The Reading Agency already plays a key role in responding to government youth policy. It is about to launch a new youth innovation programme which will give young people a stronger voice and provide more things to do in libraries, including the opportunity to become HeadSpace and groupthing partners, as Claire Styles, Liz Roberts and Ruth Harrison explain.
Wouldn’t it be great if all public libraries had a space where young people felt safe and welcome, had a say in what went on, could get active in their communities as volunteers and learn new skills – and where their contribution was recognised. A place where they could have fun online and enjoy inspiring reading activities with others. Wouldn’t such a place create a fantastic buzz, bringing in more and more young people? Shouldn’t every young person expect their library service to offer this?
Explosion of youth policy
We’re at a point of huge opportunity for young people’s services, with an explosion in policy across government departments. The key agendas are about reducing inequality and building sustainable local communities; all-party support means that this is set to continue well beyond the next election. Better educational achievement for young people aged 11-19 is part of the process, but nurturing young people to become successful adults cannot be achieved through an education strategy alone. ‘I don’t know anything that will limit a child’s horizons more than not being able to read,’ asserts David Bell, Permanent Secretary, Department for Children, Schools & Families (DCSF).
Services young people come into contact with, especially libraries, contribute to their reading and personal development. In 2007, Aiming High,1 the government’s 10-year strategy for young people, set out a vision, opening up major new funding streams and partnership possibilities.
The Education & Inspections Act 2006, which came into force in January 2007, gave local authorities the responsibility of providing positive activities (‘things to do, places to go’) for young people and stipulated that they must consult young people. Following the Children’s Plan issued by the DCSF in 2007,2 many authorities have had to restructure, creating children’s directorates and integrated support services.
Along with these requirements come opportunities for libraries to gain wider recognition in their local authority, particularly through new Public Service Agreements, National Indicators 3 and inclusion in local Children’s Plans. (Libraries can use the National Library Youth Offer developed by the National Youth Libraries Board to help them put their case to be included in the local Children’s Plans.)
New money is available to back up these aspirations on an unprecedented scale; Aiming High is supported by an investment of £679m. The Myplace 4 fund provides £160m for libraries and other services to create joint use youth facilities. In two years’ time, the government will allocate a further £160m from unclaimed bank assets which it has designated for work with young people.5
At local authority level
At local authority level, there is a clear mandate to integrate services and give young people a more active role in determining the shape and extent of provision. Increasingly, young people themselves expect to be included in decision making. By 2018 they will decide on the allocation of at least 25 per cent of total local authority spending on resources for them.6 There is evidence that young people want more opportunities to develop their skills, knowledge and self-esteem. Did you know that more young people volunteer in their community than any other age group? 7
Library Offer to Young People
Public libraries have always been fantastic at engaging young children but find it harder when those children grow up to be teenagers. Yet in many ways libraries are in a really strong position to respond to this group. They are in every community, open when other services are closed, offering much of the support young people need in terms of reading and study space, dedicated teenage book and multimedia collections and free or cheap access to IT. Traditional ways of engaging younger children with reading just don’t work with this older group. Libraries need something new and they need to attract large numbers of teenagers. They have to appeal to the teenagers who would never join a reading group.
At the beginning of this year, the National Youth Libraries Board, a partnership between libraries, the youth sector and central government, launched the Library Offer to Young People.8 The board was established in 2006 to champion the role of libraries in supporting key government agendas, particularly Every Child Matters, Youth Matters, and Aiming High.
The library offer encapsulates the vision of what every young person should expect from libraries. It’s a great tool for talking confidently to youth sector partners about how libraries can make a difference. The offer highlights:
- young people’s participation in shaping the future of library services
- volunteering opportunities
- a place to develop citizenship skills and community engagement
- free, safe and welcoming spaces in the local community
- formal and informal learning support
- inspiring reading materials supported by positive activities
- information on education, training and careers.
The board also supported a joint Reading Agency and Local Government Association Aiming High conference in January. This inspired the thought-provoking Our Space: young people, reading and libraries, part of the New Thinking publications programme from the agency.9
We have been helping libraries to improve services using the Fulfilling their Potential (FtP) culture change programme. The government’s Framework for the Future strategy identified a need to invest in a major change programme for public libraries and young people. This investment resulted in the FtP programme, launched in 2004 handled by the agency and the Society of Chief Librarians (SCL).
