Transforming youth work provision: young person led digital innovation
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Information about the local authority
Cardiff Council Youth Service is aligned to the Education Directorate of Cardiff Council. The youth service in Cardiff provides a range of services for young people aged between 11 and 25 years of age. This includes open access youth work in communities, street-based youth work, youth mentoring support aligned to schools as well as a post-16 offer to support the Youth Engagement and Progression framework. The local authority has approximately 90,000 young people 11-25 years of age.
Youth work was a focus during Cardiff Council’s inspection in 2021. The team reported that in the 12 months prior to the inspection, the youth service developed an innovative digital youth work offer to deliver effective youth work to a broader range of young people in the city. This work is led by young people who worked effectively with youth workers and web developers to create a bespoke young person friendly website for the youth service. They collaborated with partners to determine the content and most appropriate digital platform for online activities. The local authority has recognised the value of this approach and has plans to further develop this aspect of youth work provision.
Context and background to the effective or innovative practice
The onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 meant that the Cardiff Youth Service team was unable to provide its usual face to face support. It was clear that the service, in line with youth organisations worldwide, was not ready to deliver services remotely. The online offer from Cardiff Youth Service was extremely limited, consisting of a few staff members using social media infrequently. This caused concern considering young people’s use of social media and digital technology in their everyday lives. This was a challenging situation and Cardiff Youth Service responded quickly to develop a strategy to continue its youth services with young people. The first step was to invest in a digital youth work team to support the work of the Youth Work Strategy for Wales.
The youth service team recognised that the development of any new team and new ways of working requires research. They researched the evidence base and best practice examples for digital youth work with much of this coming from countries in Europe. They used the philosophy of Digital EU which describes digital youth work as ‘proactively using or addressing digital media and technology in youth work. Digital youth work is not a youth work method – digital youth work can be included in any youth work setting (open youth work, youth information and counselling, youth clubs, detached youth work…). Digital youth work has the same goals as youth work in general and using digital media and technology in youth work should always support these goals. Digital youth work can happen in face-to-face situations as well as in online environments – or in a mixture of these two. Digital media and technology can be used either as a tool, an activity or a content in youth work. Digital youth work is underpinned by the same ethics, values and principles as youth work. Youth workers in this context refer to both paid and volunteer youth workers.’
Description of nature of strategy or activity
The digital team and wider youth service gathered the views of young people in communities. This ranged from formal consultation to informal discussion in youth work settings. From this work, youth workers identified a need for information about the services that Cardiff Youth Service offered as well as information on wider youth support services to be easily accessible to all in a single online site. Young people told youth workers that they wanted opportunities to develop digital skills including filming, photography and editing and to communicate with youth workers through access to social media and safe digital spaces.
To ensure that young people’s needs were being met the youth work team ensured that staff members had appropriate equipment and support to be able continue to communicate with young people through social media. To stay up to date with latest platforms young people are using there was need to review existing methods of communication and social media policies and develop and update a social media and digital media guidelines and procedures document for all staff members. One staff member noted that 85% of their engagement with young people in their role as a youth mentor is through social media due to young people being able to use Wi-Fi at little cost.
Young people have been central to digital developments in the service. They established quickly that the information about the Youth Service area on the corporate council website required updating. A website development group was set up and group members met weekly online to explore other websites and generate ideas about important features and site design. The group met with the web developer to outline their views, opinions and vision for the site. The site was improved and now contains useful information about Cardiff Youth Service, including a meet the team section, resources, membership forms, information about wider youth support services and a blog feature. The site can be accessed here. To ensure that young people can access the site, the street-based team explored how this can be done through QR codes. This system has been adopted throughout the service with the codes on posters and business cards.
What impact has this work had on provision and learners’ standards?
One young person has shared his experience of being involved in the website development group and discusses the impact it has had on him here. As a result of the website development, the young creator’s group was formed to enable young people to create and develop content for Cardiff youth services’ website, social media channels and to help them to develop new skills.
