The Prince of Wales”s charity for young unemployed people has warned the UK is developing a “youth underclass”.

A survey for the Prince’s Trust of more than 2,300 people aged 16-24 suggested those from deprived backgrounds were three times more likely to say they will “end up on benefits”.

The trust blamed an “aspiration gap” between rich and poor.

Its report comes ahead of figures on Wednesday that may show unemployment among the young hitting one million.

The research revealed what the trust described as the tragedy of young people from poor homes who feel they have no future. A quarter of those from deprived backgrounds believed they would achieve few or none of their life goals, with a similar proportion expecting to end up on benefits for at least part of their life. Some 23% from this group thought they were destined for a dead-end job compared to 6% of those from affluent families.

More than one in six of those from poorer homes said their family and friends had made fun of them when they talked about finding a good job.

The survey, in conjunction with the Royal Bank of Scotland, also found one in 10 young people from the poorest families did not have their own bed when they were growing up and almost a third had few or no books in their home.

Source: BBC Education News

Primary schools could be asked to teach an approved list of books and authors, under new plans being looked at by the Government’s curriculum review.

Set texts could be recommended for five to 11-year-olds in a similar way to how they are for secondary schools, it has emerged.

Some children”s authors have hit out against the idea, saying teachers should not be “dictated to”. Children”s author Alan Gibbons criticised the idea of a booklist, saying teachers should have the freedom to choose what is appropriate for their pupils. “What we need to see in schools is trust in teachers and librarians. We need a network of people who know about books and keep up to date with children’s literature, who have the freedom to select books according to their pupils’ backgrounds and interests,” he said.

Meanwhile, Michael Rosen, author of We’re Going On A Bear Hunt, said there was a difference between the sharing of ideas democratically, and a “totalitarian”, top-down approach. “I”m all in favour of people recommending books to each other. What I’m utterly against is some centralised list which is supposed to be the government’s view or the state’s view,” he told the Times Educational Supplement.

Source: BBC Education News

The government could save money if it put more effort into supporting young offenders leaving custody, a children’s charity has said.

Barnardo’s says children as young as 13 are caught in a cycle of homelessness and reoffending. It claims the taxpayer could be saved as much as £67,000 per child over three years if they had safe accommodation to go to after release.

More than 4,000 young people were referred to Barnardo’s after they left custody in 2009-10. The charity says housing is a key concern since many are suffering from depression, have special educational needs and are often sent back to families who cannot cope with them.

Barnardo’s chief executive Anne Marie Carrie said those young people were easy to ignore but “we do so at great cost to their young lives and society”. Ms Carrie said the government “is on the verge of a self styled ‘rehabilitation revolution’ but there are gaps in the plans. We don’t say this lightly, we are all too aware of the cuts being made across the UK in an effort to fight the effects of the economic crisis we are in, but surely, if ever there is a case for return on investment this is it.”

A government spokesman said it recognised that young people leaving custody were vulnerable. But he pointed out that local authorities were already obliged to provide safe accomodation and support for young people who cannot live at home or with their relatives.

Source: BBC News

Cancer Lifeline recently introduced the Gift Aid Scheme for people who give to the charity following a training course delivered by the NI Council for Voluntary Action (NICVA). This new knowledge of the tax system contributed to the organisation raising over £3,200 in previously unclaimed money.

This extra cash can be used by Cancer Lifeline as it wishes perhaps to deliver more services or cover their running costs.

Gift Aid is worth at least an extra 28% on top of eligible donations. Research by NICVA suggests that £40m worth of Gift Aid is going unclaimed every year.

To find out more about the Gift Aid Scheme visit the Inland Revenue website – http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/charities/gift-aid.htm.

The NICVA can also offer NI charities advice on how to set up the Gift Aid Scheme. Contact NICVA’s fundraising advice team on 028 9087 7777 or email neil.irwin@nicva.org.

Recent research reveals that young people see organised activities as a good thing but are held back from taking part because they don’t know what is on offer to them. The Government will invest a total of £900 million between 2008 to 2011 in positive activities and places for young people to go to – and in order for young people to benefit from them local areas need to let them know what’s available.

The research also reveals other reasons preventing young people getting involved in activities. These include:

• Young people see organised activities as something reserved only for the very sporty or talented kids.
• Peer group pressure – teenagers prioritise friends and leisure time over taking part in activities and are often put off if their friends don’t take part.
• Low self confidence and lack of self belief in their ability to take part.

Parents interviewed as part of the research say they support positive activities but struggle to encourage their children to take part due to lack of information. They want activities that provide their children with a safe place to hang out with their friends, where they can enjoy themselves as well as learning new skills. However, they are also concerned about the cost of the activities which is why most areas offer free or subsidised activities.

