Ned’s Weeknotes (7th August)
I’m Ned, MD at the Centre for the Children’s Workforce. These (hopefully more or less weekly) weeknotes are intended as a way of sharing our work and learning as we build the project. Please get in touch if you’re interested in this work — I’m on linkedin here and always up for hearing from people.
In a Nutshell: Back in the groove, this week: narrative work including mapping and healthy places, thinking about youth voice and engagement with Chloe, reorganising the CCW Drive so that it’s fit for purpose, and thinking ahead to a Rites of Passage work.
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4 things:
- Narrative Work: Have worked on a couple of things this week which have been more focused on narrative/storytelling, which is maybe the area of our work that I’m least immediately comfortable with. Partly that’s been on the mapping work and how to communicate it once it’s finished, and that’s shaping up nicely thanks to Katy’s work. And partly it was a potential partnership grounded in health and building healthy places for children, but rooted primarily in the storytelling of that work rather than something more programmatic.
- Youth Voice: Chloe wrote an initial paper on youth voice/engagement in the context of the Centre’s work. Clear expectation/ambition for it to avoid tokenism, also something about how granular the ask can be and therefore how it can avoid asking people to represent a demographic’s viewpoint, and then finally for me something about the abstraction of asking young people to jump into workforce design, and how that might influence the offer and their engagement with it. Looking forward to seeing how that develops.
- Reorganising Drive: I took some pleasure in reorganising the CCW google drive and making it make sense again. We had a mission-based structure for the first year or so that was all about launching the FdA, and now that we’re a bigger team with a wider portfolio of work that stopped making sense. So we’ve now done something more traditional, and it will be interesting to see how that works when it encounters the reality of a busy team. Structure below in case of interest to anyone. File under important but not particularly sexy, and relevant to the AI governance stuff I was thinking about last week.
- Rites of Passage: We’re building up to a partnership launch with UK Youth around the practice of Rites of Passage in supporting successful transitions, so I did a bit of reading and thinking around that. Really looking forward to it.
Reading/Watching/Listening/Playing etc:
I bigged up my reading too much last week I think. I’ve been reading Concrete Island by JG Ballard for book club, and I’ll probably read The End of Everything once I’m finished with that. Have listened to a few interviews around the Regime Change Trump book, which are compelling in a bleak and tired way.
