#59: Maybe We Should Stop Consulting Young People, And Give Them Some Power Instead

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[00:00:56] You're listening to Sussex And The City with Richard Freeman. Hello you, I'm Richard. This is Sussex and The City. Welcome. Delighted you're here. One of the phrases that keeps being used about devolution in Sussex is that this is a once in a generation opportunity to reshape prosperity in the area. Once in a generation. It's a generational

[00:01:24] project. And that sounds really grand and it does well to give a sense of the scale of what's happening. But there's a question. Which generation? Which generation are we talking about? Because if we're genuinely redesigning how Sussex works for the next 20, 30, 40 years, then the people who are going to live with those decisions for longest probably should have more than a token say about

[00:01:50] what those decisions are and how they're made. So this week we're talking about young people. Young people, power and what a devolved Sussex might actually look like if we designed with them rather than for them. You'll have heard at past episodes with the brilliant Kaya Allen-Bevan and Joe Hurd giving some youth perspective. I use youth in inverted commas as if there is only one perspective and as if youth even itself is that well defined. But I chatted to them about the impact of the

[00:02:20] devolution on young people and with Kaya kind of fairly early on in the conversation and then Joe a few weeks ago. But my guest this week is Adam Muirhead. I've known Adam for a really long time and I've interviewed him on various podcasts about his specialist subject of which he is absolutely the go-to person which is on youth work and how we build structure, design, co-design services

[00:02:46] for young people outside of formal education. Adam's one of those people for whom youth work it's not his job, it is his calling. It's colonized most of his professional life and quite a lot of his spare time as well. He is absolutely extraordinary in terms of his knowledge and wisdom on this. He's been working with young people for nearly 25 years and has spent two decades of that with Brighton & Ho's Trust for Developing Communities.

[00:03:13] His experiences range from traditional youth clubs and street-based work to supporting young people at the Royal Alexandra Children's Hospital and in youth offending services. He has been a lecturer in youth work at the University of Brighton, he was the chair of the Institute for Youth Work, he currently chairs the Youth and Policy Journal and chairs the Regional Youth Work Unit for the South East as well as being head of youth work for the National Hope Collective and as I said

[00:03:37] director of youth work services at Trust for Developing Communities. I think it's clear he knows his stuff. What I really like about Adam's definition of youth work is that underneath all the programs and services he is clear that it is about two things and two things only, power and relationships. Building meaningful relationships with young people and then sharing power with them, helping them claim some of their own and where possible changing systems in which the odds are stacked

[00:04:05] against them. Which makes him a really good person to talk about devolution and how, where, if young people can help shape it. Because we're creating new structures of power in Sussex at a moment when the foundations underneath a lot of young people's lives are looking quite shaky, the contract for young people, the offer for young people, whether it's housing, whether it's education, whether it's the labour market. You know Adam talks about rising mental health needs, exploitation, youth violence and the

[00:04:33] erosion of the universal services that used to spot problems early. As he says and as he puts it very eloquently, the need is going up while the resource is going down. But we're not going to dwell in this episode just on what's going wrong for young people. That's a different topic and not something we can cover in half an hour. But it's about what a Sussex mayor or what a Sussex strategic authority could actually do differently to what's been done before. Could we have a properly funded permanent

[00:05:00] youth assembly with genuine influence rather than just more consultations? Could young people be embedded in the governance of a new strategic authority? Could Sussex appoint someone specifically responsible for future generations? Could that be built into law a little bit like they've done in Wales with the Future Generations Act? More of that in a future episode. And what about some practical things? Transport skills, housing jobs? If you're 17 in Bognor Regis, if you're 19 in Hastings

[00:05:27] or 22 in Crawley, can you afford to get to college and work? Can you train for the jobs that Sussex actually needs? And having grown up here, is there any realistic prospect that any young person will be able to afford to stay here? So Adam makes the case for an affordable county-wide youth travel pledge, stronger youth representation. And he asks whether Sussex could even become the first mayoral area to

[00:05:53] introduce a children's precept, specifically to invest in the next generation. Perhaps the test of whether this really is a once-in-a-generation project for generations to come, it's not what politicians call it, it's what they do and how a future generation can see themselves in it. Here's my conversation with the brilliant Adam, your head.

