 Good afternoon, everyone, and a very warm welcome to the Education and Skills Committee focus group session on youth work. I'm delighted to be joined this afternoon by my colleagues Daniel Johnson, MSP, Ian Gay, MSP and Beatrice Wishart. I'm Claire Adamson, convener, and we are delighted to be joined by Tim Frew of YouthLink Scotland, Mark McGeekie, Head of Partnership and Sustainability at Youth Scotland, Kaledi Nunn, Intercultural Youth Scotland, Kerry Riley, Chief Executive and National General Secretary, YMCA, Dave Spence, Chief Executive Scottish Outdoor Education Centre, Neil Young, we're hoping he'll be joined us if he hasn't already, Youth Team Leader of the Church of Scotland, Katie Docherty, Chief Executive of Scout Scotland and Louise Goodlad, Senior Head of Partnerships, the Princess Trust in Scotland. And I'd like to invite someone from, it's Tim who's going to give us a briefing on the YouthLink Scotland report. Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, firstly, can I thank the Education and Skills Committee members attending the session today and for their welcome there as well from Claire. It's great to see from my point of view how the Scottish Parliament and its committees are continuing to function and provide this kind of support, scrutiny and challenge that is really important in the democracy in these unprecedented times. I wanted to talk briefly about our report, which was a very early look at the COVID-19 crisis and its impact on youth work and young people through the lens of Scotland's youth work sector leaders. And I want to thank all of them who contributed to it. The survey was a high response and it combined local authority managers' views and those of the voluntary sector chief officers. And before I attempt to summarise the key findings, I think a bit of background is important. Before this pandemic, at the end of 2019, the sector had identified significant cuts, millions of pounds in terms of youth work services since 2007 and had through the invest in youth work campaign called on local and national government and all funders to protect and grow the youth work sector. And the campaign was noted in Parliament and had two specific calls to strengthen the statutory basis of youth work and to return investment in youth work services to pre austerity levels. This issue was flagged at the cross party group for children and young people as well in February, which was attended by Richard Lockhead. And in discussions with CLD partners and the Deputy First Minister and other Scottish government officials, a number of these issues have been in discussion. The commitment by the Scottish government to work with the sector to co-develop a national youth work strategy building on the legacy of the year of young people is a matter of record. And we continue to work with officials around these. In terms of the report, four key things to note. First and foremost, this report was published soon after the crisis began and it paints a concerning picture of the impact of COVID-19 on young people. So one in two youth work leaders believe that there will be a detrimental impact on young people's mental health. And this echoes the lockdown lowdown survey, which Scottish Youth Parliament, young Scott and ourselves did with two and a half thousand young people. I think you heard about that at your last meeting, so I won't go into detail on that, but two and five young people being moderately are extremely concerned about the room well being and 96% of young people worrying about the impact of the coronavirus on their future. And this echoes what youth work leaders have been telling us in terms of issues of isolation, anxiety, concerns about learning loss and social interaction. And the youth work sector leaders have also been identifying particular challenges for specific cohorts of young people such as those in poverty, LGBTI young people, BAME young people and looked after young people and those with particular health issues. The second thing I think the report highlights that is in the midst of this crisis, the youth work sector really has stepped up, pulled together and shown tremendous agility and resilience. In a recent letter from the Scottish Government, it was commending the CLD and youth work sector for that agility, resilience and adaptability to respond to the needs of young people in their communities. And there's been a range of things on the go, food banks, coordinating community hubs support, promoting volunteering, youth participation and voice stepping in for other sectors such as social workers when some of their staff have been furloughed, repositioning services in terms of digital learning and guidance and the report notes that 92% of our sector have been offering online services of some kind and they repositioned their offer very quickly around that. We've also connected with vulnerable children and young people and provided counselling and guidance. Now we know that less than 1% took up the offer of support children and young people in schools initially, but it didn't stop youth work reaching out through detached work and through digital services to many of those young people. A third thing to note then is the challenge of digital inclusion and this has been well documented elsewhere and there are a number of government initiatives around that such as Connecting Scotland. But for the purposes of this report it is worth noting that despite the youth work sector's laudable efforts to reposition services and some support around training, there hasn't been a big investment to support that development in the industry. And 60% of local authority managers identified digital barriers to providing services to young people and some of these are self-imposed barriers so things like Zoom and other tools that youth workers could be using with young people being kind of barred in terms of the use. So I have written to the Deputy First Minister and the local government directorate about this issue and kind of waiting a response on that. The fourth thing to note and it's the most important is that there is a significant and stark reality facing the sector in terms of funding and I can't overstate that. So the sector has been agile and responsive but it can't be maintained because there is an income gap. So national voluntary youth work organisations in Scotland are facing an immediate income loss of 20.5 million. On top of this over 70% of youth work leaders in both local authorities and voluntary organisations believe that there will be cuts to services and budgets after COVID-19 in local authority budgets and in the voluntary sector. So it's a real concern for the future as well as the medium term. Ensuring this continuity of business and longer term viability of services is absolutely crucial for the young people of Scotland. A number of voluntary organisations have taken up the opportunity to furlough some staff but actually we need them delivering activities and services and if the income was there that could be happening. Local authority staff have been amazing and continued in many different ways but in some instances they have been diverted into other activity and we really want them to be doing youth work. Now imagine there will be some scratching of heads. Government have invested £350 million to councils, charities, businesses and community groups. There is the third sector resilience fund but I think what you'll hear today is a big chunk of the problem for the voluntary sector in particular has been the loss of activity income, fundraising income and investments have declined. And this has led to some organisations being concerned that they might need to shut outdoor centres. Unfortunately the criteria for accessing the third sector resilience fund hasn't plugged some of these gaps. So this is an issue for local government, national government but also charitable funders as well. Some funders have been hugely flexible in terms of their resourcing but they're still concerned for the medium and longer term. Will some of the emergency response to COVID-19 also be there when we're looking for youth work funding as part of our core business. So to summarise there is a hole in the bucket and