4Youth (South West), based at Melksham’s Canberra Centre, deliver services for children and young people up to 18 years old, or 25 for those with special education needs or disabilities (SEND).
Delivering positive youth activities to young people each week, we run Youth Clubs targeted at different age groups and holiday activities from our youth centres in Melksham and Atworth as well as a detached youth work offer in Westbury and Devizes as well as our free-to-access counselling service, TeenTalk, which is delivered in Chippenham, Melksham and Westbury as well as remotely via phone or MS Teams. We also offer peer leader opportunities for young people to help with delivering our youth clubs.
Each of our clubs includes a range of planned activities designed to help young people develop life skills including, amongst others, cooking, teamwork, conflict management, fitness and well-being.
Youth club sessions are delivered by a combination of paid staff and volunteers, with direction and management from our part time professional youth work manager.
Many of the towns in Wiltshire, and the surrounding villages, have pockets of deprivation within them.
By the nature of the work that we undertake we attract a higher proportion of our young people from those more deprived areas. For instance, about 45% of the young people attending our Melksham youth clubs come from the Forest community in Melksham, which ranks as one of the most deprived areas in the county.
There are always young people that are ‘hard to reach’. In Melksham many of those can be found at in the skate park or in clusters in and around the King George V Playing Fields (Melksham’s main park).
Many young people living in rural areas are excluded from some activities in the towns because of the transport challenges.
For young people with SEND, being told that they can attend a mainstream activity does not always offer a practicable solution.
With the significant reduction of council run activities and localities for young people they have been deprived of some of the opportunities to take part in social projects, to socialise out of the school environment and to learn some soft skills.
Reopening and running the youth centre in the town has provided a safe environment. It is particularly telling that the location of the services is the number one issue raised by young people.
Young people attending club nights can take part in activities designed to teach soft skills. Taster sessions at the youth centre with visiting organisations such as football, rugby and even the Army and activities designed to try and promote generating new interests such as steam fair club, bowls, music and as diverse as drumming as therapy and the opportunity to handle and learn about reptiles.
The individual needs of SEND young people mean that often a slightly different approach to the delivery of services means that they are better able to enjoy the full benefit of attending the club.
As well as running dedicated provision for SEND we also have several integration opportunities including our Youth Advisory Board and the opportunity for young people from the SEND club to also attend our mainstream clubs where appropriate.
