Transcript

ARLENE KEE

So my name is Arlene Kee, and I work for the Education Authority for Northern Ireland. I'm an assistant director within the Children and Young People's Services Directorate, and I have specific responsibility for the management of youth services in Northern Ireland. And I work with my colleagues in particular to support vulnerable children and young people.

Just last year, Northern Ireland published its first 10-year strategy for children and young people. So very interestingly, we have an overarching policy that gives us high-level outcomes that all government departments must work towards to support our children and young people. And in this context, one of those key outcomes is safety and stability for children and young people, and that is something that the Education Authority does want to do.

We support children right through from age four to 25. That's quite strange because you leave school when you're 18. But that's also because the Youth Service supports young people right up until they're young adults at the age of 25. We do have priority age bands, and they are age nine to 13 and 14 to 16.

And the reason that we do that is because we are very, very lucky. We have a policy that says that we must deliver services based on assessed need. And that means that we can support the children and young people at the point of need and who most require it. But we do have generous provision for everyone.

The Education Authority has a very hopeful and supportive process. And they have a slogan which says "we want to ensure that all children can be the best that we can be." So in Northern Ireland, within the context of the Children and Young People's Strategy, within the Education Authority, our role is to make sure that children have the best start in life, that they have the best opportunities within education, that we address their barriers to learning, and that we provide them with the personal and social development that they require to ensure that they can succeed.

We in the service complete a needs assessment every three years. And five months ago, we engaged directly with 18,000 young people in Northern Ireland. That was a very successful engagement piece of work.

And very interestingly, when we looked and reviewed our outputs for the past three years, we noticed something very important. Children and young people here involved in Youth Service have less challenges and less engagement with anti-social behaviour and crime, and they experience less problems in life. They have much more resilience and are better able to cope with themselves.

So why is it important? It's important that, in the Youth Service-- in school, it's very hard to take control of your education. It's very hard to then put into that. Schools do have schools councils, and children and young people can have a say in what's happening to them. Very differently in the Youth Service. They Youth Service do not do things to children and young people. They do things with them.

So we listen to the voice of children and young people. We plan with them. We let the young people execute their programmes. And we evaluate it with them. And the whole point is that there's a relationship between a youth worker and a young person that lets them take the journey and take their own decisions and have faith in themselves and making progress when they want to.

So it's very important to have the voice of the child at the centre of all that you do. And it's very important for children to be involved in making their own decisions and taking control of their own destiny.

If you don't do that, we now know from engaging directly with young people and from our evaluation of all the work that we do, that you don't end up with the same outcomes, and there's a greater lack of educational attainment for children and young people in that regard.

First of all, and the children and young people of our generation have very different demands, and they have challenges that we don't understand, particularly to do with the online arena, to do with, even, bullying. Now it isn't often someone on the playground. It's done on a cyber space.

And children and young people don't have the same opportunities. There are lots of challenges economically in our climate, in our culture, and in our country. And that has a part to play with children and young people.

But very much, it's about relationships. The family unit is not the same. The community cohesion is not necessarily the same. So in terms of that mentoring role, that supportive role, we often consider children and young people within concentric circles. And we don't often think of their family as the first set of peers that we want to influence and to make sure that they're supportive with one another.

We think of children in the context of their friends, their peers, then with their siblings, then, often, with their community, even sometimes before their parents. So trying to understand the complexities that children and young people live in, the lack of supports, and understanding that, actually, with all that they have to offer in terms of new technologies and new infrastructure around them, they can still be in a negative position.

And we talk about the power of one. We have found that, actually, what young people need are relationships. They need mentors. They need people to understand them. One of the things that we do with the Police Service for Northern Ireland is help officers see, how do you communicate with children and young people? How do you understand that behaviour as a form of communication?

So what we really want to do is travel with young people and see how we can almost get back to basics and build on relationships. So it's not about all the resources that they have or all the new technologies. It's about what their experiences are.

And we often find that young people are often led by their emotions, as well. And we know that mental health and resilience is something that our children and young people lack in Northern Ireland, and that's something that we feel that we have a good platform to support them on.