the watering can of funding earmarked to support the initial crisis isn't going to fill all of that. And in some cases it's not being poured into where we need it. So I want to finish with some questions. What is youth work's value to Scotland and the education of young people particularly? And how might the youth work sector respond in terms of especially education recovery taking us beyond the narrow definition of blended learning? Now we know that youth work has a social return of investment of at least £656 million and up to £2 billion in Scotland through research that we've done. But we need to think about the cost in terms of young people's mental health and wellbeing, the increasing poverty related attainment gap, support into employment for the future. So these are all things that we want to be thinking about. And finally, I think it's worth remembering that for all of the youth work can contribute to Scotland's civic recovery. There is an issue of increasing demand for youth work services and we don't want a decreasing supply. Youth work first and foremost is about providing a safe space for young people to have some fun with their peers and a trusted loving adult supporting them. And I think we need that now more than ever. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. And can I just say thank you very much for the report and the work that went into that has been really helpful. I think the questions that we wanted to cover, I think I've been distributed to everyone. So I'd just be looking for people to come in on those key points of the impact, the future impacts on young people. And just a situation, if you have any issues, particularly for your own area and to my colleagues, if you indicate as well, I'll bring you in if you've got supplementaries during the course of that. So I'm seeing an indication from Katie Docherty first. Thanks, Katie. Hi there, thanks very much and thanks, Tim, for that introduction. I will mostly focus my contribution at this point on the last point that Tim raised around the funding gap issue. But before I get to that, just to say that Scouting has, like all of the other charities here, we have adapted and we've moved our programme online. We're delivering a fantastic programme online and we know as well, comparing the experience many people having with education, how important as well is that that online programme includes a direct interaction between adults and children and between children and young people and their friends. We've actually done a deal with Zoom and we've provided a free pro account to every one of our groups across Scotland so that they can have their beavers and cubs in Scouting extended sessions online on a weekly basis. And we're now delivering our recruitment and our training of our adults online. Our groups on the ground have been able to access the Business Support Fund if they have premises. Now, but this again, this illustrates the difference in how the impact is affecting young people in that it's not equal. So those groups in the areas of deprivation are unlikely to have premises and are therefore not able to access that kind of funding. We've worked with the Ganache Trust and we're now providing a resilience fund of our own to our groups to help them in these kind of areas. But our main problem is our national infrastructure and that's where we provide safety, safeguarding, adult training, insurance, all these critically important but not very exciting things that organisations need to have in order to run safely for young people. And we have exhausted every avenue trying to get funding support to fill the gap with the money that we've lost from being unable to trade, run our outdoor centres or fund raise. The Scottish Government have confirmed we've been rejected for the third sector resilience funds and we've also now had written confirmation that no outdoor centres in Scotland will receive any support. 37 centres got together to speak to the Scottish Government on the 29th of May and we got that confirmed in writing I think on Friday that there will be no financial support there. So we as an organisation are currently consulting with our staff with a view to reducing our headcount by 50% over the next couple of months and that is phase one. If we cannot operate, if we cannot open our centres and we cannot resume face-to-face scouting, we will have to cut further and we'll be looking at reducing our headcount by a total of 70% to 80%. That's the reality of this funding gap and whilst for a while local groups will continue meeting as those adults turn over and how we train them and so on, it won't just be that they can no longer go camping or go to residential centres, the adults won't be trained to take them for hikes in the Pentland Hills and things like that. So the future will be a lot of chippy walks but outdoor and adventure will decrease substantially if we can't safely train our adults to do it and that is the absolute reality. And we're one organisation and I won't speak for others but I know that many other similar organisations are days away from making the same types of announcements that we are. So that's where we are at the moment. Thank you Katie and thank you for laying out the position at the moment for the Scouts. I do have Cary and Khaledda waiting to come in but Daniel has indicated, Daniel do you want to go in briefly with your issue? John Mewt. There we are. Great, sorry about that. So a couple of brief follow-ups. One is on a very practical level Katie you mentioned there that you're rolling out Zoom. We've had a lot from local authorities that the difficulties they've had in terms of using electronic platforms and they normally cite safety. I'm guessing that you've got around that and it may not be to go into detail now but it would be useful if you could share the details of kind of how that's being deployed because certainly there's practice there that clearly is being missed by other places. But on the substantive point there in terms of the confirmation that you received on Friday, can you just, what engagement have you had from government, what contact have you had with ministers regarding your situation? OK, so we've been repeatedly writing to ministers since early April. Roughly it's taking about six to eight weeks before we get any response and most of them have simply told us to apply to the third sector resilience fund. Even though our letter was pointing out that we've been rejected from it and we were looking for discussions about whether that could be widened. The only other interaction that we've had is that we were part of a large sector meeting of outdoor centres with many organisations which met with government officials on the 29th of May. Now that is being described I've seen in letters from ministers as ministers meeting with Scouts, Guides and Boys Brigades to identify supports and how they're looking at what support we can provide them. But that was a sector-wide meeting specifically about the crisis in the outdoor education centre market and we got a letter from those officials on Friday confirming that there would be no funding support and advising us to apply for loans. So that's the interactions we've had with ministers, although the children and young persons minister has still not replied to us at all. OK, I'm going to bring Kerry Riley in from... Sorry, I'm CA. I'm CA, thank you, Kate. Thank you very much and maybe if I can just come in on the back of Katie and just to give a bit of clarity about your third sector resilience fund. The reason why so many of us have been rejected is because we had more than three months of reserves so we were well managed charities and effectively one of the conditions for the third sector resilience fund was you had to have less than three months reserves, which is normally a minimum, that's what's required for a well managed charity. But I think the other challenge is that the outdoor centres are not only used by the Scouts and the Guides and when they're used by so many other youth groups, I'm sure many of you will remember your time in youth organisations when you went on residentials and the loss of these centres would be absolutely devastating to youth work to