FtP combines the nationally recognised Hear by Right standards framework (developed to help organisations assess and improve practice in the area of active involvement of children and young people)10 with the learning networks and resources needed to develop real and lasting improvement with and for young people. It builds on best practice and helps libraries to connect with new partners and young people. The FtP regional projects have created some really exciting work that has helped to shape the library youth offer.
Regional examples
In Yorkshire & the Humber, 11 authorities have come together to improve their services using the FtP Improvement Framework. Each project has listened to the voice of young people, with really positive results. Examples include North Yorkshire’s cross-authority project, Stages of Engagement. This involved teenagers with disabilities who devised and performed a drama showing their attitudes. This work has helped to drive forward changes in staff attitudes and the way in which library services are developed with young people. It has also created lasting partnerships with youth services and shown how every young person can be given a voice in developing their library service.
In North Lincolnshire, teenagers have worked in partnership with libraries to establish a library council for young people. This will enable them to have an active and equal role in decision-making about design, stock and services, starting with their new Grant Thorold Library in Grimsby.
The first year of the North West regional FtP programme brought more than 1,000 young people into libraries, and pioneered the strategic regional approach to embedding FtP. Twenty-one authorities developed innovative work to involve them in staff recruitment, designing facilities, selecting stock and volunteering. In its second year, the programme is set to achieve its ambitions to extend and join up young people’s involvement across the region, underpinned by a secure partnership with the Regional Youth Work Unit.
HeadSpace and groupthing – national projects
In addition to the regional projects, Fulfilling their Potential has led to the development of two groundbreaking national projects for young people – HeadSpace and groupthing. Each programme focuses on different aspects of young people’s participation.
HeadSpace 11 is a cool social environment where young people meet friends, enjoy a coffee, discover something new, join a group or have a debate with an author. It’s also the place where they might get a job, launch a campaign, choose stock, design spaces or create a display. They can in fact get involved in everything that goes on in the development, management and delivery of the services they want to use.
HeadSpace was created in 2006 under the working title Book Bars. It has been developed for libraries and youth centres using refurbishment or building of a new library as an impetus for youth participation. An award of £575,000 from the Big Lottery Young People’s Fund enabled us to get the project off the ground, working with 20 authorities across England. It has built a strong brand understood by young people, and has created a model for working in equal partnership with young people to respond to local needs. This is a great opportunity for libraries to create centres of excellence for delivering the national youth offer and for running creative reading activities that could eventually feed into the government’s Find Your Talent cultural offer.12
HeadSpace helps library services to achieve this through training and development that embeds the principles and learning from Fulfilling their Potential. It provides practical tools such as design and brand guidelines and a youth volunteering and accreditation framework. With just six sites launched in the first year of the project, levels of young people’s participation exceeded predictions, drawing in more than 350 teenagers who were not previous library users. Expectations are for that figure to more than double, with two more sites already open and another six sites to be launched by the end of the year.
The success of HeadSpace is down to its adaptability to local needs and the fact that young people drive the implementation. It succeeds in attracting and, more importantly, developing their interest. A total of 104 have taken up longer-term HeadSpace volunteering roles, designed around their initial interests, which will help them to develop their reading ability, self-confidence and skills. A great incentive for becoming a HeadSpace volunteer is the opportunity to gain an accredited award. Forty-five young people are working towards a Duke of Edinburgh or Youth Achievement Award. This will put them in a better position to go on to further education or employment.
Benefits for young people translate into benefits for libraries. HeadSpace can be used to draw in strategic partners from the youth sector and open up opportunities for shared delivery of services. HeadSpace authorities can demonstrate a response to the statutory requirement to provide positive activities for young people. They also extend the range of out-of-hours youth venues in the community.
Groupthing – new tool
HeadSpace will shortly have a virtual presence as part of groupthing.org. Being launched in October and moderated by Tempero, it is the Reading Agency’s major new tool to help public libraries engage young people in reading. It harnesses the two main drivers for young people today – being online, and generating and exchanging their own creative content.
