Tuition Fees

This week the Government in England has announced that Universities will be able to charge students up to £9000 in tuition fees to attend their University and get a degree. This is the latest change to University costs and funding over the last twenty years or so. It just seems there is no end to the spiraling costs of attending University.

The first attack on Higher Education was when the grant system was taken away, this forces students to take out loans and overdrafts to cover their costs. This however was still affordable as the Student Loans Company gave out loans which you only paid back at a small rate when you were earning a high figure and tuition fees were relatively low.

After this we had Top-Up fees which lead to some universities increasing the cost of a degree by raising tuition fees. This added to the recent recession then made it even harder for students to afford to go to University. Now to hear that Universities will be able to charge £9000 must send shivers down the spine of any prospective student and this could only be the beginning.

Universities have evolved over the year and are now more business driven than ever with course places really turning in to supply and demand. Currently there are more people applying for University than there are places which means Universities can afford to bump their prices and can make more money than they would by opening more places and courses for everyone.

I think society and education are to blame for this current demand for University places which has lead to the rise in costs. I think money needs to be invested in showing people that there are other successful roots than University because if you did this the value of a degree would go up for people who do one and you would have less unemployed young adults with a mountain of debt to pay back.

Don’t get me wrong I am proud of my degree but only because it has helped get where I wanted to go in life. In today’s world with the spiraling cost and the decrease in value of a degree I am not sure if I would do one. I just think it is the madness that the value of something can go down but the price can go up, to me in any other business as a customer which the students are in this situation you wouldn’t buy it so I don’t know why so many people are.

You can share your thoughts by going to:

http://www.talentedyoungpeople.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=839


Adam Sibley
Founder of the Talented Young People organisation
www.talentedyoungpeople.com
"Envisage it, Believe it, Achieve it!"
”Shaking up the Youth of Today”

http://www.talentedyoungpeople.blogspot.com

Does Anything Really Change?

Does anything really change? Last week it was discussed in the news whether funding for youth related projects and schemes had actually made a noticeable or quantifiable improvement to the lives of young people or not.

It is hard when you read the headlines over the weekend of murdered teenagers to actually imagine that funding is helping but how do you gauge the national and overall success of a project when you have stories like this to contend with?

No matter how much good is done the news outlets will always highlight sensational and extreme news of the minority of young people committing crime. This will in turn lead people in to thinking that this is what young people are up to across the country.

Although we all hate figures, statistics and having to measure success I think in some cases it is needed. If you as a government are going to invest millions of taxpayers pounds they have to know they are getting a return for their money. It is hard to stop extreme cases like we have seen on the weekend but what needs to be done is to make sure that these stay isolated and minority events, it is when these incidents become the norm is when we have failed. One teenager dieing is far too many but you can’t stop wanting to better or to improve things as we only lose when we stop trying

These events need to remind us that no young person is safe and we all need to be doing are all to make sure every young person leads a safe life. We can’t rely on funding or education to solve the problems we all need to take an active role within our communities to make sure we are all safe.

When every young person has the same access to funding, education and support is when we will be able to judge change properly and see real change on a national basis. Success with young people is only temporary and we can never afford to forget it. That is why we need continual funding and continual monitoring for the improvement of young lives in the UK. Just because a project has been successful for a young person and changed their life it doesn’t necessarily mean that if support was pulled away that they would continue to be a success.

It may seem like nothing changes but it is a much better world than if funding and support was to be taken away from youth projects and programmes. Just remember that just because you may be reading the same headlines every year it doesn’t mean change isn’t being made or happening.

Do you think anything is changing in regards to the success of support for youth related projects and programme? We here at Talented Young People would love to know your views and you can share them by joining in our topic of the week by going to:

http://www.talentedyoungpeople.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=457

Adam Sibley
Founder of the Talented Young People organisation
www.talentedyoungpeople.com
"Envisage it, Believe it, Achieve it!"

http://www.talentedyoungpeople.blogspot.com

Sports Funding

It’s a big year for sport this year with the Olympics this summer as well as other big events like the football European Championships. Sports are making big headlines at the moment with the Formula 1 season kicking off the last weekend and the upcoming climax of the premiership football season.

This week there was some great news for young up and coming football players (or soccer players as otherwise known) in England as the FA announced plans to pump two hundred million pounds in to grassroots football. Many organisations and government parties have promised ideas like this for many years but now finally the FA are making a heavy financial investment.

After much time spent working and playing in the football community I am all too aware of the problems that exist. Young people need safe and proper facilities and staff in order to help their development. However in my time spent in youth football I have seen a huge range of standards of facilities with any clubs not having any facilities at all and just a pitch to play on.

Money needs to be invested in facilities and the education of coaches, staff and volunteers associated with football clubs. So many clubs are run by parents or adults who have had no access to training. If we can raise the quality of coaching staff we will raise the quality of players being produced. However the cost of courses are putting many people off as individuals and clubs can’t justify paying for the courses with so many other outgoings.

As well as training players to be the best they can be the FA need to encourage young people in to other career routes which can get you in to football. We need more young coaches, more young referees, more young groundsmen and more young first aiders. Not every young football player is going to go and play football for a living but if you can teach them more skills and show them different experiences it may help them make a career out of football.

