A visit to Kids Company's Urban Academy

Members of Bestinvest's charity committee visited Kids Company's Urban Academy in Southwark, London, which historically has accounted for about 15% of the charity's spending. The Urban Academy is one of three centres run by Kids Company and can be described as a cross between a school and a youth centre for its pupils. One of its more controversial aspects is that pupils are effectively paid to attend by Kids Company through a system which rewards them with a small weekly allowance based on adherence to an educational contract, however, we were surprised and impressed by what we found.

The Urban Academy

The Academy's students are typically young people aged 16 and over who have previously been excluded from or left mainstream education prematurely. David Gustave, an Oxford history graduate and qualified lawyer who is a key worker for Kids Company, told us that 95% of the youths at the Academy and those at Kids Company's other centres tend to self refer; they hear about Kids Company's services through friends on the street, and come to find out more.

The Academy has two hundred students, although as it occupies a small building they are not all there at once and some are supported through their studies on courses elsewhere. The maze of rooms includes IT facilities, a media and film room, an art workshop, a fashion design studio and classrooms which give students the chance to develop skills that are typically hard for them to access. The benefit of direct access to teachers is also considerable. During our tour, one of the things that stuck out was a young girl who was receiving personal A-level maths tuition with the goal of taking chartered accountancy exams. Her dedication is impressive, considering she left school at sixteen, as is the amount of effort that the staff at the Urban Academy are willing to put into each pupil.

Holistic Benefits

However, the Academy's function is not just to make facilities available to students. Many have experienced considerable trauma, and Kids Company staff know how fundamental it is to address their mental, emotional and physical health needs in order to enable them to make progress academically. Nutritious hot meals are provided daily, and young people are offered the chance to see a professional osteopath, a psychotherapist, an educational psychologist, and to access a range of complementary health therapies. There is even a weights room where students can develop physically. This holistic approach is deemed to be crucial by Kids Company: "Because of the kinds of environments in which these children grow up and live, they typically exist in an overly heightened sense of alertness. They are constantly physically tense and need a release for this pent-up energy before they can concentrate on learning. Many also require intensive therapy to help them to come to terms with events in their pasts.

How successful is the Urban Academy?

The success of the Urban Academy is hard to quantify, although Kids Company is proud to have a long list of children who have successfully passed through its services, currently supporting around 150 young people at college and university. However, in 2003, an evaluation by Crime Concern on behalf of the Home Office identified an 85% success rate in reintegrating excluded pupils into mainstream education, compared to the national average of 34%. Crime Concern declared that, "in an ideal world every neighbourhood should have a Kids Company".

Kids Company has recently made efforts to quantify its success further through a University of London study. The answers given by a random sample of 240 young people at Kids Company indicated 88% had reduced substance intake; 90% had reduced criminal involvement; 91% had returned to education; 100% had access to GP and NHS services (the figure is just 68% for children on their arrival at Kids Company) and 69% were in employment.

Our View

If there is a problem with the Kids Company model it is that it is not really saleable. Our visit showed us that their work is highly resource intensive which means that a huge amount of voluntary and professional time and effort is put into each child. Camilla Batmanghelidjh, the Founder of Kids Company is adamant that this is the only way to get satisfactory results: children need intensive nurturing. Added to which, without this kind of support, many would fall into the criminal justice system, where their cost to the state would vastly outweigh the cost of Kids Company's services. Consequently, it is improbable that Kids Company will be able to offer its full resource-intensive approach to the 14,420 London-based children on the Child Protection Register. However, the charity recognises this limitation and, with support from the Department for Children, Schools and Families totalling £4.2 million per year, Kids Company is establishing itself as a centre of excellence in the management of traumatised young people with the aim of seeing its model replicated on a national scale.

Further information on Kids Company and its Urban Academy can be found via: www.urbanacademy.org.uk and www.kidsco.org.uk.

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