that bit around personal development and support for young people. But I think picking up on what Tim was saying about one of the big challenges that we're finding for YMCA's is the earned income challenge. So, for example, a lot of our YMCA's run out of school care after school care childcare programmes, which are an income stream for them that then allow them to do youth work and to support their core funding. And I think they're really frustrated in terms of not being able to see clarity about when childcare can resume but also up against the challenge that because that's been devolved to local authorities, they're at the end of the queue behind all of the local authority services and so feel like in some places they're not getting that collaborative approach that should be happening in terms of service delivery. And I think it's all very well having a third sector resilience fund, but in the same way as the Scottish Government is arguing around furlough, there needs to be a recovery funding as well so that when the pipeline of income that is generated and earned income isn't there, there needs to be a way that these organisations, the third sector youth work organisations can have some recovery in order to be able to look to the future. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to bring in Caledah. She'll appear on the screen as maith. Please rely on that for me. Hello. Hi. Hi. I'm not sure if you can see me because my green light's not on. We can't at the moment. I'm not sure if there's anyone who could offer you some technical support with that. I think video sharing is disabled by the administrator. We do have support on the call. I'll bring in Mr Gray and if any other technical staff could be looking to see if there's a reason for that or maybe message in the chat to help Caledah out and I'll go to Ian Gray. You're on mute, Ian. Still on mute. Apologies. I just wanted to pursue Katie's point there a little bit more of that. I mean, that's very disappointing to hear and as Katie knows, we've also written on behalf of organisations including the Scouts to the First Minister, but I don't think we've had any answer to that either yet. So, it really is a pretty poor response, pretty shabby response, but I wanted to just get to a bit more of the detail of the position that the Scouts find themselves in. I mean, two things to ask. One is, I presume these staff are currently furloughed, but I also assume though that the organisation has to give them into a consultation period. You're considering redundancy, so it's not a case of being able to wait until the furlough scheme ends. Am I right, is the question. And the second thing is obviously the most important thing is the people themselves and what's happening to them. But the centres are physical centres as well. So what measures are you going to be forced into taking with regard to the centres because presumably if you have to dispose of them then the situation becomes completely unrecoverable. So, can I ask everybody not speaking to put themselves on mute please and I'll bring Katie back. Okay, so we currently have 80% of our staff furloughed. We are trying not to lose the full 80%. So the initial consultation is around reducing the staffing by 50%. And that's not just centre staff. That is other, that is, you know, there will be youth workers that will go in that as well because when furlough ends, we are then responsible for the full costs of employing those staff. And because we cannot generate any income this year, and because we are concerned about our ability to generate a membership fee next year, we have to reduce our costs in order to ensure that we still exist next year. It's that simple. We have a duty to make sure that scouting is still there. So projecting ahead whilst we don't know when we can open our centres, we don't know when we can resume a face-to-face scouting, we have to make some assumptions and that is that we have to reduce our costs in order to not run out of money. Because when we run out of money, you know, the most we could ever get out of the resilience fund is 100,000. And that will keep us going for about three weeks. So we have to reduce our costs. And yes, you're quite right. We have to do a consultation. So we are consulting with staff just now. We're taking our time over it. We're going, you know, as long as we can, because we still hope that at some point we might actually be able to resume operating. And if we can resume operating, we can generate money and then, you know, we don't have to lay all these people off. But it might, where we get to by October is if we aren't operating and the furlough scheme is end. And if we can't see when the centres can reopen, then we will have to properly close them and start disposing of assets in order to protect, you know, the rest of the organisation. So our current cuts have these as theoretically viable should we be allowed to operate them. But when and how that will ever happen is completely unclear. Can I bring Khaledda back in? We're not going to be able to see her, but we can hear her hopefully. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry you can't see me. I think it's because I'm on my daughters account. I've not used the teams yet. So thank you. Can I just start as difficult with me for me to begin without mentioning what black people are experiencing in the world and the trauma that has not only been seen but completely felt by young black Scots in Scotland. Into cultural is Scotland makes a plea to keep in your mind throughout our COVID-19 contribution that the devastating impact this is having on our young black and brown Scots. I need to begin pointing out that the current reports or surveys do not include the genuine voices and experiences of Bain youth workers or Bain young people in Scotland. We have clear evidence that decision makers, the learning and wider community, including Scotland's youth provision continually overlooks Bain young people, which results in tokenism and decorating, which ultimately has a devastating impact on Bain young people in Scotland. It is clear that there's a gap in providing cultural appropriate research to gather the experience and perceptions of Scottish Bain young people. It would be in the committee's interest to extend the review, have a series of committee meetings to have specific focus for Bain young people. And although with great intentions, white led organisations are talking on behalf of Bain groups and this must stop if we want to see a change for Bain young people in Scotland. If Parliament is committed to a human rights based approach, we must speak directly to Bain young people with lived experiences. Bain groups don't have equitable right to sustainable funding from the national budget and there is limited funding dedicated for COVID, anti-racist mental health services and education, which has contributed to the lack of availability of resources devoted to young Bain young people. The programme of austerity is institutionalised racist policy, which has been passed directly to us. It would be in the committee's interest to extend this review. Organisations who work effectively with Bain groups are not funded appropriately and they're not given the opportunity to provide recommendations and sustainable services, especially during COVID and with the murders of innocent black people. There is lack of cultural appropriate services and role models in youth work and education. Bain voices are not being supported or heard. We need to recognise and acknowledge power dynamics and equity in services provided. Intercultural youth Scotland are here and have the genuine voices of Bain young people, but we may not be around in six months due to having no funding to continue. We need support to ensure that our current services continues. Intercultural youth Scotland has been working in consultation with our youth anti-racist ambassadors and their peers during current COVID-19 crisis. We are having to commission a robust report on the impact of COVID-19 with particular focus on education and the 16 plus young Bain school leavers. Although this work is not funded, the report and recommendations will be available at the end of July. Local