Organisation: Caerphilly Youth Service

Title: Curriculum and Accreditation Project – Young People’s Focus Group

Contact: Evan Davies

The focus group initiative aims to increase young people’s involvement in the development of the youth service curriculum and accreditation offer, ensuring it’s engaging and relevant to young people, and, responsive to current local and national needs, trends and issues in youth culture.

A Focus group of young people from across the borough are engaged with the project at least once a month through meetings, workshops and accreditation opportunities. Young people are representative of the full range of open access and targeted provision.

During these sessions young people are consulted with on each curriculum area or a specific topic, for example, what information is needed, what learning is required for young people to be informed? Young people help to design resources and review workshops and accreditation workbooks that are delivered as part of the curriculum.

The C&A team develop curriculum content with young people both at the start and end of development ensuring young people have inputted their ideas on topics covered, delivery methods, and the resources used, including the wording used in workshops or curriculum packs. The group also have the chance to review the paperwork we use to register accreditation or when collecting feedback at the end of any work delivery.

All young people who engage do so voluntarily, working in a small group to allow us to focus on their personal development whilst developing the curriculum.

We use the principles of participation, and work alongside the Youth Forum. We have found that listening to all of the young peoples’ ideas and fully exploring them (even when it’s initially thought that such ideas may not work) has allowed us to empower them and to input more in the future. It also enables them to explore how they can communicate their ideas in a different way to allow their voices to be heard and achieve maximum impact.

After a recent review of the group, we found that the similar age grouping of members may have not had the resulting benefit of varying the curriculum and content to a broader age range of wider youth service users. We decided that it would be good to change the way the group runs, allowing young people to sit on the group for 2 years (therefore enabling them to develop their skills and experience) and then when they leave we invite participation from young people representing an area or age group that isn’t included. This has allowed us to have a more diverse membership, which enriches the outcomes being worked towards.

The group initially started with an approach based on a more sit-down discussion based session, and although we had good input from members, the group felt that it would be better to become more interactive. As a result we now run through suggested activities to see how they might work, we move around a lot more, we remove seats when needed, we get creative and mobile when brainstorming etc.

The final lesson we have learnt is that whilst young people had significant input into the curriculum content and workshops provided, we weren’t always getting the level of usage of newly developed resources from across the service. After discussion with the group they felt that it would be good to look at more interactive methods to deliver the curriculum. For example, we now have a termly project that the focus group designs and facilitates with the idea that everyone engages across the service.

A recent example as part of the curriculum area around Healthy Eating and Cost of Living the focus group asked all youth centres and projects to put together and trial a recipe that young people can use for the youth service recipe book – the response was overwhelming, and we recently printed the Caerphilly Youth Service Recipe book made up of contributions from across all provisions.

The focus group also run competitions to get more young people involved in curriculum development. This has had a large impact and feedback from staff has highlighted that because the competition was something their young people had been involved with, it resulted in them wanting to deliver the related curriculum content more than if it had developed for them/given to them to deliver.

Young people engage with the knowledge they are there to put forward the views of young people from their area. Young people engage with curriculum workshop development often from the start to the end of the piece of work. This gives them the opportunity to learn what is required when designing an educational resource and they are encouraged to provide their own views throughout.

We try and develop their social, communication and teamwork skills and build their confidence. The termly projects have been designed to run in a way that encourages young people to slowly take charge of learning the skills they need such as research, editing, organisation and time management. The plan is that with each project the youth workers take more of a step back in the work done with the aim of the group deciding on their own project and workers being there solely to provide the space and support.

The young people also have the chance to gain national accreditation during the sessions including the Youth Cymru Youth Achievement Awards and Agored units. The benefit to the wider service, includes, having curriculum content and resources that best support staff and young people, having the young person’s voice included throughout and allowing them the chance to develop the workshops makes it relevant and credible.

It also helps showcase the work young people do giving them a feeling of pride and ownership of the work they are actively doing rather than the work they are receiving.

The main benefit to the youth service is having a wide range of resources designed with young people, we have found that often these are the resources that get used more often. It also provides us with the opportunity to learn where the gaps are in our curriculum and get unique ideas of how we can tackle them. An example is a workshop on Vaping. The original plan was to design a poster but after discussions with the group they wanted to design a comic book to engage young people in year 6 and 7.

As staff we are benefiting from the input that allows us to be challenged on the resources we design, opening ourselves up to get feedback from the group allows us to continually develop our skills and reflect on things we may not have considered in the past. It gives us the opportunity to get ideas from a group of young people that are really creative.

We ensure that all workshops are available in both Welsh and English.

Throughout this year we have been working with the group to develop resources around the theme of ‘challenging discrimination’.

We continually look at how we can develop, we’re currently exploring the idea of a residential for members to further develop skills to create their own resource with less support from ourselves, and the idea of giving the experienced members more responsibility on how the sessions may look.

We feel that the project will always be adapting and developing to fit the needs of the young people involved in both the group and within the wider service.