[00:06:29] I'm joined by an old friend, somebody I've interviewed many, many times for various different podcasts over the years. Not just because he's got a beautiful lilting voice, which of course he has, but actually I think he's a very smart thinker. I'm always curious to come back for more because I think there's a lot to learn in his particular professional subject, and that is youth work and young people. So I'm really chuffed to be joined by Adam Muirhead, the youth worker's youth worker

[00:06:58] in my eyes. Adam, how the devil are you? Adam Muirhead I'm very well. I'm ready to answer some of your questions. Thank you, Richard. Good. So introduce the listeners to you a little bit. Say a little bit about your journey into youth work and why it gets you out of bed in the morning. There's an old adage about youth work. If you put 10 youth workers in a room and ask them for a definition of youth work, they'll come up with 15 definitions. Because people try and put their finger on it, is it a process? Is it about what it produces?

[00:07:28] Is it all sorts of different things? And I have done different thinking on this. And I think that in the DNA of youth work, the double helix is about power and relationships. So youth workers form meaningful relationships with young people, share power, support them to claim their own power in society, make society a bit fairer for them, help them to beat the odds in a system where sometimes those are stacked against them. But if we can, we also like to kind of change the system and

[00:07:58] change the odds for young people in that system and think about power in that structural sense as well. So you'll find youth workers out there delivering, you know, traditional fair and youth clubs and out on the streets. And my organisation, the Trust for Developing Communities, does that work? In recent times, we've also been delivering a lot more kind of targeted and specialised youth work. So we are the provider of youth work in the Royal Alex Children's Hospital in Brighton in the

[00:08:25] emergency department, supporting young people who've come in with various harms related to exploitation and fights and those sorts of things. But we also work in the youth offending team with young people who've been arrested for the first time. And you kind of think, well, maybe there's something going on there. So we help them to explore that, plug them into more positive outlets and before it escalates. And we do all the, you know, coaching support work, and then lots of

[00:08:51] youth participation stuff as well. Work with brilliant partners, brilliant young people, and hopefully making a real change to outcomes in the city. How long have you been doing it for? And what drew you to it in the first place? I guess I started about 20, maybe just under 25 years ago. I look like I'm in my 20s. I'm not. I guess I had my own turbulent journey through adolescence. In fact, what happened was my

[00:09:18] sister was meeting youth workers, and she was in the same boat as me going through a difficult time at home. And, you know, there's lots of stuff going on. But I thought to myself, I should go and check out these people as the protective older brother. And I went in and slightly guarded, you know, looking to scrutinise them a bit. And it turned out they were some of the loveliest people I'd ever met who were genuinely interested in me and cared, and saw my

[00:09:45] potential, then offered me to come and volunteer at a special needs youth club. And that turned into, well, do you want to come and work paid in these youth clubs and actually come out the street with us and meet some other young people? So I did that back in Hampshire. There was a time when I was able to go and do a year at an outdoor activity centre down in Cornwall. And I learned so much down there as well, but then came back. And when I moved back, it wasn't the township, it was to Brighton and Hove. And I've been plugged in here. I've been working for the Trust for Developing Communities for 19,

[00:10:15] nearly 20 years now. But at the same time, I've kind of been doing other work too. So I work for the local authority here and for West Sussex. I've worked for the Hangerton Knoll project, amazing project, doing brilliant work over in the west of the city. And I've been supported here to engage in other youth worky things. So Richard, you and I connected over the Institute for Youth Work, and you were instrumental in helping us strategise and think about what was going to take us from

[00:10:41] here to there. And that was some brilliant support that you were able to help us with at the time. I also lectured at the University of Brighton on what was the youth work degree, and then it kind of morphed into other education programmes. But I was there for nine years. I did that. I chair Youth and Policy Journal, which is an international youth work journal, no paywalls, democratising knowledge from brilliant minds all across the globe. I also

[00:11:08] chair the Regional Youth Work Unit for the south-east of England, the head of youth work for the Hope Collective, which is a national group of organisations that seek to manifest a fairer, safer future for young people. And the legacy of Damalola Taylor's aspiration for a better world kind of came about in the wake of his murder 25 years ago. So yeah, I guess I'm a bit of a