The feedback from young people and parents shows that investment in the new £270 million ground breaking myplace youth centres is money well spent. Young people have played a central role in deciding which projects to fund, the type of activities that are on offer and the times they are available, as well as helping to design the free world class facilities.

Nearly 70 per cent of young people already participate in positive activities but the Government wants to increase this to 100 per cent to help all young people build friendships and social skills and achieve more at school and college. Participating in positive activities will also help to prevent them from getting involved in risky or anti-social behaviour.

One in ten teenagers in knife crime “hotspots” targeted by the government say they still have to carry a weapon to feel safe, a Newsbeat poll shows.

More than half of the people questioned said they are worried about other teens carrying a knife when they go out.

Fifty-three per cent surveyed said the government would not be able to reduce teen violence over the coming months. Home Secretary Alan Johnson said: “It is going to take longer to change the culture of carrying knives.”

The Home Office launched its £12m Tackling Knives Action Programme in June 2008 to crack down on offending in 10 key areas.

Police have been carrying out more stop and searches and extra cash has been used to pay for airport-style security arches and community schemes for young people.

Knife survey findings

• 25% know someone who has been a victim of knife crime
• 9% say they have to carry a weapon to feel safe
• 55% say they are worried about other teenagers carrying a knife
• 44% think the police are unable to protect them from violent crime
• 30% think longer sentences for people found carrying blades would reduce knife crime
• 49% say they would not report someone they know who carried a knife or gun
• 70% say it is easy or very easy to buy a knife

The survey questioned 500 people aged 13 to 19 in five of those hotspots – London, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and Thames Valley.

Source: BBC Newsbeat

Today the Blog was off line for several hours due to another nasty hacking attempt.

The WordPress platform has now been reinstalled, together with a backup from a few days ago.

The posts are all clean of the SQL insertions and the blogs security has been tightened up somewhat.

Lets hope these hacker slime-balls now stay away and keep our users free of adds for drugs and other stuff.

Chris, Web Designer at Input Youth

Nearly half of mothers think the 1970s and 1980s were an easier age for raising children, a report suggests.

Although 68% of mothers work full or part-time today, they are twice as likely to be involved in childcare as fathers, according to the report.

But the Changing Face of Motherhood report suggests nine out of 10 mothers feel guilty about how much time they spend with their children. Over a third think they have less time for themselves than their mothers did.

The research carried out by the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) and published on international Women’s Day, based its findings on focus groups with mothers and grandmothers and a survey of 1,000 mothers. It also considered statistics from the 1930s to the present day.

In 1971, less than a quarter of mothers (some 23%) worked, compared with more than two-thirds today. Nonetheless the study found nearly half of mothers think they spend more time with their children than their mothers did with them. Some 32% of mothers today say they spend over 28 hours active time a week with their children. And yet the survey suggests 88% of mums feel some guilt about about their work life balance and how much time they have to give to their children.

According to the report, commissioned by Procter and Gamble, the 1930′s and 1940′s were seen as the worst decades for being a mother, with the 1970′s and 1980s’ seen as the best. It said: “In the 1960s women did three quarters of all housework, including childcare, averaging 18.5 hours per week. “Data for the 1970′s and 1980′s are unclear but the hours spent on housework, including childcare, rose by 24% between 1974 and 1987. The contributions made by men during the 1970s/1980s doubled, but were still well below those of mothers.”

Source: BBC News Education

The blog has been unavailable for a couple of days because of a WordPress table corruption. The table affected was the blog ‘posts’ so they all disappeared from view.

I worked on the Input site last Friday and only got back to it today to find all the posts had disappeared.

Thankfully I use DB Cron Backup plug-in and this had a good copy of all the post’ table entries, but the SQL file was so large that phpMyAdmin could not upload it. I therefore tracked down BigDump, a staggered MySQL dump importer, which once properly configured worked a treat.

The result is that the blog is now fully operational again!

Chris, Web Designer at Input Youth

Identifying citizenship education as ‘the single biggest government investment in youth citizenship’, the Youth Citizenship Commission (YCC) report’s first recommendation to Government calls on the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families to ensure that ‘the delivery of citizenship education is consistent and effective’.

The Citizenship Foundation agrees with the YCC’s assessment that young people’s experience of citizenship education is mixed and welcomes the emphasis the Commission has put on reinvigorating citizenship’s delivery.

As the Commission’s report suggests, the Department of Children, Schools and Families needs to develop delivery plans to promote teacher training and good teaching practice for citizenship.