authority grants for children and families have not funded adequate Bain youth provision. It's almost zero for 14 to 19 year olds despite intercultural youth Scotland's campaigning over the last year. Even before COVID and the murders of innocent black people, councillors highlighted a gap in Bain youth service for 13 to 19 year olds. But despite meetings, deputations, highlighting several case studies of racist hate crimes and attacks in Scottish schools, evidence of underreporting, evidence of teachers not following procedures. Local authority failed to dedicate any funding in this area for the next three years and in particular services with a focus on black young people. Apart from IYS into cultural youth Scotland, this service is non-existent and with the impact of COVID-19 and the murders of innocent black people, this will have devastating consequences and there seems to be no targeted interventions for this. Thank you. Thank you, Khalida. Please, we will look forward to getting a copy of that report in July for the committee and it will be shared with other committee members. Can I bring in Dave Spence, please? Hello there, thank you. I hope you can see and hear me alright. I just wanted to partly reiterate what Katie was saying there. We have also furloughed 90% of our staff, but we have also this week embarked on our consultation about the likelihood of redundancies. You're right about the centres, Mr Gray. We have a year of trading. We would have generated 1.4 million this year. A great deal of that would have gone towards the rolling maintenance of the centres. That has been wiped out through lack of trading this year and we don't expect it to get much better. There is a suggestion that things might come on stream more quickly. We might be able to open again more quickly than we thought. However, I don't think that necessarily takes into account the lack of confidence amongst parents and perhaps teachers and other youth work professionals about taking children away this year. We could really be going for a year without work. There are things that we are trying to do. We are trying to set up other things, but it's unlikely to make up the shortfall given that the period from spring to summer is the period when we generate about 70% of our income. We are very easily affected by this. I would just like to say that the outlook for the residential sector prior to lockdown was not very good. I think that several centres had closed or were signalling that they were to close. We are definitely staring at the demise of the residential experience for young people in Scotland. Once the centres have gone, they will not come back. We are unlikely to have the money to bring them back. It is a particularly serious situation, but there are specific reasons why it has been in decline. I would be happy to talk about that at some time if you wish. Thank you. Is that okay? Sorry, that was me. I was on mute. Sorry. Can I ask everyone else to mute if you are not speaking and bring in Louise Goodlatt please? I just want to echo what others have said in terms of the impact on income, specifically that unrestricted income that charities so rely on, as Katie said, for those central support services within a charity. That is certainly where we at the Princess Trust have seen a huge impact from the current crisis. I would agree that we have not been able to access the government support either, not through resilience fund. We also did try for the wellbeing fund, but I suppose as we often see, the wellbeing fund felt very much for new activity and very much that piece of the activity itself, not necessarily the support that goes around that activity to make it happen, which so often nobody wants to pay for the boring parts of the organisation, but without those boring parts, the exciting new innovative activity at the front line can actually happen. I would agree with that. I just wanted to go back to some of the stuff that Tim spoke about from the report and just specifically in terms of impact on the types of young people that we work with, similar to others, we very much pivoted to digital delivery and we are really welcome that there has been a lot of focus on digital poverty and device poverty, but I think it's just to highlight that for many young people, there is more barriers than that in itself. My fear is that there is a sense of getting access to a laptop or an iPad, then the problem is solved. I think what we are seeing is that young people are struggling in many cases. They find it this quite an intense experience to be in these kind of, especially if it's one to one, but even in this kind of set up, they're reluctant to put their camera on, they're finding it quite an alien way to communicate, so we're struggling with engagement with some vulnerable young people who just aren't comfortable with that. I think it's really important that we, and we also must remember that some young people don't have a safe or private space at home where they get time and the luxury to do this kind of exercise, so that's something we've also found. So we're really keen to really look at face to face again, how do we get those young people, a blended approach is fantastic and I think it's really exciting the opportunity to do more on digital, but I think we have to remember that it's going to be key that we're able to do both. And that's something that we're looking at and I think there's questions around key worker status for youth workers, just getting a sense of some kind of advice and guidance that's shared across the sector in terms of getting back into centres. And then the other thing just to mention if I'm not jumping ahead was, I think there was a question that was around education and how we can have youth work as part of every, part of every young person's offer. And I think there's just, obviously I recognise that for everyone and for schools, this is an incredibly trying time. They're trying to manage current student cohorts, they're trying to think what is the world going to look like post summer. But I think, you know, we actually got advised by a local authority just this week. Don't ring schools. They don't want to hear right now because they're too busy. And I feel like there's a real gap out there in terms of somebody who is making sure that we join up that youth work offer. You know, you've companies, you've organisations like the Prince's Trust, putting a lot of investment in time and energy into some fantastic digital products. And I know lots of us are doing that in digital delivery. And it seems a shame if the schools are trying to reinvent the wheel as well to kind of re-engage young people who they will have lost because of this period of disengagement. There will be young people that just won't come back because they've had, you know, four months of not being part of that routine and not having that goal setting. So it feels to me like we're really missing an opportunity to really innovate, to use some of this learning and youth work to really support young people after the summer. But certainly for us as an organisation, we're just really struggling to get through the door with just not getting engagement. And it's kind of who could be that conduit to help education look outside of itself for solutions and not just lay it all on the schools, but they have to solve everything themselves. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Louise. Obviously, we've been looking at curriculum for excellence for a long time and hearing how, you know, non-traditional qualifications are as important to a young person's development as other areas. So we've been looking at schools that are providing Duke of Edinburgh Awards as part of the curriculum, you know, third sector organisation being in there, being part of the key delivery of the schools. So I'd be interested to hear as you come in whether or not that has stalled in from what Louise has just said. It looks like it may have stalled completely in many places. I've also got another question from a colleague, Daniel. I'll bring Daniel in just to add those two points and then we'll move on and I'll bring Kerry in after that. So Daniel. It was really a very similar point to yours, Claire. I'm going to be interested to hear from broadly from people here what contact they have had from, you know, whether it's at local authority level or from government level in terms of the ability of your organisations either to provide point expertise or indeed to supplement the capacity within the education system itself. I mean, obviously there's a lot of focus at the moment in terms of, you know, the physical capacity, but also supervision and teaching capacity within our schools in terms of blended learning. If no one is talking to you, I would suggest that slightly disappointing. Is that the case that there hasn't been contact or have some organisations been contacted? Yeah, I think Louise has answered that already. I'm going to bring Tim in just on that point please, thanks. You know, great question and I think it is important to say that there's a lot of, you know, collaboration going on between youth work and schools and we have many youth workers that were part of those community hubs as well and they were brought in as well as teachers doing that kind of work. In terms of the pupil equity fund and the kind of, you know, listening of the sort of arrangements around some of that funding to, you know, be responsive. I guess what we've been looking for is a discussion around how to do that. So what we have had is and I've written to the Scottish Government about this about the lack of our involvement in the education recovery planning groups. And I have had a response to say, you know, that that question has been asked back within government. How are we more involved? How are we more involved? But it was a little bit after the effect. So in terms of blended learning, in terms of a recovery curriculum, some of the key strands where a youth work offer, especially with the summer programmes and the, you know, detached and evening activity and after school activity and STEM activity and award programmes like Duke of Edinburgh, youth achievement awards. Many of these programmes have been repositioned digitally as well. So there's a real opportunity to make more use of that. And I feel from my, you know, conversations with government officials, it's one of these ones where they've moved fast and haven't involved us. You know, but I do think that, you know, I've made the point and I'm hoping that that will, you know, we'll get more involved in some of those discussions. But where it really has to happen is at a local level. So we have, as a sector, met together a COVID-19 recovery planning group to talk about the youth work and schools offer again to build on some of the work that we were doing with the Scottish Government around tackling the poverty-related attainment gap and the capacity and the impact of the sector around that. I suppose all of these things are dependent on the funding question again. And so it takes us back to that place if we've got local authority workers doing food parcels and food delivery rather than kind of informal education support. You know, it's both those things together we need. We need more. This demand and for both is a demand to help out in that very emergency way in terms of food and food poverty. But equally, we need to be stepping into the space of informal education and learning and a lot of discussion as I'm sure this committee is aware of around blended learning. And I think what we want to the point we want to get across is that we're not a kind of stockgap or a filler for for schools. You know, we all want schools to come back fully, you know, fledged. But just remember that it's also youth work as well. This is part of the wider educational offer. So that kind of experience, the cultural experience, the link to sports, the achievement that can happen for young people and the link into transition and employment programs as well. Youth work, you know, Princess Trust, many other organisations, not even here that we're mentioning, have a big role to play in that in that space. Can I bring Mark in who wanted to comment on the face to face aspect of what's happening and getting back to that. Hi, thank you very much. Yeah, it was just building on the point that was made earlier about young people access and so many services at the moment by digital means. And ultimately, that has been a great way in which youth workers in many of youth Scotland's member youth groups in particular have been able to continue engaging with young people. But what we are increasingly finding is that in itself is causing a bit of digital burnout, I suppose, for one way of describing it for young people, they're getting turned off by absolutely everything being done over a screen. And I suppose one of the concerns that we have as we move into hopefully schools returning in some way, shape or form in August, either by part time blended learning or hopefully if it does become full time. How are we preparing young people to return into that environment when they have been out of it for a particularly long period of time in an environment that where they're only engaging with people in this digital way, which I think we would all agree is quite alien to most of us. It's not how we would choose to operate as our everyday interactions, particularly when it comes to youth work, which is primarily a face to face activity is about the relationships that are developed over time by being alongside young people and the youth workers. And I suppose one of the things that a lot of our members are struggling with in many ways is this lack of clarity around guidance on what they can do when, you know, for example, and it's relevant to colleagues that are on the call as well. If you have a fully outdoor nursery, then you can be delivering your activities at the moment. But if you're delivering outdoor activities as a youth group, you're not able to do that at the moment because there is no guidance which says that you can do that. And while there was some commentary last week about it's not possible to provide guidance for every sector in every situation, that has ramifications for safe and effective operation of youth groups or indeed many organisations. For example, if something goes wrong and your insurance asks you, do you, were you operating within the government guidelines at that point in time, you cannot say yes. So therefore, you'll be operating in an unsafe way. And that puts the future of your youth group small, medium or large at risk. So there's two bits really, two points that I'd like to make in that sense is how do we ensure that we can return to some form of face to face activity as soon as possible, particularly where there are youth groups across the country of all shapes and sizes who want to deliver summer programmes and who want to work with young people to enable them to return into school, whatever that does look like, and how can we ensure that they do so and are supported to do so with clear guidance as early as possible. Because I know there is guidance being worked on, but nothing seems to be addressing these fundamental issues as yet. Okay, thank you. Sorry is that okay. Sorry. Yeah, I was saying there's quite a few topics in the chat now, but if you could stick to deprivation and digital exclusion, I think Kerry wanted to come in at that point. Yes, thank you. So just to give an example of digital exclusion, I think for those young people who are still at school, there has been an opportunity for them to get devices through schools, but there is concern about the 16 plus age group. Young people who are maybe not in education employment or training. And then, as a concrete example, in Paisley alone, our YMCA, which operates just on the next to Ferguson Park, knows of 108 16 plus young people who have no access to a digital device or to data, and that's just one community. And I think there is a gap there in terms of how those young people are being resourced. Paisley is a very good example of where the local authority has engaged with the third sector in discussions around contribution to learning, particularly because that YMCA is doing a lot of work around STEM education. But in answer to Daniel's question and coming in on what Louise was saying, our experience is not good across the