He wants to swap Neets for ‘Greets’, thinks young people are misunderstood and that local authorities dominate youth services to the detriment of young people. Tim Loughton, the minister charged with delivering the Prime Minister’s cherished National Citizen Service (NCS), talks to Liz Lightfoot.

Meet & greet

At full speed, his elbows pumping, Tim Loughton rushes out of the Department for Education, nearly colliding with the doors in his haste. He is late, very late, for his meeting with MPs in Parliament. The Minister for Children and Families overran because he wouldn’t stop talking about his brief to promote and safeguard the interests of young people, knowing that his words would reach the people he needs on side at the moment, secondary school leaders.

So the allotted half hour became an hour and then longer as the minister acknowledged and ignored the pleas of officials to draw the interview to a close. “Sorry, I can yap on for ages,” he says finally, grabbing his jacket.

He is the man charged with the task of making a success of one of the Prime Minister’s Big Society policies – the National Citizen Service (NCS), a three-week mix of outward-bound activities, volunteering and social action for 16-year-olds.

After a small pilot last year, the NCS starts in earnest this summer with 30,000 places costing about £35 million. There are plans to expand it to 90,000 places but attendance will not be compulsory – hence the minister’s need to get the message through to secondary schools over the next few weeks.

‘Up-market summer camp’

The PM’s community-oriented version of National Service has not had a good press so far, caricatured in the media as an up-market summer camp and described by MPs on the Commons Education Select Committee as an unjustifiable use of funds at a time when youth services are facing cuts and closures. It estimated that if half of all 16-year-olds take it up, the cost would be £355 million a year, possibly amounting to more than the annual local authority spend on youth services in England.

“The select committee was just wrong,” the minister insists. “The money going into the NCS does not come from the DfE or local authority youth budgets; it is a discrete line of financing from the Treasury delivered through the Cabinet Office. This is not money that would be propping up existing youth services if the NCS were not there.”

He wants schools to open their doors to organisations contracted to provide the NCS programmes so they can do their pitch and sign up the students. He hopes that teachers, youth workers and youth justice services will identify teenagers whose lives could be changed by what the NCS offers.

The activities will be challenging; it is not a walk in the park, he says. The full-time course l lasts three weeks. The first is an outward-bound residential week in areas such as North Wales or the Lake District, and then the teenagers return to their home patch for the second week, living independently in youth hostels or halls of residence. They go home for the third week and continue to work full-time on their projects with their teams. After that, they are expected to continue with their projects and volunteering in their own time, supported by staff. Some programmes are free and some charge a small fee, averaging £35, waived for those on lower incomes.

Those who complete the three weeks and then clock up 30 hours of volunteering to make their communities a better place can attend a graduation ceremony and receive a certificate signed by David Cameron.

“All the kids come together and there is a good mix. You get kids from different sides of the tracks socially, from different ethnic minorities, from the youth justice service and independent schools all thrown in at the deep end. It is about team-building with people you would never normally cross the street to bump into,” he says.

Confidence and team-building

The Prime Minister wanted to involve teenagers in an intensive programme with a range of objectives. “One is about personal and social development, two is about confidence and team-building, three is engagement with the local community, four – and this is the key – is about social engagement and integration, and five is a rite of passage into adulthood,” he explains.

“We are not going to judge its success by how many squeaky clean middleclass kids with 10 grade A GCSEs go on it, much though we want them to join up, but on how many kids in care go on it, how many from the youth justice system, how many with disabilities or from difficult home backgrounds.”

The 49-year-old minister and Conservative MP for East Worthing and Shoreham knows a bit about mixing with people from different backgrounds, as the son of a vicar whose parish contained a large council estate in Lewes, East Sussex.

But as the only comprehensive school-educated member of a ministerial team dominated by those with expensive private or grammar school backgrounds, does he feel he brings a different perspective?

“I am not one of those people who think you have had to have done something in order to appreciate what it is about. People in independent schools have a lot of challenges; they are not all going to be brainboxes and go to Oxbridge,” he replies diplomatically.

Negative tabloid stories

Married with a teenage son and two daughters, he believes young people are having a tough time at the moment and are much misunderstood. “I think anybody who has their own children or works with young people will have a different perspective than those who are prepared to swallow the negative tabloid stories about hoody-wearing muggers,” he says.

He hopes the NCS will help to break down what he sees as mutual mistrust between the generations through teenagers working with older people. The government is not running the activities itself but commissioning youth organisations to provide suitable programmes and he would like to open up the wider youth services to voluntary groups, charities and business.

Local authority youth services are one of the last, unreformed areas of public sector services and little has changed since they were shaped by the Albemarle Report more than 50 years ago, he argues.

“Too many youth services are effectively a monopoly for local authorities. They rely disproportionately on public money and when budgets are tight, they are disproportionately hit. I would like to see more of a mixed economy with youth services working much more with voluntary organisations, social action and the private sector as well as local councils to provide a more sustainable mixed offer for young people.”

He wants government policy to be “youth-proofed” across departments and has even invented a new term for Neets – those not in education, employment or training. “That term is slightly derogatory so we use the phrase ‘Greets’ – getting ready for education, employment and training, which might sound a play on words but I think it sends out an important signal about not treating ‘Neets’ as some sort of homogeneous body.”

His vision is a UK littered with big signs saying National Citizen Service project, inspired and run by young people. But he knows there is a long way to go before an NCS graduation certificate will be a soughtafter prize and passage to adulthood. Perhaps that influenced his choice of artwork for his office: the recently rediscovered World War II poster: Keep Calm and Carry On.

• Liz Lightfoot is a freelance education writer.

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