[00:11:32] in youth work and of youth work. My work is youth work, but you might also say that my hobby is youth work. The older one gets, the more one needs to be quite critical about one's understanding of what young people are going through. I don't think it's ever been harder to be a young person. Obviously, lots of common themes are timeless, but actually, there are nuances and there are new

[00:11:57] pushes and pulls that are making young people's lives better or worse in all sorts of ways. And some of them, none of us really understand yet because of the pace of change. How does that affect your practice? And how does that affect your understanding of what youth work needs to be now versus maybe what it has needed to be in the past? David This is a dynamic space and being young, the condition of being young is different how it was

[00:12:25] when I was growing up. If I got really drunk and threw up all over the place, people weren't recording it on the device from their pocket and posting it online. Or if I, you know, if I was in a fight, people weren't recording it and posting it online. There are pressures today on children and young people that adults won't understand. I think it's important to come to it with that humility

[00:12:50] because if you take for granted that we really need to hear the direct experiences of young people in the condition of being young now, then you will soon find out that your service or policy or whatever it is, is completely outmoded really, really quickly. Your service becomes ineffective. David And so that's the thing that I think keeps it fresh and interesting for me is that we really

[00:13:14] need to be constantly tethered to a contemporary understanding of youth, by youth and for youth. David Whilst I sort of float around the city doing various strategic bits and support the kind of strategy and finance here at TDC and all those sorts of things, I'm also delivering. You know, I keep my hand in where I can and up at the youth club and Wooding Dean on a Wednesday night at the moment and meeting young people directly and hearing from them. This is the kind of space where you

[00:13:41] really need to be, someone used to have a long leader. You've kind of got your feet on the ground, but you've still got your head up here on the swivel. That's how I try to position myself so that I can still remain credible. And the innovation that we're seeking to do with young people is always kind of guided by them so that we are relevant. It's difficult to be future-proof right now. We're

[00:14:05] riding that wave and I think we're doing okay. David I went to an event recently convened by the YMCA, Dan's Link Group, who are a great partner in the Sussex And The City project where they were bringing together all the different voluntary sector organisations and politicians and, you know, people who care from across Sussex, particularly looking at young people and homelessness. I

[00:14:30] couldn't help, you know, walk away feeling just how much it feels the mountain is getting taller, you know, for organisations and institutions to have the back of young people, to be a safety net, to be advocates that, you know, it's not just about that young people's experiences are getting harder, as you've talked about. But actually the scaffolding that supports young people to fail, to fall, to get

[00:14:54] back up again or to succeed is creaking a little. So I'd be interested to know from your perspective, you know, a public health outcomes perspective, how does it feel to be in an organisation at the moment in Sussex? You're right to say that it's challenging right now for, I mean, certainly for young people, there are compound issues now that are manifesting in some really poor outcomes. And if you just looked

[00:15:22] at my own organisation's safeguarding work, you will see the kind of issues come up around mental health, just absolutely skyrocketing for many young people. That means that actually they kind of find themselves in difficult situations, potentially self-medicating with Xanax and then overdosing on the Xanax, finding themselves dealing drugs to pay for things that they're self-medicating for. And then all of a

[00:15:49] sudden this person's labelled as a bad person and they go, you know, anyway, there were so many issues there. And it's been harder and harder for organisations like ours to respond. The need goes up and the resource goes down. It's a bit of a chart of doom where, you know, actually the foundational offer for young people to support that baseline has been eroded. And if people imagine having kind

[00:16:15] of a really a pyramid of services with the kind of broad, thick universal level of services that provides the safety net, but also spots things early, promotes referrals into more specialist support, into a kind of higher up the triangle and then higher up, you might have acute services. And actually, that universal bit in particular is massively shrunk and under pressure, and it's doing more safeguarding than ever before because young people might be waiting for, let's say two, three years

[00:16:44] for their neurodiversity diagnosis and treatment. What do they do? In the meantime, they're still with us trying to access services and trying to find ways to meet their needs. Yeah, that universal level of service is really, really challenging to fund and to make sure that it's there. We've had to fight tooth and nail to ensure that it is, in spite of people in the system recognising that it's needed. It's just very,

