FutureYou

By BeatBullying
In partnership with Kent, Greenwich, Cornwall and Lambeth Councils

There are approximately 900,000 young people from 16-24 not in employment, education or training (NEETS). But efforts to get young people away from benefits and towards a better future have not generally been successful on a large scale.*

NESTA is working in partnership with one of the UK's fastest-growing charities - BeatBullying - to develop FutureYou, a public service designed around the web. This is the place where we know young people go to first for their help and advice.

At the heart of the service is a safe, online social networking site that supports excluded and vulnerable young people with trained mentors, counsellors and advisors, who guide and support disengaged young people and signpost them to specialist help and services where needed.

Key to this is helping young people to develop soft skills, such as communication skills, and the ability to manage relationships, to provide the right foundation for learning hard skills - such as a trade.

Importantly, FutureYou enrolls young people to run the service. Mentors are themselves trained young people from across the UK, which gives them the opportunity to develop and use soft skills to support their peers. This is an approach that has already been used successfully on BeatBullying's anti-bullying website, www.cybermentors.org.uk, and it allows a model for scaling up the service as it becomes more popular.

By doing this, FutureYou could become integrated into existing local services provided by the state. FutureYou is being piloted in Kent, Greenwich, Cornwall and Lambeth and is currently seeking additional local partners to trial the service.

Children not in education, employment or training (NEETS) - some facts

In May 2010 the Office of National Statistics showed a rise in NEETs, to just under a million 16-24 year olds out of education, employment or training. This represents a rise of 18,000 on the previous three months.

The economic and social costs, particularly for longterm NEETs, are high. LSE figures put costs at £97,000 per NEET over the course of a lifetime - an annual cost of £3.65 billion.**

* The Princes Trust (2007) ‘The Cost of Exclusion.’ London: The Princes Trust

** Ibid