At the heart of the new government’s mission is a recognition that breaking down barriers to opportunity means breaking down barriers between siloed sectors. Nowhere is this more the case than with enrichment.
Improving access to enrichment opportunities is critical to improving wider educational outcomes for young people. That means the ambition to transform the breadth and impact of our education system relies upon leveraging the vital role of the youth sector.
Recent research commissioned by the department for culture, media and sport found that there is a clear association between participation in youth provision and positive short-term outcomes relating to physical health and wellbeing, pro-social behaviours and education. There is also strong evidence that these short-term outcomes are sustained over decades.
Given this strong evidence base, it is a continuing injustice that enrichment opportunities are so unequally distributed. Significant disparities in access see only 9 per cent of young people in the north east participate in music classes, compared to 19 per cent nationally and 22 per cent in the south east.
Likewise, 15-25 per cent of the school day in fee-paying schools is devoted to enrichment and co-curricular learning while the state sector has endured a decade or more of decline in this vital provision.
This inequality deprives many young people of experiences proven to enhance mental health and wellbeing, foster crucial life and work skills, as well as in many cases deter violence and antisocial behaviour.
For all these reasons, the education and youth sectors must find common purpose in expanding access to enrichment opportunities.
Earlier this year, NCS Trust and The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award (DofE) published research into how partnerships and collaboration across our sectors can improve not just the accessibility, but also the quality and impact of enrichment activities.
The youth sector is well positioned to be a catalyst for change
We found some inspiring examples of best practice, where there are dedicated roles within schools and in community-based organisations who broker partnerships and support young people to engage with enrichment opportunities both inside and outside school.
To build on those examples, NCS and DofE are testing some approaches to improved collaboration and co-design, through our Enrichment Partnerships Pilot in the north east, north west and east of England, funded by the government.
Our findings will give us a blueprint for how this could be rolled out at limited additional cost for schools, with a view to radically altering the enrichment landscape for generations to come.
In the meantime, we have put forward several recommendations with the potential to enhance access and drive collaboration.
For example, an enrichment framework could help to bring more definition to what quality and accessible enrichment looks like, and the role of cross-sector partnerships within that. There is much to learn in this from the Gatsby Benchmarks, which have established clear best practice when it comes to careers education.
Such a framework could be integrated into Ofsted inspections to strengthen schools’ personal development offer, while existing mechanisms such as the Pupil Premium could be leveraged to enable equitable access for more disadvantaged young people.
This could provide a long-term funding stream to improve access and to resource the necessary coordination capacity both within schools and across sectors to deliver diverse enrichment opportunities.
There is a unique opportunity to leverage existing enrichment expertise and provision from the youth sector to help address many of the significant challenges that our new government faces – from school attendance to mental health, and from youth violence to essential skills education.
The new secretary of state has acknowledged the challenging fiscal environment and the strain on resources across sectors. We also know that young people face greater and more complex needs than ever.
The new government inherits a daunting in-tray, but the youth sector is well positioned to be a catalyst for change, with opportunities for collaboration on the curriculum review, the development of the new school report card and the Youth Futures initiative to expand access to youth work and mental health support in the community.
Our organisations are committed to this effort, and we hope others will join us in this important work.
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