[00:17:11] very difficult to fund. Broadly, we're kind of in a tumultuous time for national funding and different projects and change of government came with a lot of hope nationally. But also, we're kind of waiting for them to see whether they're just going to junk the old stuff because it's got Tory written on the front of it and come in with their new stuff or not at all. For instance, the violence reduction units nationally, there's no guarantee they'll be funded beyond March. So our hospital youth work project

[00:17:39] and our street-based youth work project that are out there saving lives right now, that's not hyperbole. But they are at risk of falling off a cliff's edge, which causes me a lot of anxiety. Not least because these young people absolutely need that support. But I also have brilliant staff members who are just unrivalled in their engagement, their skill to refer to safety plan with young people, to extract them from

[00:18:07] gangs. So yeah, those are the things that are keeping me up at night. You've probably got a strategy, a vision, a roadmap, maybe even a post-it note empire on your office wall. But has anyone asked the really awkward questions yet? Like, is it actually working? At Always Possible, we help senior leaders challenge the obvious, rethink the possible and deliver the

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[00:19:29] able to join up what all the existing local authorities and what the new versions of the local authorities are already doing, but with potentially more money or the ability to leverage more money on a regional basis, looking at particular public health outcomes that the mayor will be judged on. So some of the things that you've talked about there that are particularly acute in Sussex, we know, you know, things like county lines and an exploitation are rife. We know that a lot of social

[00:19:56] mobility is going backwards. We've had some stark assessments from people at the Sutton Trust recently that's talking about parts of Sussex nationally near the bottom in terms of life chances through attainment and things like that. There's some really big problems, but the reason devolution is happening is because the government wants growth. You know, it wants to put Sussex on the map as a place for, you know, where housing's being built, where roads are being built, where jobs are being created,

[00:20:23] and blah, blah, blah, blah. And there's a risk that young people are nowhere near that sort of conversation. Yet, it feels like one of the areas where a new mayoral authority could make a really, really big impact quite quickly. What sort of conversations are you having at TDC, but also through your your youth work sort of networks? TDC It's been quite challenging to think about it in a lot of ways. Like, I'm personally reasonably

[00:20:52] well informed. I'm elected as a voluntary sector rep to sit on the People's Scrutiny Committee for Brighton City Council. So I've been witnessing Cabinet present on devolution and talk about it, and it still feels like it's being discussed in quite headline terms. I'm reasonably convinced that there are great opportunities in this, but they still kind of exist in that conceptual way at the

[00:21:18] moment. And it's exciting for me to think about what a mayor would be able to do if they were really concerned with young people and young people's needs. And I think there are some opportunities that do present themselves here. You can't just do things to a generation, you really need to do them with the generation. My question for any prospective mayor is, where's the permanent funded powerful

[00:21:46] youth assembly embedded within your governance structure, not just as a consultative body, but as a partner in making decisions and holding you to account? The bill itself creates commissioners, things like transport and skills, but why not a commissioner for future generations? Why not someone who can really hold to the advocacy and the functions of youth space for young people, the voice for young

[00:22:14] people, ensuring the right audiences are there and critically ensuring the influence is there. I've just described a particular model in the youth work world, the Lundy model that talks about those four elements being there. And actually, those not just being a nice to have, those are based fundamentally on the rights children, young people have. And how established and or effective are those principles already? You know, you talked about you

[00:22:39] being a sort of critical friend to Brighton Hove City Council. I mean, one of the challenges across Sussex is we have lots and lots of local authorities, and some of them are quite small and some of them are very big. I think public sector is a big part of life down here. But with the fragmentation, what's in place at the moment? What is already happening? Is there a pedigree where there is some good practice in that already, where young people are kind of helping to shape sort of governance and accountability?

[00:23:07] David There's some brilliant practice in play, and it's brilliant in the context of being really poorly resourced and systemically embedded, perhaps. And I think there are challenges to any democracy in engaging with different groups who are marginalised. Young people are definitely some of those. There's a youth council, which is run by Brighton Hove City Council, and is doing a great job

[00:23:31] of ensuring that there's a Make Your Mark campaign, which consults with as many young people as possible, and then turns those into priorities. And they did brilliant work campaigning on those priorities. David And they're looking to evolve that work into some quite exciting kind of thematic program, and aligned with kind of cabinet leads and things. The people running that are doing brilliant work. We also have a system in Brighton Hove called YouthWise, and they've met with

