Cambridge City Council’s Youth Strategy

Posted byCambridge Town OwlPosted inUncategorized

Over a decade ago I wrote a blogpost asking why Cambridge was systematically excluding young people from decisions that affect them

That was in September 2013. It’s now January 2025. It has been a very long journey.

Image – The Trials of Democracy is back

Cambridge City Council is due to sign off/approve a new youth strategy in March 2025 – which pleases me muchly. (See item 3 of the Equalities Panel papers here).

One of the results of the most recent work by Cambridge City Council was their Youth Assembly of 12 Nov 2024. See the video that the council commissioned below.

Above – Cambridge City Council 12 Nov 2024

I’m generally of the view that my input into this area has come to an end. I’m not a specialist worker, I don’t have any offspring of my own, and those involved seem to have things in hand without me rocking up and complaining about how ‘orrible things were in the 1990s and how it’s all Gillian Shepherd’s fault (The Education and Employment Secretary during the mid-1990s). Instead, I resort back to my usual role of turning up to council meetings on cold windy nights and asking for progress updates so the institutions don’t forget about things as/when new priorities emerge. As is inevitable when a new government comes in.

A decade ago I stood my social media avatar Puffles as a candidate in Coleridge Ward at the city council elections. I wrote a manifesto with the help of a couple of people who I had met via social media – and inevitably it read more as a public policy document rather than a party political manifesto. (That’s what Dr Julian Huppert – back then Cambridge MP for the LibDems told me at the time!) In that manifesto was a theme on young people that included:

“Annual ‘open space’ gatherings bringing together frontline youth workers, teachers, senior managers, young people, politicians and community activists to scope problems and solutions”

Puffles’ 2014 Manifesto – Theme 2) Supporting young people (see the other themes here)

So if the Youth Assembly becomes an annual event (and I hope it does), then that’s a manifesto commitment being delivered without having to actually get elected to the city council. That sounds like a win to me!

Three top posts on public services and young people

I’ve written lots about this over the past decade-and-a-half, the consistent theme being the shortcomings of institutions in my own childhood growing up in the same city. ‘Not another generation failed’ I demanded of Queen Edith’s residents back at the 2023 city council election hustings.

Eddington provides a textbook example of how to design out young people resident in social and council housing from activities organised in an affluent part of town

I moaned about it here having been at the Cambridge Regional College open day asking about adult education and democracy education. Poor things! The Combined Authority has more public questions to deal with.

Basically if you’re an affluent institution that wants to build a new exclusive community that doesn’t have any poor people who might behave badly and be ‘bad for the brand’ that relies on exclusivity and a utopian bubble to attract people from all over the world, you’d do what Cambridge University did with Eddington.

  • You’d develop a large site of land that you owned – giving you a much freer hand
  • You’d secure all of the exemptions you need from ministers on things like social housing commitments
  • You’d ensure that any public transport was not compatible with the existing main public transport provider – doubling the costs of journeys onto the site
  • You’d ensure that there are no convenient interchanges in those parts of the city with large areas of social housing – such as the northern fringes of Cambridge.

Cambridge University did all of these, which means that you really have to make the effort to go to an event at Eddington unless you live on the Uni-Bus routes. Which is why I gave up going to CamCycle’s AGM today because the bus got stuck in Saturday afternoon shopping traffic.

“What does the council meeting paper say?”

The Youth Strategy focuses on 5 objectives:

  1. Supporting young people to be heard
  2. Access to play, leisure, sport and culture
  3. Helping young people to take part (championing routes to health and employment)
  4. Helping young people to feel safe and welcome in the city
  5. Using our assets to best effect

All of those five would have sat well in 1990s Cambridge with my generation – in particular helping young people to feel safe and welcome in the city.

The priorities put forward by the young people participating in the Youth Assembly were:

  • Lack of safe spaces and activities. (Yo! Councillors and Ministers! Run with this!)
  • Diminishing green spaces – in my opinion developers are under-providing for green spaces – in particular Darwin Green which should have had much larger areas reserved as playing fields for the children of Arbury.
  • Work experience and part time work (this is something the local trade union movement should seek national union funding for to pilot putting rocket boosters on outreach work)
  • Local bus services – students get penalised by their colleges for being late, even when it’s not their fault.

On diminishing green spaces, I’ve had a look in past blogposts about which areas can be opened up as new open spaces. One of them is on the border of Queen Edith’s and Trumpington wards.

Above from G-Maps – there’s a closer view here, it’s the green patches on the right of the railway line that I think could be turned into a public park and pathway to Long Road and Cambridge South Station. (See also my lockdown-era video here)

The City Council’s Next Steps

See the meeting papers and item 3 again – the one thing that is missing is continuity and mainstreaming. Especially with the annual turnover of yeargroups as children move up. How will councillors ensure that whatever they produce and implement can be improved in a routine and consistent manner rather than requiring huge overhauls. That means ensuring there are proper handover procedures in place to get new cohorts of teenagers and young people up to speed as fast as possible, and being able to share with the new cohorts what their predecessors had achieved, the barriers/challenges they came across, and how they dealt with them.

It’s all the more important they incorporate this in the transition to the new unitary council. The problem is – as I found out at Cambridge Regional College, is that the college has no offering on citizenship education for their students. As one of their staff members told me, there’s no space in the timetables for students on full time courses, and any part-time courses or modules need to be accredited before they can even look at them. And such a system for accreditation is lacking. (Could CPD units be created for citizenship, government, and public services? That was one of their suggestions).

They, like me were impressed with the content of some of the course books I brought along and gave to them, and said that they would refer this up their management chain. I said that I’d approach the Combined Authority again to urge them to meet with CRC again pending the outcome of the curriculum and examinations review, and arrange a meeting with representatives of the Association of Citizenship Teachers.

Because it seems strange to have the UK’s armed forces being deployed in Eastern Europe and elsewhere to ‘defend democracy’ when at the same time hardly any of our teenagers get to learn much about it.

If we get this right, then that will deal with several of the issues that Andy Haldane of the RSA spoke about regarding our declining social capital. Do we have to wait until after the county council and mayoral elections for things to happen?

If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to:

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