This year with all the sport going on there is a great opportunity to us these sporting events to help tackle obesity and to help create a fitter and healthier nation and football is one of the many sports we can use to do that. As shown by Sports Relief on BBC last week you can do great things through sport and sport has a great power to change lives we just need to use it right.

To have your say on sports funding join in our topic of the week on the forums by going to:

http://www.talentedyoungpeople.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=389

Adam Sibley
Founder of the Talented Young People organisation
www.talentedyoungpeople.com
"Envisage it, Believe it, Achieve it!"

http://www.talentedyoungpeople.blogspot.com

Funding and Grants for Charities and Not for Profit organisations

I have been wanting to talk about funding and grants in my blog for many weeks as it is an area that I feel very strongly about and feel that my thoughts need to made public on. This is a long rant so bear with me as I think many of you will agree with what I have to say.

Many Charities and Not for Profit organisations rely on funding and grants from trusts, the lottery, the government and many more funding awarding bodies to carry out their daily activities. Through my years of being involved in charities and Not for Profit organisations I have never experienced a worse or harder time for these organisations to exist in.

Now I come from a media background so every week I purchase a copy of the Guardian on Monday for their media section which is a very well respected section in media circles. In this section they have pages and pages of the latest media jobs. Well that use to be the case as now when I open it up there seems to be more job adverts for Fundraising Managers with salaries of £20,000 - £30,000 than actual jobs that actually require a media background.

Now these organisations are employing these people to be professional application form fillers and to help them win the big grants and awards for their projects. The thing is that every week there seem to be more and more positions but the money that is out there in grants doesn’t seem to be increasing. Granting bodies seem to have followed suit with the amount of professional people working applying for grants by making the application process a lot harder to qualify for many grants.

How is an organisation or a charity that is run solely through volunteers who all have other day jobs ever going to compete with organisations that can employ people on big salaries to apply for these grants and awards? Quite simply they can’t. They can’t phone the organisations awarding the grants as by the time they finish work the offices are closed and then the volunteers have a few hours when they are tired after working all day and whilst looking after a family to try and fill out the forms.

An organisation’s worthiness to receive an award shouldn’t be based on the amount of employees they have or the size of their offices but the actual difference they can make. With many big organisations you would be surprised by how much of the money they make through donations and winning grants goes to paying admin staff, costs, office space and PR campaigns. I would say a good 95% of charities and not for profits can not afford any of that as it would be not financially sensible for them to do so. If you are interested to find out where your money goes to go to the Charity Commission website or Companies House website where you can get annual reports for free or at a small cost for every registered organisation. One thing I would strongly advise is, if you are donating money to an organisation and you are worried where your money is going, to specifically say in writing that you want that money spent on a certain area.

Now I have always been brought up that the right way to set up a charity or not for profit is because there is an area you want to help or change whether that be young people, a disability or a country dealing with poverty and then look for funds to support your organisation. It seems now though that the only way to survive is to look at what grants are out there at the moment and then a tailor an organisation around that award which meets all their criteria.

The Internet has helped smaller organisations a great deal with it now being easier to find out about grants through search engines and to be able to download forms instead of having to do it via the post. However it seems many people are now cashing in on this by offering software packages, CDs and websites which you have to pay to use in order to get the latest information and details on grants. These companies guard this information very closely and try to make sure the only way you can find out about them is by buying their product. I think it is a sad world we live in where the charity and not for profit world have been taken over by companies and the race to make more money. Organisations shouldn’t be forced to pay for information for grants that they are able to apply for.

Now there are many conspiracy theorists out there that believe our hosting of the 2012 Olympics is robbing many organisations of money which I’m not going to comment on either way. All I can say is that we seem to be living in an era where the goalposts are getting changed on a regular basis and grants are getting harder and harder to apply for and to win. It’s like now to become a registered charity you have to have an annual income of £5000 coming in to your charity. To get £5000 many organisations need to apply for grants to get this sort of money but for most grants they expect you to be a registered charity so although they are doing all the things a charity should be they can’t become a registered charity because of their finances so can’t apply for the grant.

Now I am not denying that there are valid reasons why it is so hard to win grants and to become a registered charity as it helps stop a lot of cowboy organisations or dishonest people getting involved but they need to find ways of doing this without penalising the good people and good organisations.

The one thing to remember though if you are an organisation who is currently applying for grants is that they aren’t a long term financial solution to your financial needs and can’t provide you sustainability. Grants are good for one off projects but if you are using them to fund long term projects and the grants are only allowed to be used within a year period then the next year it leaves you with a big financial hole to fill as many granting bodies will only let you apply once or at least have a few years year break before you are allowed to apply again. It is ok to start off your first year with a grant but during that year you need to be thinking of ways you can generate that kind of funding through other means like fundraising events, sponsors etc. which is more sustainable and that you control so that in the second year your financial future is secure.

That brings an end to my rant I hope this has given all of you some food for thought this week.

To get involved in our weekly discussion on this matter go to:

http://www.talentedyoungpeople.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=247

Adam Sibley
Founder of the Talented Young People organisation
www.talentedyoungpeople.com
"Envisage it, Believe it, Achieve it!"

http://www.talentedyoungpeople.blogspot.com