Helping young people

The percentage of young people not in education, training or employment (NEET) in the South West was 5.5 per cent in November 2004 – down from nearly 13 per cent in just one year. This has been achieved in large part through our support of the work carried out by the Connexions Partnerships across the region.

Over the past year a lot of our attention has been focussed on changes to the Government-funded Millennium Volunteers initiative, which encourages young people aged between 18 and 24 to get involved in local community projects.

GOSW is responsible for the successful transfer of the project and contract management of Millennium Volunteers to the Connexions Partnerships across the region, by March 2006. And in doing so, we have to make sure that delivery is not affected, performance targets are achieved, value for money is secured and the quality of provision is increased.

Connexions Devon and Cornwall was the first in the region to take on this role, and was a trailblazer in more than one sense. With our help, it adopted the first consortium-based approach to Millennium Volunteers delivery in the country, pulling together all of the projects on its patch into a collaborative group.

We began by identifying the readiness, capacity and capability of Connexions Cornwall and Devon to take on the leadership of the potential consortium. Then we discussed the benefits and features of this approach with individual projects and got their backing. We also organised joint meetings to develop a strategy, construct an action plan and to identify required outcomes and outputs. Finally, we agreed the resource allocations and targets. Overall, we facilitated seamless transitional arrangements.

The results have been impressive. The consortium approach has led to greater partnership working, and we have evidence to show that this has improved performance. Although it is not solely attributable to Millennium Volunteers, Connexions Cornwall & Devon have reduced NEETs in its area by 15.2% over the course of twelve months.