Children and Young People’s Partnership Board - July 2024 Meeting

On Tuesday 16 July 2024, we met in the Councillors Chambers of the Town Hall and Ashaz from the Youth Cabinet chaired our third partnership board with Cllr Cusworth. We all introduced ourselves and told the group our name, where we go to school or work and our favourite thing about Rotherham. We had lots of favourite things, like how involved young people can be in big decisions and the green spaces we have around the borough.

Helen explained that there weren’t any risks we needed to be aware of on the risk log.  A presentation showed us what had happened with the actions we agreed at the last meeting.

Helen told us that a Creative Learning Manager has been appointed to work across all educational settings, focusing on effective communication with schools about events and opportunities. There has been work happening to improve our events webpages that some young people were involved in, and there are opportunities for us as young people to join the workforce to help plan and deliver major events.

Excitingly, a Climate Action group has been created that we can attend, and Andy has said he’ll come and speak at one of these sessions. Polly and her team are also working on creating more nature recovery volunteering opportunities that are age appropriate.

Helen told us that our letter to schools about locking the toilets had been sent, and that we were collecting responses.  We agreed to meet with the schools that do lock toilets to find alternative solutions. Sue said that the issue had also been raised in other forums.

Helen told us that there was a great opportunity for us to impact the new Council Plan and asked if this was something we’d like to be a part of. We all voted, and it was unanimous, so we’re going to have this as an agenda item next time.

We needed to pick a second item for our next meeting, so Helen showed us the four topics from the Rotherham Together Plan that we’d been interested in before. We voted by standing next to the agenda item we wanted, choosing between the Levelling Up Fund, community mental health services, increasing physical activity and CCTV. We all stood by the same topic meaning we’ll get to hear about community mental health services at the next meeting. 

The two agenda items for our next meeting are:

1) Impacting the new Council Plan

2) Transformation of community mental health services with patients and carers.

We went to the Garden room for a networking tea and had chance to talk to other children and young people at the meeting, as well as some of the adults.  

Agenda item 1 – Improved Transport Links

Karen told us about the improvement schemes in Rotherham, and how these support access to jobs and opportunities, health improvements, climate change resilience, investment and regeneration and housing delivery. Her team are delivering new cycleways, bus corridors, Park and Ride services and are improving our railways. She also told us about the Independent Travel Training programme, offering children and young people with SEND needs help to travel by public transport and as a pedestrian

We discussed what we thought about transport in our groups. We said that young people don’t feel safe on buses and that bus stops can be intimidating. Someone also said that buses can be overcrowded at peak times and that they aren’t always reliable. They can be expensive too! On the other hand, we do think that there are some good facilities on buses like Wi-Fi and charging points.

We also spoke about how lots of work has been done on improving the cycling network, but we wondered how we could encourage people to travel by bike, especially since cyclists don’t always feel safe on the road because of dangerous drivers.

The Independent Travel Training programme sounds like a great idea! We think it should be promoted along with the ‘Travel Buddy’ scheme.

We told the group what we had been talking about and we all agreed what should be done! We’d love to feel safe to use public transport, so we’ve decided on some actions to improve our safety. We also think that methods of encouraging bike use should be developed, and the ‘Travel Buddy’ scheme should be promoted through the Independent Travel Training.

Agenda item 2 – Tackling Hate Crime

Neil showed us a presentation about hate crime. He told us that hate crime was a criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice, based on a person’s race, religion or belief, sexual orientation, disability or transgender and gender identity. He told us what was happening in Rotherham to tackle hate crime and how to report a crime.

We discussed our experiences of hate crime in our groups, and how we feel hate crime is an issue in Rotherham. We questioned whether work around hate crime was promoted enough and how we think awareness should be raised so that people know what hate crime is and what to do if they see it happening. We wondered if the information made available in schools was well known, and whether those who were homeschooled received the same information. As well as this, we recognised the importance of preventing hate crime and want to make sure that there are consequences for the perpetrator rather than the victim.

We told the group what we had been talking about and shared our key messages. We feel that it’s most important to increase awareness of hate crime and consider how we can do this in all settings. We never want a victim to feel like they’re being punished for things that are happening to them and want to make sure other young people know what to do if they fall victim of a hate crime, with consideration of how they might feel about reporting it.