board in terms of local authorities considering extending their school estate, as was in the guidance. And you know, we have some YMCA's with big community halls that could be used as additional resource and space. And the majority of the experience would be that it is very difficult to engage with the schools. And I think whereas Tim said that youth work has been engaging with the schools, I think my argument would be youth workers have, but they've tended to be local authority youth workers. And the third sector has again, unfortunately, been excluded in many situations from that engagement at this point in time. Thank you. Katie, you wanted to come back in. Are you still on mute? Are you still on mute? So, two points. First, following up on terms of what Mark was saying about when can we engage face to face. I mean, I was in a meeting this morning with my colleagues from England, Wales and Northern Ireland. And in England and Northern Ireland, they are expecting to be able to resume face to face provision on the 4th of July. And they are getting guidance and assistance with developing frameworks and tools from their respective governments. So that was quite interesting that they expected to be able to move so quickly. But the other point I wanted to raise was about how the impact isn't equal and how it is worse in areas of deprivation. And I think it will get worse as it carries on. So young people in areas of deprivation are currently digitally excluded. But as we move to face to face provision, that's where the provision is going to fail first. So as school lets are not available. So if you don't have your own premise and you normally meet in the school or the church or the community centre, these places are not going to be opening back up to any kind of community provision, except for apparently Edinburgh who've made an announcement today that they are going to look at different buildings for community groups. Other places across Scotland are telling us, forget it, it's just not going to happen. We've got to clean the schools for the kids coming back next week so you can't come in. So these are the areas and we've spent the last four or five years establishing a lot of new provision in areas of deprivation, but they don't have their own halls. So we're now trying to look at our wider estates to see how can we share that. But geographically sometimes they're just not located in the same places. So there's definitely an unequal impact. But the one place sector that's really keen to speak to us is private skills. They are very keen for us to support them with relaunching their Duke of Edinburgh provision and upscaling their teachers to deliver outdoor education. So another example of where the impact is very unequal for our young people. Thank you, Katie. My colleague Ian was wanting to come in with a supplementary question. I think that's you, Ian. Well, you're backing me out. You went off mute. That's you. There's a bit of lag, and then you try again and you switch yourself off again. Sorry. I wanted to follow up this point. Mark started on it and Katie referred to it too about just to be clear that there's no provisional day or indicative date or any indication at all of when face-to-face work might return. And also no guidance about how that might happen. But I wanted to ask Mark, you said guidance was being worked on. And I just wondered by who, where is that happening? Is it OK to come back in? Well, we know that there is a CLD sector specific guidance being developed and we have been contributing to that. However, it doesn't go into, it's fairly big picture. It doesn't go into the specific detail that small community-based youth groups really need to know about what they can do with who and when. And to the extent that we have been producing guidance to try and distill some of the national guidance and make it relative for our member youth groups. But we still lack that information that Katie's just provided. A shared has been provided south of the border more recently. Now that's not to say that it, yeah. I don't know why we can't have some of that detail around a date that just says we can aim for this when there are other sectors with youth work that are having that. It would certainly be helpful at this point in time. I'm going to bring Khaledda back in on the young people and the future impacts. Thank you. So, for us, what we're seeing is that there's inadequate culturally appropriate youth services for BAME young people across Scotland who don't engage with current services. BAME young people are in a dangerous situation which will cause structural disadvantage to deepen and implicit bias which could influence a teacher's decision to give a pupil a lower mark on assessments throughout the year and influence their final estimated grades. There is evidence that young BAME Scots will face challenges receiving estimate grades from teachers. Schools in less affluent areas will not have the previous performance privileges. As a result, there's greater risk of disadvantaged pupils from lower socio-economic background and from ethnic minority backgrounds. It's already highlighted in the race equality action plan before COVID and the murders of black innocent people. Young BAME Scots are more at risk of leaving school with no positive destination and no support to assist in making timely and positive decisions as there is lack of culturally appropriate street-style services to support them. In November, as I've shared with you, first of its kind, we launched a report on the perceptions and experience of young BAME Scots in Scottish schools and racism is a major concern and that's now amplified due to COVID-19. All young BAME Scots right now are seeing is police murders and brutality. Organisations who have never spoken out for them are now following the trend on the hashtag Black Lives Matter and it's not a trend as it is Black Lives. High numbers of their communities are dying from COVID. This together with the thought of going back to school and having to face racism and microaggressions is all too much and traumatising for young people. They will most definitely experience difficulty coping and adapting to severe events what they've recently went through. We have to remember they're not just seeing this like we see on TV, we see on YouTube. They're seeing it and they're actually feeling it. What young people are seeing right now on social media is they're suddenly realising their history because it's not taught in schools. They're realising what happened to their ancestors and how they were treated. The information is all out there on social media and it's having a negative impact. There's studies to show that young people from these backgrounds are less likely to access mental health services, counselling because the role models, the people, the leaders are not from their cultural background. They can't give culturally appropriate responses. Thank you. Thank you, Ceralda. Tim, you wanted to come back in as well. I don't know if that was in the previous point so I missed you. I was just to say that I suppose in an ideal world again we would have been part of the guidance with government around education settings and community settings and leisure. One of the joys of youth work but also one of the challenges is that it is varied. You will get slightly different approaches through the voluntary sector. You'll have outdoor programmes. You've got people working in schools along with schools and a myriad of other activity including opportunities for young people in terms of sport as well and activity. It is something that we felt would have been good to be at the level that we had to ask for. But it is good that it is developing now. There is wider CLD guidance. It is very generic. What we are trying to do yourselves, I know that you Scotland have developed some guidance. We are also working with outdoor learning and youth work guidance specifically so that we can get the most relevant information to people to then make their own decisions at a local authority and within their own voluntary organisations because it will always be context specific. But that doesn't take away from the overall point about certainty about dates