Beyond citizenship education in schools, the report places much emphasis on increased opportunities for young people to be involved with school governing boards and national, regional and local public bodies and increased opportunities for volunteering. The Commission also acknowledges that young people are communicating in new and different ways and calls on the Government to establish a New Media Taskforce to set out good practice for engaging with young people online.

The final report of the Commission and its other publications can be downloaded from the YCC’s website.

White couples should be allowed to adopt black and ethnic minority children under new guidelines for social workers in England.

Local authorities will be warned not to delay placing a child with a suitable family of a different ethnicity. Many children from ethnic minorities do not get adopted because social workers have been keen to place them with families of the same background. The move will be confirmed by Education Secretary Michael Gove on Tuesday.

The law will not change but the new guidance will state that as long as prospective adopters show that they are able to care for the child then race should not be a factor. They will also say that preventing families from adopting children of a different ethnic group is “unacceptable”.

Each local authority will be closely monitored and those that persistently ignore the advice could have their adoption services contracted out to voluntary agencies.

Source: BBC News

UK children watch an average of more than two and a half hours of television a day and spend an hour and 50 minutes online a day, a poll suggests.

A survey of 2,445 children aged five to 16 by Child Wise found almost two in three have their own computer (62%). And nearly half have internet access in their own room (46%).

The poll suggests two thirds (65%) of children go online most days and collectively children in the UK spent 13 million hours on websites every day. The survey also found children regularly use their mobile phones and games consoles to access the internet, giving even wider access and personal control.

In the five to 16 age bracket, 70% of children have their own mobile phone and this rises to 97% from the age of 11. Among 11-16 year olds, almost two in three are able to access the internet via their phone (65%), and 43% do this regularly.

The study also says many children spend time on social networking sites. A third (36%) of seven to 10-year olds visited Facebook in the week before the survey was conducted. For 11 and 12-year-olds this rose to 71% of and to 85% for 13 to 16-year-olds.

However, television still had the strongest hold over the children surveyed. The figures suggest that 12 million under 16′s in the UK watched 23 million hours of TV a day and 62% have a television in their own room.

Source: BBC

Long-term speech and language problems are wrongly being blamed on parents not talking to their children and too much television, research suggests. But a survey for the Communication Trust reveals common misconceptions about the cause of serious communication difficulties. It says the exact cause of such problems is often unknown. Parents know more about milestones in the development of walking than of talking, it adds.

The poll of 6,000 people, including 3,000 parents, was carried out to explore perceptions about children’s speech and language development.

It suggested half of parents thought serious communication difficulties were caused by parents not talking to their children enough. One in six blamed excessive TV-watching or computer use. However, one in five of those polled considered biological or genetic reasons as a possible cause of problems.

The research for government-backed charitable group the Communication Trust also suggested that one in three parents have had concerns about their children’s speech and language development.

Source: BBC News

More than two thirds of jobseekers lie to get employed, a survey has revealed.

Some 69% will lie during the recruitment process, with 36% admitting to using a false referee. More than half used a member of their family and one in four used a best friend.

One in three lied because they left their previous place of employment on bad terms. Other popular lies were altering a secondary education qualification and making up hobbies and achievements such as going to the gym or playing musical instruments.

The research by Hirescores.com also found nine out of 10 people had bent the truth on their CV. Lisette Howlett of Hirescores.com said: “I think that many people have lied to get a job in the past, and these current statistics show that people are still doing so. I can see why people would consider lying as in this economic situation jobs are few and far between, but by lying in the present you could end up jeopardising things in the future if you are caught”.

See the Input Youth article on how to have a successful job interview – www.inputyouth.co.uk/jobguides/job-interviews.html.

Chris, Web Designer at Input Youth

Thirteen per cent of 13 to 15-year-olds know someone who has carried a knife for protection, a survey has suggested. The research estimates that overall 1% of those in the age group carried a knife between 2009 and 2010 – lower than other estimates.

The figures for England and Wales suggest a fifth of 10 to 15-year-olds were bullied in the last year.

The statistics are an attempt to better understand the effects of crime on children and how safe they feel.

The report focuses on a wide range of questions relating to young people”s perceptions of crime and personal safety, rather than the number of them who have actually been victims.

The results are drawn from the 2009-2010 British Crime Survey, a rolling programme of interviews designed to record experiences of crime beyond incidents reported to the police. Some 3,700 children were interviewed.

According to the figures on knives, almost 70% of those aged between 13 and 15 said that carrying a knife meant they would be more likely to be stabbed themselves. However, the older the children were, the less likely they were to strongly agree that such a risk existed.

Source: BBC News