Stirling Community Learning and Development (CLD) - Stirling Council: What did you learn?
This section contains observations and reflections from the partner’s involved in delivering the project, specifically detailing advice and guidance, challenges and solutions and lessons learned from their perspective.
Training is important to ensure staff are confident in this role. A focus on getting to know the young people and building relationships is key while ensuring the approach is flexible and adaptable to meet the needs of those involved.
It is important to have strong local knowledge of the schools involved and how to manage the expectations of key stakeholders while remaining true to the values and principles of a youth work approach.
Ensure each of the sessions are stand-alone and do not rely on participants to be there each week. This makes sure that children and young people do not feel they have missed out on sessions. As a result, it prevents barriers to participation due to them feeling like they have ‘fallen behind.’
The process of co-design could be challenging to manage competing expectations and priorities of stakeholders involved. However, the investment of time to explore different suggestions on how the project could be delivered was rewarding. Community Learning and Development (CLD) staff used their skills to ensure a shared consensus was reached which met the needs of all teams.
Finding a measurement tool that met everyone’s needs was important for the overall aim of the project. In this case, using the Youth Work Outcomes framework was successful at creating those shared outcomes.
Communication is key to any successful project and CLD staff worked well with schools to ensure they had the information they needed. The commitment of all staff in the partnership to improving outcomes for children and young people ensured information was shared consistently.
Allow more time for the project to develop and don’t expect change to happen instantly. Ensure all parties have a clear understanding of agreed outcomes from the outset. This would provide a shared understanding of what the partnership is trying to achieve, why the chosen approaches have the best chance of success, and what each person's role and responsibilities are.
Having a small but representative planning group would allow for progress to be monitored more readily and ensure decisions and corrective action can be taken timeously and meet the needs of all stakeholders.
Wellbeing and attendance are closely linked, and this project reinforced the understanding of staff involved in the project, that children and young people who have social and emotional challenges require additional support beyond traditional methods to encourage them to attend school.
Some children and young people may have attended school to only take part in the project. Further monitoring and tracking of individual's attendance would be required to determine if positive changes were sustained beyond the lifetime of the project. It’s also important to recognise that the positive impact may not be realised through attendance statistics alone and may be positively recognised in other areas that are building towards positive engagement with education. Measuring attendance in a more systematic way would help staff understand the trends that come with attendance difficulties and further develop the work of this project to respond accordingly.