[00:23:58] young people who use youth services regularly. The lead for children and young people from each of the three main parties in the city come together and engage young people and ask them questions and actually held to account by those young people as well. Just a couple of weeks ago, my own organisation did a hope hack, bringing young people from all across the city together to kind of problematise and then workshop the solutions for how the city should manifest the new Families First agenda

[00:24:29] government. And they were coming up with all sorts of creative comedy sketches through to modelling spaces and places that workers should be engaging with young people and how those should be and doing that creatively and really using the assets of young people. We've also done peer research where we've trained young people up as researchers who could then go and research with other young people about barriers to accessing

[00:24:54] services. And we've recruited young people to then co-produce a whole process where statutory services looked at their own participation practice. You know, what is going really well? What could be better? Making sure that Lundy model again is in there. And so if I can speak across the system, I think there are some brilliant ingredients here. There is a lot of goodwill, but a fundamental acknowledgement that

[00:25:19] there's a lack of resource to do this in a way that really embeds young people's voice as part of the systemic democratic infrastructure. I know this would be challenging for some people to hear. There are young people who come to the scrutiny committees, but it's really easy to see in a kind of cabinet scrutiny system that lots of stuff is kind of sewn up outside of the meeting. And if the majority of the party want this to go through, you know, how much influence do young people really have in that

[00:25:47] space? How much do I have as an adult with some experience of how this works? So we really need meaningful opportunities here. And I think the bill changes the voting system from mayors from first past the post to supplementary vote. And I think it's a small step towards more consensual politics. And I think that's really interesting and useful. You know, there could be an under 30 of the party representatives, let's say, and sat around the table advocating for young people,

[00:26:15] pulling together a constituency over, you know, this kind of embedded governance structure. In London, they've got a whole shadow youth mayoralty. Well, indeed. They have a London youth mayor and has their own cabinet and all sorts. I just finished doing a master's that focused on youth participation. And one of the things I was able to at least as insight was that we need a range of different things. It can produce tokenism

[00:26:44] when you just have one thing. Potentially, you know, an advisory board, it can just replicate adult boards. Only certain young people are ready to put their hands up and yeah, I'll go do that. We'll be the ones involved. And so I think that really needs some consideration to understand the massive. So many services, government policy, et cetera, just see spending on young people as spending. And I think if we can flip the narrative and see it as investment, particularly in the context of the kind of adult skills fund and what we need to do in terms of

[00:27:13] bridging a gap between what employers want in the city and what our young people are training to do, and how we're supporting them to get there. I notice in the bill as well, there's talk of a precept opportunity to kind of raise money for priorities and things. And I think that a challenge to our Sussex mayor might be to invite them to consider being the first mayor in the country to have a children's precept, to really kickstart this investment. If not, you know, this generational

[00:27:41] project should be for them. So let's give it the best possible start it could with some real investments, some real consideration across the whole county. David Yeah, no, really some really interesting points there. And with a process like this, which feels like it's a really good thing for Sussex to have some transfer of powers from White Hall, it also feels like to a lot of people, and they're very vocal about it, that it's being done to them, that this is imposed, it's not been asked for. And because of the speed, you know,

[00:28:10] lots of decisions and systems are going to be put in place that don't recognize marginalization or nuance or representation. And what on earth should young people care? We need people under the age of 25, under the age of 21. We need primary school children to be engaged with this because they're going to be voting soon. And we need them to feel like they are part of something bigger, that they are part of a Sussex story, that there is someone who's got their

[00:28:38] back that's batting for them nationally. Do any of the young people you're meeting on a Wednesday night in Wooding Dean, do any of them have a faintest idea that this is going on? And if you did talk to them about it, would they care? And should they care? David Those conversations aren't happening with the young people that I'm meeting. And my team aren't currently banging down the door going, all these young people that they don't even want to

[00:29:02] know about this new mayor. And I think it's fair to assume that the site of influence needs to be quite tight, needs to be hyper-local for young people to firstly, immediately engage with opportunities like this. And at the moment, we are talking about things that are kind of devolved down but to a Sussex-wide level. And so I think the tangibility isn't quite there yet. But I do think there are

[00:29:29] opportunities here. Some of them may just come on the other side of the mayor being in place. There's a brilliant organisation that I've been working a little with called My Life, My Selle, Youth-Led, looking at system change, all that sort of stuff. And they've got this motto at the moment, if you don't do politics, politics will doom you. They say it really well. Because I think there are questions that young people should be asking. One of them is, I grew up here, can I afford to live here?

