try to alleviate and ameliorate some of those problems. We have recommended that a youth inclusion strategy plan and youth support services be brought together under the responsibility of a senior officer in the local authority and that youth inclusion strategy plans be held in the Scottish Executive under the direction of the Minister for Children and Education. There are a number of recommendations along those lines, and members might want to ask questions in a moment.We were also aware that, in terms of how people viewed young people within structures and organisations, there was a need for a youth awareness function in agencies that work with young people. By those agencies, we mean the police, the benefits system, housing departments and other bodies. We recommend that they develop a youth awareness function to improve the way in which they deal with young people. Finally, we looked at getting policy right. We are mindful of the fact that the responsibility for benefits legislation still resides with the Westminster Parliament. However, we urge the Scottish Executive to request a review of the benefits system for young people. The complexities and inconsistencies of the current system cause difficulties for many vulnerable young people. In the report, we gave the example of a young woman who had the chance to become better qualified in child care. Because she was aged 17 she had to decide whether to take that opportunity and do so without her housing benefit, or give up the opportunity to try to become better qualified and keep her housing benefit. It is intolerable that young people who desire to get on, get qualified and have a stake in society should have to make a choice about getting better qualifications and sleeping rough.In terms of the criminal justice system, we recommend that as many young people as possible are retained in the hearing system until they are 18. However, we wish to draw to the attention of readers of the report, and particularly this committee, that we met a lot of young people who believed that they did not receive equal treatment from the criminal justice system. Many believed that they were not protected by the police in the same way as other elements of society are. You may say, "They would say that," considering some of their backgrounds and life situations, but we are nevertheless concerned that a system that does not protect young people properly, which does not give them confidence in its fairness, which brands some of them criminals at an early age—we heard some concerning stories from vendors of The Big Issue in Glasgow—and which in general does not give due weight to their interests as members of society, is a society that will not support their inclusion in the longer term.We examined the subject of drugs and drugs policy. We made no major recommendations because we were aware of the drugs strategy produced by the Scottish advisory committee on drug misuse, but we witnessed the catastrophic effect of serious drug dependency coupled with homelessness, prostitution, offending and prison. They leave young people in such desperate straits that it seems unlikely that some of them will ever recover. We have therefore recommended that we need far more rehabilitation programmes for young people, addressing their particular needs with imaginative service design.With regard to homelessness, we make particular recommendations about models of transitional accommodation, linked to practical support, with training and employment opportunities. Hostel accommodation is expensive, and while more hostel accommodation is necessary, young people do not always see it as safe. Some of them told us that they prefer to take their chances on the streets, where they can look out for each other. We need to listen to young people about what their particular service design might be.Finally, I believe that I speak for the rest of the team when I say that over the past few months social inclusion for young people has become not just a policy imperative, but a moral imperative. We saw so many wasted youths in Scotland. Although they were vibrant, articulate and had ideas aplenty, they had no stake in society and some were branded as no good before they even made a start. We met young people with the same aspirations, desires and visions as my child and, I am sure, your children, yet their opportunities were manifestly different. I am not suggesting that they are all little angels. Most of them need to understand about responsibilities, rights, social order and the need for social skills, but life has dealt them a raw deal. Inequalities, driven largely by poverty and unemployment in their families, mean that some young people will always find their life chances severely restricted from birth. The excluded young people's action team believes that until those wider inequalities are tackled, some young people will always begin life at a severe disadvantage.We believe that within the Scottish Executive and the UK Parliament we have a policy imperative with regard to social inclusion: it lies at the heart of Government objectives. We feel that it would be very sad and, indeed, morally reprehensible, if changes did not take place to equip excluded vulnerable young people in Scotland to take their rightful place in society and give to Scotland in the 21st century what we know they are capable of.