Children and Young People’s Partnership Board - October 2024 meeting

On Tuesday 22 October 2024, we met in the John Smiths Room of the Town Hall, Alex from the Youth Cabinet chaired our partnership board with Cllr Cusworth. We introduced ourselves and told the group our name, where we go to school or work and the best event we’d been to in Rotherham. We had lots of favourite events, like The Rotherham Show, the Museum of the Moon in Rotherham Minster and the Reytons concert, for some of us having our say at the CYPPB is best!

Tanya told us about the Council Plan for Rotherham and told us about what the current priorities are. She then told us about the consultation activity that was happening and told us how we can impact what goes into the new Council Plan.

We then thought about some of the highlighted priorities and voted the things we thought were most important by putting tokens in wooden boxes.

After we’d voted we spoke in our groups about the Council plan. Tanya and Kellie helped with our conversations. We said that it covered most things but some of the wording wasn’t very child friendly or accessible. We thought there were plenty of things to do for children, but not enough things for teenagers or enough support with the transition from childhood to adulthood. We discussed what we were worried about and said how we see Anti-Social behaviour and broken street lighting and don’t always feel safe, especially when using public transport or when we’re in the town centre. We know that the environment is important, and we’d like to see a cleaner Rotherham as footpaths can be dirty and there’s rubbish in the canal, but we think that there’s more to a thriving neighbourhood than plant pots, as young people prefer to have things to do.

Tanya also asked us to think about how we would like to hear about the results of the consultation and be told about what changes will be made. We thought about this and said that schools are a useful method of communication, through letters, emails or assemblies. There could also be a drop-in to communicate issues and give updates, as well as using social media and asking people to spread the word across the borough.

We fed back our main messages to the group and agreed what should be done!

Naomi showed us a presentation about Mental Health and Wellbeing and told us about the goals the service has to help its transformation. She told us they wanted a clearer pathway through the service, with reduced waiting times, making sure that young people get the right support. It’s good that young people are currently involved in the service and sometimes they sit on interview panels and help with joint decision making.

There were some really good next steps, like how the service wants to hold engagement sessions with young ambassadors and advisory groups around proposed language and names and how they’d like to develop a self-referral drop-in clinic too.

We spoke about our experiences with our Mental Health and asked Naomi any questions we wanted to in private. We didn’t feedback to the group on this as we thought it was quite a personal topic, but we did write some things down anonymously on our tables.

We think that the With Me in Mind service was helpful but do feel that schools need to prioritise Mental Health more and teachers should have some training to help them understand it. We said that sometimes young people don’t want to talk about Mental Health, which could be related to different cultures, and said that we thought if we were to talk about it, we’d be more likely to go to a youth worker who we trust.

The feedback we gave clearly identified what we wanted to happen!

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

Helen then 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. The Young Inspectors had developed a questionnaire about busses and were inspecting the bus station and we shared our concerns around safety with the transport team. We heard that there was a campaign in place to encourage people to use cycle lanes and in the future a volunteer network will be developed to help with the Independent Travel Training scheme.

In terms of Hate Crime, she told us that Neil was continuously offering his service around to schools and that he’d also contacted the elective home education representative to offer his service to those who aren’t educated within a school. The Hate Crime Pledge has been printed for Neil to distribute on his visits, as well as the guidance that the Youth Cabinet developed on how to report hate crime so that these can be displayed in the community.

We also heard an update about us writing to schools to ask them to stop locking toilets as a method of preventing vaping and voted on our next steps. We decided that we would help with the guidance Sue and her team in Public Health were working on and share this with schools to highlight how important it is to have access to the toilets.

Helen told us that there was a great opportunity for us to take control of the meeting next time and impact the Rotherham Together 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 our meeting next time where we all present what’s most important to us and set our priorities as children and young people in Rotherham.