Last week some encouraging news emerged from the online Children and Young People Now magazine regarding a teaming up between Kent and Medway Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) and a charity to support 10 secondary schools to reduce the number of exclusions and create an inclusive learning environment. The Charity was referred to as NutureUK although its formal title is THE NURTURE GROUP NETWORK LIMITED which is based in London. The exciting aspect of this story is the way that a public sector agency is working with a charity and we can only hope that other agencies will adopt a similar approach. The CYPNow story explains

Kent and Medway VRU has announced a new partnership with education inclusion charity nurtureuk to deliver its National Nurturing Schools programme alongside its Nurturing Family Engagement programme across the county. Combined, the programmes are aimed at creating a holistic approach to nurture in education and at home, so all pupils, parents and school staff can work together to create a culture where young people can thrive and achieve through their education, nurtureuk said. The partnership is aimed at supporting the mental health and wellbeing of young people and their families, reducing exclusions and fostering more positive engagement with schools and learning among young people. The public health approach to tackling youth violence is based on a similar scheme used in Glasgow.

The article goes on to explain about the Glasgow example. There are of course a great many charities that are well capable of working with the public sector and perhaps more specifically that can work with young people to help them being educated in a way that is not currently able to be effectively carried out by Schools and even County Councils. So the question for those of us in Sussex is what would it take for our own Sussex VRU to pick up this thread and begin to work with it. As I wrote a few weeks ago, Sussex VRU needs to start to change radically from its very easy collaboration from a limited group of public sector agencies led by a small number of politically determined people to start to look much more widely and addressing issues that it currently is not dealing with. The youth charities in Sussex include YMCA Downslink Group, AllSorts and Impact Initiatives and these and others could potentially assist Sussex VRU in trying to resolve some of the issues that Glasgow and Kent and Medway are resolving in their settings through partnership working.