[00:29:59] Going forwards and actually house building is on the mayor's agenda. And young people can't afford housing now. It's really out of reach. And that's a problem not just for the young people now, but obviously when they grow up and they don't own anything, but they need care from the state, who's paying for that. This is like a massive, massive thing. You can't just pigeonhole young people not getting on the housing ladder and having equity. They might grow up here, but actually the job that

[00:30:25] suits their skills isn't in the city, because we've not done that job of aligning the needs with the training that happens here. And the adult skills fund is all about making sure that we close the gaps for those things so that people can stay here, assuming they can afford to live here and make sure that Sussex isn't just brain draining up to London or internationally. One of the highest priority campaigns for young people consistently is around transport and about the cost of it.

[00:30:55] People get really upset when young people say, wow, we should have subsidized transport, like OAPs. And they go, well, no, OAPs deserve it. What are you talking about? This group of people have less money. Usually they need to get to jobs. They need to get to their training. They need to be able to do that in a way that allows them enough money at the end of the week to pay for their rent and their bills and their food and stay and live in the city.

[00:31:24] It's a social mobility as well as a kind of economic case needs to be made. And a mayor do. What are the levers and pulleys that could be made in order to try and help stimulate, from an economic perspective as well as, as you say, essentially a social justice perspective, but actually being able to get people around. We know in Greater Manchester, it is free for 16 to 18 year olds to use any bus. Greater Manchester mayoral office run the bus service now.

[00:31:51] Absolutely. And if you are going to do this work in gathering young constituents from across Sussex, and you are going to make sure that it kind of starts at an hyper-local, there's lots of engagement going on and maybe feeds up to it more. They are going to tell you that transport is important, that subsidised transport is hugely important. It's something that the mayor really should be grasping early.

[00:32:15] Last question. How could a devolved Sussex be good for young people? Yeah, for me, I think there are four key opportunities. The first is just making sure young people have a seat at the table. And that's not just because it's so nice to have, that's because it's their right in law. Services are better when they do. Young people get developmental

[00:32:41] opportunities through that. And we get the opportunity to create a system that's better and fairer and more access for more young people, particularly disadvantaged young people who would struggle to be part of or feel like they have a share in the story for a new mayor of Sussex. I think the second thing for me, the outskills budget, for me this is an opportunity for that to

[00:33:07] become a real platform, an opportunity for young people in particular, for the 19 year olds. There's obviously a narrative around older people retraining for different careers and different skills, but really if this is like, let's make a generational change. And that investment should be focused on the future generations. And I'd like to see that protected. I think the third thing is this kind of affordable

[00:33:34] countywide youth travel concession. And then I think, yeah, the idea that this is a place to live and grow up and stay and you can afford to stay here. And the job that you want is here. And I think that the opportunity with the greater house building is to ensure that there is social and more affordable housing in all parts of Sussex and in all parts of the city. Send all the social housing out to places that are already

[00:34:02] deprived. This is an opportunity to make sure we build policy that includes, creates more egality across whole regions and more access to opportunities for people through living in mixed communities with different people. One of the things that we really recognize at Trust for Developing Communities is that our difference is our strength. And you know, there really shouldn't be

[00:34:31] any there than us, just us. And actually, we will all be better off for creating a fairer system that serves everyone. And let's hope that our new mayor has similar thinking. David Well, that's the headline. Adam, you're ahead. Thank you so much for being my guest on the Sussex

[00:34:52] and the City podcast. Thank you. Thank you very much to this episode's guest and to you for tuning in. Sussex And The City is an independent and non-political project about devolution as it happens,

[00:35:17] explained in human. It is led by Always Possible. You can find other episodes, resources, events, and blogs about change in Sussex and Brighton by visiting sussexandthecity.info. That's sussexandthecity.info. This episode was written and presented by Richard Freeman for Always Possible. The editor was me,

[00:35:42] Chris Thorpe-Tracy for Lo-Fi Arts. I did the music too. Production management was by Letitia McConnellogue for Always Possible. Talk to you next time. Always Possible.co.uk