for face-to-face contact that was being made and that direction really does need to come from the government and public health. Thank you, Tim. Dave Spence? Yes, thank you. I was just saying with the teachers, I've been asked to return, reopen schools. Looking at three strands, they will need to upgrade in terms of digital teaching. They need to deal with young people with social distancing in schools and they need to get young people outdoors. Getting outdoors is the safest place for young people to be. The transmission incidents outdoors is vanishingly small. So the outdoor learning specialists can support people to understand the benefits of being outdoors and to make that practical. We deal with quite rigorous risk assessments and standard operating procedures all the time to consider the requirements for COVID or post-COVID is just another layer of health and safety for us. So we can help schools and we're working with a couple of schools to try and see how we can support them going back to when they reopen in September. We're looking at programmes to help them specifically to get out of doors. The thing is to do that, we're having to go and help them get funding from other sources. If we're really going to make a significant contribution to this, we could do with central government support for that financial support. If we are looking for support from local authorities, I'm afraid it's just not going to happen. The thing is that there are enormous opportunities, I think. We are changes being forced upon us and we can create a new way of working with the third sector playing a more significant role. It's just that we need to really create space for that to happen. We can provide the examples of, there's plenty of examples of excellent work. We just need to make sure we get some support so that we can roll these out so they can appear in society through schools and with young people more often than they get now. Thank you. Thank you. I'm just looking... probably just... Khaleda was wanting in again on our next topic, which is youth work to roll in the COVID recovery. Do you want to come back in again, Khaleda? Yes, thank you. It would be in the committee's interest to extend, as I said, the review and have a series of committee meetings that have a specific focus on BAME young people. BAME young people must be put on the youth work agenda. Organisations and schools must resist tokenistic gestures and develop meaningful and genuine participation with specialist youth work organisations who can evidence effective engagement for 13 to 19-year-olds. It is clear that schools are not preparing to support specific trauma experienced by young BAME Scots due to COVID and the Black Lives Matter, and the even heavier weight that will be held by pupils on their return are there likely to suffer more than other young people specialist youth work is needed. We need to build a platform for BAME young people with lived experience to take a leading role in services in their education by influencing teacher, teaching and practising content working with a whole school approach. The youth work and education must become aware that BAME young people face additional, often unforeseen challenges on the basis of colour, nationality, ethnicity, culture or national origin. Thank you. Thank you very much. Does anyone else want to come in on that specific area of recovery? We touched on it slightly in other areas, but... Tim, yeah? Yeah, I just wanted to pick up on some of the things that Khalida has been saying, and I think it's very important that we listen and connect in terms of the national youth work strategy, the co-production of that youth work strategy with young people and with the sector and with Scottish government has been very keen to... One of the key issues was about youth work being open and accessible to all, and it had a very much focus on ensuring that all looked at, whether it's looked after in a comedy, young people from BAME communities, we need to do more to understand what their issues are that young people are facing and ensuring that's part of our youth work strategy. In the wider umbrella of our work at Youth Links Scotland in terms of the action on prejudice website, tackling hate crime that we lead on, action on sectarianism and our own pursuit as an organisation to have an investor in diversity status, we're kind of very aware that there's a lot of work to do and that has been highlighted again through some of the recent interest and awareness through Black Lives Matter. So certainly I know that I've chatted to Khalida about shadowing her for a day and I think as a sector, we certainly want to appreciate and understand the specific concerns that she is raising today. Thank you, Tim. Louise? Yeah, I just want, just when you were asking about youth work's role, I just wanted to touch on when Tim mentioned the report at the start, one of the key headings was obviously mental health and well-being and just to flag that that's something that the trust is very much seen as a kind of decline in the well-being of young people. We conducted a YouGov poll at the start of earlier on in lockdown and we found that there'd been a real increase in the anxiety of young people. Obviously their future prospects are not looking great and obviously that's continued and probably worsened in the last few weeks as the statistics have come out and the kind of economic forecasting and kind of pending jobs crisis. So I think, and I think that's where youth work have a really positive role to play there as well. I mean, I heard a great case study just yesterday of a colleague who has been just staying in touch, phone calls twice a week with a young person in Dundee. They have said it's had a massive impact for them of just having someone to check in with who isn't in the family, having that continued key worker support and some of that goal-setting. And I think it's just to highlight again that I think sometimes mental health and well-being can be very much boxed into almost a clinical medicalised area and actually I think there's so much research and data to show that youth work can have such a positive impact for young people in terms of their confidence and that goal-setting piece that they've got somebody in their corner. And I think that's going to be really important. And that's obviously one of the scary things behind the sustainability of the sector and where will we be in six months because I think young people are going to need us from that point of view more than ever. It's one of the areas for the committee's work was Ky Bosch by COVID if you like because we were looking at the introduction of councillors in schools and we wanted to do some work on where that had been done previously and things that obviously COVID stopped all of that work for ourselves as well at this point in time. In terms of the recovery, we've touched very much on the sustainability. I think we're all getting the message of sustainability in the long term of youth work. But the last question that we were given was about access to youth work and part of education. I live in North Lanarkshire so my schools are very much linked into this and I see many of the awards network organisations at embedded into school curriculums and given opportunities to young people. And it's and the Duke of Edinburgh has been delivered to Caledonia I think in about the cost of that. But embedded in the curriculum is part of the offer to young people. Going forward do you see a change? It's also quite disappointing to hear that in terms of getting back to normality you seem to have been cut out of that process. Given the Education of Scotland's information to us that this is part of the new curriculum and part of young people's development do you think there has been a lack of leadership at this stage to actually embed that in youth work into immediate recovery phase and how do you see that going on in the long term? So a pretty long-winded question there. I see Tim's hands up already. Thank you. I'm not sure I'm going to address the whole question in a few seconds but I guess that there is involvement of youth work alongside schools and it's important to remember it's youth work and