National Youth Strategy

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, this is such an important issue. We have let down a generation of children and young people. The National Citizen Service, good as it was, and the International Citizen Service, good as it was, were never going to be a replacement for decent youth work activities where young people live, grow up and go to school. Therefore, we have seen disadvantaged children in this country fall behind even further. There are more of them living in families that have poverty and lack of opportunity these days, and I am shocked at how the eye on what was happening was taken off the ball in the past 14 years.

We know that children in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods make significantly less progress at both primary and secondary school. We know that they are more likely to be in lower-income households and that they are subject to more violence. There is a concentration of the poorest families and children with the poorest outcomes living in a clear set of neighbourhoods. I urge the Government and the Minister to think about this as they develop their strategy.

I really welcome the strategy—there is quite a lot of information for parliamentarians on the website, if you read it carefully, about how they should be engaging with young people in their constituencies or localities on what sort of services are needed and what is missing. It is important that they are invited, and we are invited, during the consultation to do things to help that along—and I shall be doing some of that work over the next few weeks. Will the Minister work on the cross-government involvement and the involvement of civil society?

I was at an event yesterday with AllChild, a place-based children’s and young people’s charity doing really interesting work. It is very enthusiastic about the strategy and needs to be involved. I hope that the Minister will talk to the DfE about training and skills development for those who will be needed to work with young people, whatever we come out with. As somebody who did that for a decade before I came to this place, I could cry when I see how much it has been neglected of late. Furthermore, will the Minister make sure that the Government recognise and understand the importance of place-based work for young people, so that where they grow up and where they go to school there are services that open up opportunities for them?