Welcome to Youth Workforce Dream Team.

About the game

In the Youth Workforce Dream Team game you put together and choose training for a virtual team of leaders and workers providing services for young people.

The choices of team members and training you make when creating your team will be fed into an England wide research project that is trying to find out what training youth workforce leaders and managers need.

When you have created your team it will go into the Dream Team league, allowing other website visitors to vote for their favourite teams.

The team with the most votes will rise to the top of the league table and will be crowned the Youth Workforce Dream Team.

Results from the game will be fed into the formal research up until the 26th February 2008. Results from after this point will influence future planning, but may not be included in the final research report.

The Survey

As well as, or instead of, creating a team – you can also have your say on the future of training and development for youth workforce managers and leaders by filling in our short survey.

The background

Services for young people are changing.

Last year (2007) the Government put together a plan called Aiming High for Young People.

This plan includes changes to the way services for young people will work together to provide:

• Positive activities for example: sports, arts and youth clubs;
• Information, advice and guidance for example: connexions advisors, health advice, careers advice;
• Specialised support for when young people have particular needs for support;

To make those changes, the managers and leaders in the youth ‘workforce’ will need extra support and training.

The National Youth Agency and FPM training have been asked by the Children’s Workforce Development Council (part of the Government) to find out about the sorts of training and development leaders and managers need.

We are running a survey with leaders and managers across England – but we also want to hear from young people.

Who is behind this?

DCSF has commissioned this research, which is part of a range of research being undertaken by and with the full support of both CWDC and Lifelong Learning UK. The research is being carried out by The National Youth Agency and FPM.

The National Youth Agency are co-ordinating this online interactive survey.

The online interactive survey was developed by Tim Davies from Practical Participation.

Why an interactive game?

Workforce Development can be a complicated topic to ask questions about.

There is a lot of background information to think about, and many of the questions we might want to ask end up being very long and detailed.

When you make choices in a game, you can use and pick up lots of background information without having to go through pages and pages of text.

This game is a simplified version of the real world choices that often have to be made about choosing and training staff.

By asking many different people to go through the same process of making choices in this game, we hope to learn about the priorities they hold for choosing and training leaders and managers of services for young people.

The voting element of the game encourages everyone to think carefully about putting together the best dream team that they possibly can.

Contact details

If you have any questions about the research project please contact kevin.ford@fpmonline.co.uk

If you have any questions about this website or the content on the site, please contact timd@nya.org.uk.