The Schools Project and CD-ROM
Position Statement 16 December 1996
This piece of work was part of a programme of activities which led to the production of the Loadin' the ROM CD-ROM for the West Midlands Low Pay Unit financed by Newtown and South Aston City Challenge. It was part of a raft of activities designed to advance the economic opportunities for local people in an inner part of Birmingham in the UK West Midlands. It included looking at the potential for local partners in the production as well as the preferred content for the CD-ROM. More about the CD-ROM is on Loadin' the ROM
There are 5 sections in this short report.
Research
Activities
Observations
Action Plan
Other Issues
Research
There are two distinct strands to the research for this element of the programme, Action Research which seeks to give expression to young peoples attitudes and opinions, and quantitative research which measures the extent and depth of young peoples awareness. Both strands can be considered as scoping exercises which will suggest the parameters for the CD-ROM as well as building evidence for the project and a set of statistics for demonstration. The Action Research is current and is based on focused workshop activities and discussions with young people which were arranged in order to develop a participatory process. This has been conducted to date by Trilby Multimedia who will be the producers of the CD-ROM in the following year of the project. The quantitative research has begun with a new researcher in post at the WMLPU since the end of November. This has included the pilotting of a school questionnaire, contributing to the action research development sessions and the setting up of contacts for inter agency development work.
Activities
A programme of exploratory and promotional actions was enacted over November and early December ‘96 in order to set the scene for a concerted programme of research over the next part of the project, January to June 1997. Detailed work with a group of young people at Holte School was matched with discussion with an older group at Aston Arts FE College and was used to create a working process, a mechanism, for the full research programme. This has resulted in a portable display called the Action Research Machine or ARM, which can tour the area during the next phase to collect further expressions, comments and ideas. A set of publicity has also been created to raise awareness of the project and to inform people of the end result - the CD-ROM project. This publicity consists of flyers, 3000 DL sized cards which alert people to the project and introduce the working title, ?Loadin the ROM?; a set of posters presenting the themes which will be covered during the project and an accompanying newsletter which will be circulated to all relevant professionals and agencies for feedback. A questionnaire for use within the schools in the area has been tried and tested during these activities and the primary researchers, Alice and Tony Stanley, have made contact with most of the main workers involved in youth related matters in the city Challenge area.
Observations
The work conducted so far confirms the need for young people to have more information about work situations. From the small amount of evidence so far they also lack any sense of the structures involved in the adult world of employment or have any awareness about rights and conditions at work. We have also found no demonstration of knowledge about trade unions or other mechanisms for worker support and very poor information about European opportunities.
We have not so far experienced the negative attitudes which other studies suggest are exhibited by many young people. That is accounted for by our being targeted so far in schools where the most able and self aware students volunteered to be involved in our workshops. We must take this into account when reading the research to date. But even these competent and assured young people revealed important pieces of knowledge were missing from their understanding.
The students at Holte School had recently completed their ‘work experience’, a two week attendance at a place of work. This gave them a taste of the world of work and was an important source for their responses in the workshops. However we were asking questions they were not able to answer because they were beyond their experiences. While young people are exposed at school and at home to aspects of personal development they do not seem to have sufficient opportunities to look at themselves and their own ‘sense of self’, an important prerequisite to making decisions about choices for the future. This observation led us to move further back from a ‘work’ orientation to look at young peoples self awareness and to regard the ‘sense of self’ as being a crucial aspect in our preparations for the CD-ROM.
These observations have confirmed some of the presumed content areas for the project and we are now including two sections around self discovery and taking control of your situation. The proposed topic areas are now delineated as follows.
Dreams and Ambitions. Knowing what you want to be.
Who’s in Charge? Taking control over your situation and doing something about it.
What’s your Game? Jobs and their required skills, experience and qualifications.
Work - past, present and future. Changing patterns of work and the need to retrain.
Rights at Work. Knowing statutory and contractual rights.
Worker Connections. Organising to preserve and extend rights and conditions.
The Benefits Maze. Surviving on low pay or without work.
The European Story. Rights and conditions from a European perspective.
Action Plan
Having developed a process for participation our next set of tasks is to set up a touring schedule whereby we can engage with a large number number of young people. We are therefore planning how best to provide this through discussion with the schools and with those responsible for other centre where young people gather. Our plans currently are around the idea of placing the Poster set on specific sites a couple of weeks prior to our being there with the Action Research Machine. This will be followed within the same week by the questionnaire and the focus group or discussion workshop. This will provide us with a broader sample. Parallel with the work with young people we will circulate the newsletter to professional workers for their response to the project proposals. This will be followed by telephone of face to face conversations to secure their approval and their commitment to the project’s development. A further newsletter will be published after this feedback process. We envisage that this phase of the youth research will run over the next 6 months, into the next financial year, and that the work with professionals will be completed by the end of March. The CD-ROM production will gear up in May so providing ongoing youth activity.
Other Issues
The concept of a Theme Park is generating much enthusiasm and some work around the feasibility of this will be carried out over January to establish its viability as a goal for June/July.
Aston Arts are very keen to have an involvement in the project and we will be having practical discussions in early January 1997.
