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   Local charity help bring our youth Back from the Brink
Local youth charity, Fairbridge (which operate from Salford and Bury) has published a report called Back from the Brink: How Fairbridge transforms the lives of disadvantaged young people, to provide an insight in to ‘what works’ to help disadvantaged 13-25 year olds across Manchester turn their lives around. Over the past ten years, Fairbridge has helped over 3,290 13-25 year olds outside of education, employment or training in the Greater Manchester area improve their lives by providing flexible, bespoke confidence building and learning activities. From this, 883 young people have gone on to enter education, training or employment, while others reported other positive outcomes such as improved self confidence and communication skills, improved school attendance and gaining secure housing. The report (which brings together the results of three studies of Fairbridge’s work over the past ten years) shows that disadvantaged young people who develop their personal and social skills in flexible, more personalised environments have a greater likelihood of moving into and successfully sustaining education, training or employment. Secondly, it showed that the pattern of these young people’s development follows a far from straightforward path. Initial rapid progress is followed by a dip, followed by steadier progress to a point where they are scoring consistently higher on factors such as self esteem, communication and problem solving than they were initially. So it seems that young people need to experience something of a crisis in themselves before they can make progress. Tracy Minshull, Manager of the Fairbridge Greater Manchester team said: “The Back from the Brink report demonstrates that working with disadvantaged young people in a flexible, personalised and consistently supported way, like we do at Fairbridge, is the key to ensuring they take control of their lives and take the first step back in to main stream society again. “We help them to indentify the skills or areas they need to improve or develop – which can be anything from employability, independent living to learning skills and communication to create a bespoke 100 hour programme of activities for the individual. Activities are then run in parallel with one-to-one support sessions to ensure they receive the support to continue through the subsequent ‘lows’ that they may experience.” It costs an average of £2,400 per person to complete a 100 hour Fairbridge programme. However, the potential alternative to the state is far more costly. The annual cost of anti-social behavior in Britain stands at £3.4 billion per year, while the cost of youth unemployment in the UK stands at £90 million per week. Tracy concluded: “1.8 million young people are currently outside education, training and employment – this accounts to around one in six of all those aged 16-24, and just one of these disaffected youths is estimated to cost the state £277,000 in their lifetime. We are working hard to change these kind of statistics, and going forward, with more support from our local businesses, we will achieve this.”
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