Improving the quality of life for young people

Local authorities can help children and young people to enjoy life and achieve their goals. They are legally responsible for ensuring that every child has the opportunity to achieve or maintain a reasonable standard of health or development. This especially applies to those who are deaf, dumb, blind, substantially and permanently handicapped, or suffer a mental condition.

Many people assume that a person who is physically or mentally handicapped is totally incapable of learning or working. However, this is not necessarily true for every individual. It may be more difficult for the individual to learn or work, but it isn’t totally impossible for the individual to do so. If the educational and training materials and employment environment are properly adapted, the individual may be very successful in school and on the job.

Contributing factors to good health and development

Numerous factors contribute to a child’s good health and levels of development. Two primary factors are the child’s sense of achievement and joy of living. The attainment of these two factors leads the child through a chain reaction of events which ends up providing better health and higher levels of development.

Basically, the cycle starts with the child obtaining a joy of living. The joy of living makes a child feel good inside, which leads to better health. Better health helps a child to achieve and develop more, which in turn leads to a sense of achievement. A sense of achievement encourages a child to have dreams and aspirations.

If the child has dreams and aspirations, he or she will attempt to gain the skills needed to turn those personal dreams and goals into realities. If the youth succeeds in gaining the necessary skills, he or she can gain useful employment in the desired field. The gained employment in turn provides a better economic situation, which permits the person to enjoy life more. The cycle then comes full circle and begins again.

Education, training, and employment skills are essential

A child’s education, training, and employment skills are essential to how achieved she or he feels. They are also vital to obtaining the desired type of employment the child spends a lifetime dreaming of having as an adult. However, there is a high rate of children and young people who are dropping out of school or who are truant quite frequently. They are not developing their employment skills and are not receiving the training needed in order to obtain employment. This is especially true for those who have mental or physical handicaps, young parents, and those who have been placed in the social care and youth justice systems.

Local authorities can help to create joy of living

Local authorities can assist children and young people throughout this entire cycle, but especially can help them to obtain the joy of living. First, the local authorities can work with community partners to establish a wide range of programmes and safe play areas suitable for all children. The authorities and their partners should help to provide children and young people with as many opportunities to play and enjoy leisure activities as they possibly can.

They can arrange for the children to participate in sports, concerts, and cultural events. They should also provide opportunities for the children to serve their local communities through various projects. Most importantly, the local authorities can establish a way where the children and young people can share their own ideas of how to improve the local community and the services being offered.

Local authorities can accurately assess educational needs

Another way the local authorities can assist children is to accurately determine what their educational needs are. Part of the local authorities’ duties is to determine what education and employment skills are needed by the children and young people to meet the employers’ needs in their communities. Then they determine what schools to open or close, and how many students to provide spaces for.

To become more effective, the local authorities could set up a system that allows them to actively listen to what the young people want to do with their lives. The authorities also need to actively listen to what the employers in the community want. The system the authorities set up should have the capability of matching the children’s interests with the employers’ needs.

For instance, the local authorities could administer aptitude tests and conduct surveys periodically. They can survey the local employers at the same time they survey the children. Once a child decides what he or she wants to do, the education and training can be matched to the employment fields they will most likely choose to enter as adults. The local authorities could then partner up with specific employers to provide support and mentoring for that child and its family all throughout the child’s developmental period.