Groupthing.org gives all libraries a space where young people can come together to share their interest in words, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A place that creates a fantastic buzz, bringing in more and more participants. Here’s where young people can form their own groups on unknown manga, or fantasy writer Robert Muchamore, start creating strange clusters around Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, imagine different endings, and create new genres for books older readers have never heard of.
They can upload images, create new cover art, storyboard their favourite animations, write lyrics, and form bands. They can blog and slam, get new serials on to their phones. In this space there will be passionate debate, ideas shared, and secret writers revealed. Authors, illustrators and games designers will drop in to chat, answer questions and offer suggestions.
Groupthing believes that readers are social, that they are creative and make choices. They use reading to achieve different goals. Some want to figure out where they want to go in life, some want the manual for a car to get them there. Groupthing.org allows libraries to engage with young people who have been turned off traditional forms of reading. It promotes all reading: magazines, non-fiction, manga, graphic novels, cross-over titles, plays, scripts, music (lyrics), short stories, film, games (on- and off-line), as well as fiction and poetry. Groupthing.org is what young people asked for.
Behind the scenes, the Reading Agency is using its high profile and proven track record to pull together a range of partners for groupthing. These include publishers, the National Youth Agency, the HeadSpace projects, the RNIB, and arts organisations such as Creative Partnerships and performance poetry organisation Apples & Snakes. You can get young people involved in usability testing, become an early adopter or subscribe to the site.
Subscribers will be able to:
- use the site across all public library terminals (on and off-site) for one year
- set up any number of group pages
- create ‘closed membership’ group pages
- add in events and links to library web pages and catalogue
- access ‘hidden’ professional pages which give support and advice
- engage with other children’s and young people’s professionals (youth centres, schools, literature and arts organisations) to develop an online community of professional practice.
Other Reading Agency initiatives
We are not only creating new online resources for young people. Their Reading Futures (TRF) (www.theirreadingfutures.org.uk), the workforce development programme supporting library staff in their work with young readers, now includes best practice resources to support FtP and HeadSpace with:
- an e-learning area
- an FtP learning pathway through the site for library managers
- a best practice area containing micro-sites with support resources for library programmes and activities.
Membership of the TRF programme provides access to a range of services including training for building frontline staff skills. Training can be run across a library service with a focus on FtP and involving young people.13
In the autumn we will bring together all our work for libraries and young people in a new modular youth innovation programme. By investing in this, libraries can begin to effect culture change that will put services in a strong position to deliver the full youth offer and prepare for the Find Your Talent cultural offer. All signed-up services will benefit from the very latest training and innovation coming out of FtP, including groupthing. Libraries with new buildings or refurbishments can also become HeadSpace partners. This provides real opportunities to work together across authorities and to deliver transformation locally.
A final word of advice from young people: ‘Find some young people and work with them, share ideas and see what a big difference they can make to your library service’ – Shaheen Mogradia and Khadija Ugradar, Bolton HeadSpace volunteers.
References and notes
1 Aiming High for Young People: a ten year strategy for positive activities. DCSF, 2007.
2 The Children’s Plan: building brighter futures. DCSF, 2007 (www.dfes.gov.uk/publications/childrensplan/).
3 PSA 14 is ‘Increase the number of children and young people on the path to success’. NI 110 is ‘Young people’s participation in positive activities’ and NI 6 is ‘Participation in regular volunteering’.
4 www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/prog_myplace.htm?regioncode=-uk&status=theProg
5 & 6 Aiming High Implementation Plan. DCSF, March 2008.
7 See 1.
8 www.readingagency.org.uk/young/library-offer-to-young-people/
9 New Thinking publications capture cutting-edge thinking and debate, with a linked blog at www.readingagency.org.uk/media
10 http://hbr.nya.org.uk/
11 HeadSpace information is at www.readingagency.org.uk/young/
12 Find Your Talent cultural offer information is available at www.creative-partnerships.org/offer
13 www.theirreadingfutures.org.uk/eLearning/trfTrainingprog.html
Claire Styles and Ruth Harrison are Senior Project Managers, and Liz Roberts is HeadSpace Project Manager, the Reading Agency.
Updated: 15 August 2008