It just doesn’t add up?

Because my knowledge, at this time, is limited regarding the numbers of children who access the youth clubs the following callculations have to be viewed as unsubstantiated at this time. Ozone run two sessions for younger and older children on Mondays and Thursdays. The maximum number of children at each session is 20. Therefore they can cater for 80 children per week. Assuming that YMCA and Newsome Avenue cater for a further 20 children each, that’s a maximum of 120 kids at special needs youth clubs in Barnsley each week. Lets assume that the total cost of running these services is £50,000 per year and they are run for 45 weeks of the year. That means the cost for running these services is £9.26 per child. Wow! great value. However, the clubs are far from fully utilised because no one apart from the excellent staff at the venues promote them and I’m led to believe that the Local Authority has significantly narrowed the enrty criteeria to reduce numbers.

Why then would the Local Authority want to stop using the £50K (don’t forget it’s a best guess) from the Short Break Provision for an open source set of projects that could potentially deliver excellent value? Well the Local Authority have a Short Break budget of approx £850K for 210 families. Lets say they use the youth group £50K spend to give short breaks to the 80 kids who actually attend these sessions (don’t forget there will be a good proportion of kids who go but won’t get anything; however, that’s OK because it gives the LA scope to award short breaks to other qualifying children). They can now advertise that they have increased the number of children who access Short Breaks by 30%. Of course there’s no more money they have just moved what they already have around a bit. Don’t bother asking for the figures on anything, it’s easier to see FIFA’s accounts. In sumary the Local Authority is doing creative accounting with our children’s emotions.

The irony is that if we parent and carers caused the stress and anxiety to our children that this thoughtless policy is going to cause we would be accused of emotional abuse.

Another important thing to appreciate is that Short Breaks are not specifically awarded for one type of service. They are a moveable feast; you can chose to spend them elsewherre if you child gets board or stressed and the provision no longer meets their need. That’s great but when at the end of the year the Local Authority decide Mmmmm? not enough children attending YMCA, they will close the provision and cite lack of interest.