The young creators group has provided opportunities for the service to explore other forms of digital youth work. The digital team offered weekly online opportunities for young people to learn new skills in graphic design, blog writing, videography and editing. These have given young people the skills to express themselves confidently and share their views on matters that are important to them in addition to improving their skills in creating online content. Some of the work that the group has produced can be found using the following links.
Day in the Life Of the Class 2020/2021 – YouTube
Pride Month (cardiffyouthservices.wales)
The group has been in existence over a year now and members continue to meet weekly at Butetown youth club. Nearly all the young people that have engaged with this project are new members of Cardiff Youth Service. One young person provided the following feedback about his involvement of the group.
‘I found out about Cardiff Youth Service’s Young Creators from an email my headteacher sent out to the whole school. The things listed in the email included various topics of content creation, such as video editing, graphic design and blog writing – I was quite interested in the latter two at the time, so I signed up. That was exactly a year ago.
My time at the Young Creators has helped me to develop my skills in a wide variety of media – if it weren’t for this club, I probably would never have used a professional camera, edited using specialist software, written blogs for a website, hosted social media takeovers, interviewing members of the public – the list goes on.
Alongside this, I’ve also boosted my confidence slightly and made some new friends – and those are never bad things. Since I joined in November 2020, I have also volunteered to work for Cardiff Youth Service’s Gaming Club and have since produced a promotional video for them’. (Young Person).
This project was a catalyst for other work with young people. The youth service has offered opportunities for young people from different areas of Cardiff to get involved with similar projects. The youth service has many example of this work that young people are willing to share.
Members of the young creators group have volunteered to support others at a gaming club run by Cardiff Youth Service. The club provides a safe space for young people to meet up with like-minded people that were socially isolated from their peers. Through this young people have built relationships with others and improved their communication and teamwork skills while receiving support from youth workers. This online work has developed into face to face activity held at a bespoke gaming facility in Cardiff city centre. The club runs weekly at the venue and is accessed by a wide range of young people, including those who have physical disabilities, learning difficulties and emotional health issues. All current members are newly involved with Cardiff Youth Service. Referrals to this provision are made from wider youth support services for young people they work with.
How have you shared your good practice?
Throughout this time of exploring digital youth work approaches with young people there has been increased demand for sharing youth work practice to further develop youth workers and wider youth support services skills and abilities as well as being able to offer digital services and opportunities with young people.
Cardiff Youth Service’s digital team coordinated two events ‘digital spaces and approaches’ that consisted of a range of presentations focusing on digital youth work from our national, local and regional partners that covered the following themes: expressive arts, health and wellbeing, employment education and training, digital tools, QR codes, Gaming, Digital citizenship and wellbeing. The presentations covered their approach, outcomes, learning from their pieces of work and opportunities for questions and answers.
Two digital conferences took place, the first for the youth support services in Cardiff and then this was followed up regional partners and was attended by 174 professionals. One attendees feedback from the day ‘Online content, the struggles of engaging young people during a difficult time (it was nice to hear that others were faced with the same barriers as working from home you can sometimes feel you are the only one) ideas for engaging young people digitally and widen knowledge of support in other areas’ (Youth Worker). https://www.cardiffyouthservices.wales/images/pdf_doc/Digital_spaces_and_approaches_for_young_people_report-7-compressed.pdf
and the resources from the events can be found here
In addition to this event the service has also offered staff members opportunity to develop their digital skills through learning how to use ‘Mentimeter’, ‘Quizzes’, ‘Canva’ all great digital engagement tools that are available for free. We have also been able to work with ‘Wise Kids’ to offer all staff training in digital citizenship and wellbeing. Next financial year there is an on-going commitment to further develop teams’ skills and capacity to develop digital youth work and we will be building upon our existing relationship with ‘Youth Link Scotland’ to offer a range of training opportunities in addition specialist support our digital team can offer teams and individuals.
Further information and references
Children and parents: media use and attitudes report 2020/21 (ofcom.org.uk)
DFI-Youth-Report.pdf (nominet.uk)
NC0218021ENN.en_.pdf (youth.ie)