Inquiry urges non-academic achievements in young people to be valued more

Gauging success among young people should be broadened beyond academic benchmarks to include areas like community involvement and entrepreneurship, according to an inquiry.

A panel of experts spent a year investigating the challenges faced by children in Knowsley, one of the most deprived areas of the UK where almost two-thirds of families are classed as ‘hard-pressed' compared with 23% nationally.Despite improvements in recent years, exam results in the borough are still below average, crime rates are high and there remains an ‘intergenerational pattern of low expectation'.

The Knowsley Young People's Commission, led by national charity 4Children on behalf of the local authority and chaired by TV producer Phil Redmond, was due to be launched at a youth club in Huyton today. Among its recommendations is the need for a ‘new focus on measuring success' to ‘develop a new range of non-academic indicators to unveil a story that current statistics don't tell'.

As well as a young person's involvement in business and community life, improvement in their social skills and achievements in areas like music and arts should be recognised. The commission has urged Knowsley Council and the local strategic partnership to establish a ‘bold youth enterprise strategy' that unites children, schools, local businesses and those involved in supporting enterprise to nurture entrepreneurial skills from primary school age onwards.

Young people's champions and mentors drawn from the community should be used to help raise aspirations and parents offered better access to training and education to help them become positive role models.And the commission said getting young people more involved in local decision making, including how money is spent on services that affect them, would help them ‘become agents of their own destiny'.

‘At the age of 12, educational attainment of young people in Knowsley sits alongside or above the national average. By 18 it is below, meaning that both individual ability and potential community social capital is being lost,' said Phil Redmond.‘It also means that the way we, as a wider society, measure "success" through rigid national educational benchmarks may be throwing up false echoes in places like Knowsley. It is those false echoes we need to address.'

Damien Kelly, director of children and family services in Knowsley, said the findings would be taken forward and developed at a conference in the autumn.

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