schools it's not just what's part of the formal curriculum it's lots of the stuff that happens in the evenings and the weekends and the summer holidays too which has a positive impact on young people's achievement and attainment as well and transition support in particular. So I think that in the policy terms and in what's written down community learning and development within that you will see Education Scotland with CLD regional improvement teams and advice but I think what the worry or the concern would be in the rush to get schools back it has been a recovery of schools plan rather than an education recovery plan and that's the thing that we're saying so it's not that this previous work in the area around youth work and schools was developing was moving forward but the gulf and the potential challenge especially around a widening attainment gap which there's a lot of people rightly concerned about I think it's just ensuring that youth work has a huge role to play especially with young people in marginalised and young people in poverty and we need to see that as one of the priorities not an add-on. Okay Can I bring in first? Thank you Thank you I think if I'm being very honest until there is some ring fencing of part of the PEPF budget for youth work there's not going to be a parity in terms of the impact that youth work can have as part of education because what our experience is is that where youth work works well in schools it's where you've got a head teacher who's absolutely sees the value of it but that is not every school unfortunately and so you're almost at the whim of a head teacher's choice or kind of a local authority structure and decision making so I would really urge some consideration around part of the PEPF budget being ring fenced for youth work because I think that would make a huge difference Okay Mark you wanted to come in Hi, yeah it was just on the assurance of mental health I mean one of the things that we know in youth work and community based youth work is that youth workers can often be a trusted adult that young people will turn to when their lives are turned upside down, when they need support when they need space and I think as we talk about the youth work's role in the recovery we don't need to go over all the ground around the impact on people's mental health that this crisis is having but youth work has a vital role in supporting young people now and as we work our way through whatever the future is going to look like you know having that space in the community for them to come together to explore their issues, their thoughts, their anxieties their hopes and their fears and to have someone that just allows them to give them that space to do so is incredibly important and equally alongside that we need to ensure that youth workers and it's not just about training people in schools to be able to support young people's mental health youth workers because they are that point that young people will turn to they need to be supported to understand how to identify mental health issues mental health concerns where young people can do with more interventionalist support and where they need space to work through issues I can't remember who it was Louise was talking about the role that youth work can have in that early intervention pre-cams, pre-clinical more interventionalist and specialist support but if we're going to support young people going forward youth works role in creating that space to support their mental health and wellbeing it can't be overlooked and there's a danger that it always has been but if we continue to do so now then we're just creating an even bigger problem OK I've got Dave wanting to come in as well Thank you I've said earlier that the situation has been in a part of the state for some time for decades now residential centres have been closing and that was quite serious before Covid-19 with about half a dozen centres saying they were closed going to close or a signal that they would do in a year's time the as the time has gone on and it's got worse and worse it's exposed the great fault line between local authority provision and third sex provision and it is very difficult to create a level playing field when there are two sides against each other operating against each other like that we very rarely get the support from local authorities because they don't work in partnership with us as we might expect they would there is a tendency for them to keep us at arm's length as much as possible and really as we are having this chain forced upon us I think there is a case to say encourage local authorities to stop delivering see themselves as delivery agents and leave that to the third sector to expand and grow if we get some support at this time and it is urgent that we do within a year's time we as charities and social enterprises will be trading again bringing in our own income sustaining jobs throughout Scotland and bringing in philanthropic support if you give support to local authorities at this time local authority outdoor centres I'm afraid they will come again next year for the same amount again and again and again as we are reaching breaking point 10 years of austerity has nearly put paid to residential provision by local authorities another several years I won't say 10 years again but several years of austerity to come will probably change the position emphatically now is the time to create a new structure a new public policy structure that sees a great role for the third sector and that's all I want to say thank you thank you Tema see your hand up did you want to come back in I appreciate the times limited it was really around mental health and wellbeing and to say that in terms of youth work's involvement in mental health and wellbeing it's clear that that was increasing and needing to increase in terms of prevention before this crisis and this crisis just underlined the need even more to revisit that and see what different roles that youth work organisations can play to support young people's health and wellbeing I am very conscious of time and I'm a lot to take forward from today's meeting I just wondered if any of my colleagues wanted to come in just before the end looking to Beatrice do you want to come in I just wanted to I haven't said anything throughout this because I've been listening quite intently and taking notes and hearing what everybody's been saying so I just wanted to say thank you to everybody for the time and I have heard what you've said OK, I'm looking to Daniel or Ian Ian, you want to come in? No, you find Daniel, you're OK I have to say thank you to my colleagues thank you to everyone else who's contributed this afternoon it has been really really helpful and we've a lot to take away from it certainly things that we will be coming back to and as I said Caledad would be really really look forward to seeing that report in July when it comes forward I think this was a focus group for now but we will be discussing it with our other members of the committee and deciding how we may take this forward obviously we're into recess as it is this time next week but we don't know what might be coming up over the summer but certainly not a recess as normal and the committee will be keeping a very active view on what's happening in the sector so thank you everyone, there will be a note of today made up but I can just assure everybody that nothing will be attributed to a particular person who's spoken out today is sort of Chatham House note that will be presented for the rest of the committee but we do really appreciate everyone taking part this afternoon and please if anything else comes up or something that you need to feel the committee needs to know about between now and when we might be meeting again if you please could let our clerks know I'm going to ensure that the committee is made aware of that I think Joyce is saying that everyone is saying consent form so the session might actually be going live so I haven't appreciated that before today so it's likely that the recording will go up at some point soon but thank you very much for taking part this afternoon really appreciate it and thank you to my colleagues as well and that was the meeting thank you, bye