Children & Young People's Network
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Aims of Network
This Network brings together groups working with children and young people (C&YP), to promote greater involvement in and understanding of regeneration, renewal and local & national strategies. It provides a mechanism for dialogue with the City Council and other agencies. If you would like more information on the network, please contact Voscur's Children & Young People's Organisations Development Worker, Cheryl Wycherley, email: cheryl@voscur.org or phone (0117) 909 9949.
The Children and Young Peoples Network includes over 200 groups operating in the Bristol area and delivering services to C&YP. Meetings of this network are held regularly at which speakers give presentations relevant to the sector and attendees get a chance to share information about projects. Reps to various strategic partnerships feedback to the network.
A monthly e-bulletin is sent out to all on this mailing list with information about services in the Bristol area, national developments, training available and potential funding streams. Click here to view past copies of the ebulletin.
News
Myplace
A 'world class place' for young people to go.
Myplace is a fund that will deliver £190m of Government capital investment over the next three years through grants (managed by the Big Lottery) of between £1m and £5m. The fund opened on the 6th May. This is a fund that absolutely requires partnership working across the private, statutory and voluntary sectors.
The facilities will be driven by the active participation of young people and will have to demonstrate evidence of the real participation of young people, in the development, design and future running of the project. Myplace should be a place that will have co-located support services, sports, arts,
music, cultural or youth work based activities and potentially also
using mobile facilities to reach out to surrounding areas.
Voscur's Children and Young people's Organisations network organised a meeting for members who were interested in the idea of a consortium bid to come together and discuss options on the 29th April. The notes from this meeting can be seen here. At this meeting it was unanimously decided that the voluntary sector should lead on the bid, with Young Bristol being the lead organisation. Several participants identified themselves as key partners, to work with Young Bristol on this.
Next steps include:
Meeting with leads from Integrated Youth Support Services to discuss the proposals
A second meeting to begin putting together the outline of a bid. This meeting will include the voluntary sector key players and, it is hoped, the leads from Bristol City Council.
Identifying a building/site
The next meeting will take place here at The Create Centre on June 3rd at 2pm.
Guide to Working With Schools
Voscur, along with partner organisations, has produced a guide to working with extended schools. This useful Guide explains the context of current work with children and young people and the extended schools agenda. It also looks at the typical structures of a school, and examines the practicalities of working with a school. The Guide also contains case studies and useful contacts. Furthermore there is a Directory of voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations in Bristol who can work with extended schools.
Information
The South West Child Protection Procedures Website
10 Year Strategy for Young People
On 26th July the Government published its 10 Year Strategy for Young People. This is a really significant step for work with young people, committing funding to improving young people’s access to positive activities and to the development of a skilled and effective workforce to deliver good quality provision.
Network Meetings
The network meetings provide a forum for information exchange and a place where open discussion can take place in relation to issues affecting voluntary and community sector children and young people organisations.
The group continues to receive feedback from the Voscur reps on the Engagement Project Steering Group and the Youth matters leadership group as well as feedback from joint reps on the 3 work-stream groups: 14-19, Attainment and Prevention and Early intervention.
Click below to view notes from previous meetings:
Representation
For information on Representation from the C&YP network on strategic bodies, please go to our C&YP Representation Page.
Children & Young Peoples Network Ebulletins
Playing Out
The survey shows that anxiety about children playing out unsupervised means that adults are denying today's children the freedom to spend time with friends that they once enjoyed themselves. When asked the best age for children to be allowed out with friends unsupervised most respondents (43 per cent) said aged 14 or over, despite the fact that most of them had been allowed out without an adult at the much younger age of 10 or under. The research report draws conclusions about the potential damage to children’s friendships and development of childrens’ social skills as a result of the anxiety about children playing out.
For more information on The Children’s Society report see www.childrenssociety.org.uk
Children's Play Update
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