New youth service to launch in Oswestry

Faced with the impending withdrawal of Shropshire Council’s funding for youth clubs, Oswestry Town Council took steps last December to ring-fence £35,000 for activities for young people in its 2020/21 budget.

Shropshire Youth Association (SYA) put in a successful bid to run the new service, which will include youth clubs, holiday clubs and the social inclusion football, which was held as a pilot project before lockdown – but the plans stalled when the country went into lockdown in March.

Town councillors have now agreed to commence the contract with SYA, worth £30,000, from September 1.

The contract will initially run until the end of the current financial year with the option to extend it for a further two years.

The idea of the town council commissioning its own youth services was initially pitched by Councillor Jay Moore, who used to run Fusion Arts Oswestry, after witnessing the impact of youth service cuts first-hand.

Councillor Moore said: “It’s the reason I joined the council so it’s vindication for that decision to run and proof to the people who had faith in me and voted for me that I have done what I said I would do.

“The service is going to be delivered in a bit of a different way to what we imagined in the beginning, with social distancing and other measures. Sessions are going to be taking place outside for now.”

Valuable

The service will include a weekly junior youth club and senior drop-in session, each lasting two hours, run by qualified SYA youth workers with support from Qube and The New Saints FC Foundation.

They will initially be held outdoors but discussions are underway with Shropshire Council over when The Centre in Oak Street can reopen.

There will also be holiday club sessions running for three hours when schools are closed, which will include a healthy meal, as well as eight two-hour art sessions run by Qube.

Councillor Moore said he could not have foreseen just how valuable the new service would be, launching against a backdrop of school and youth club closures which have meant many young people have not able to socialise with friends for months.

He said: “It has been incredibly difficult for young people, they are very much in their formative years both socially and within education, so not only have they been missing out on essential lessons but they have also been missing those relationships and social development that young people really need.

“Young people are going to be able to get together in a safe and controlled environment.

“We are seeing some disruptive behaviour at the moment where young people are getting together and are not social distancing, so this is going to be a great opportunity for them to get together and be monitored and be educated on the importance of social distancing at the moment.

“Young people often get the majority of their structure from school – some children aren’t even getting meals at home – so the pandemic impact on young people is going to be massive.

“Having this youth provision in place could not have come at a better time.”

A report to the town council said Shropshire Council, which intends to pull all funding from youth clubs in order to fund a new model of outreach work, had committed £9,000 towards youth provision in the town due to the delay in its restructure of youth services caused by the pandemic.