Government is committed to ensuring that young people can take part in social action projects and programmes regardless of their background. The yearly independent National Youth Social Action Survey reports on the socio-economic gap in participation enabling us to monitor year on year progress and to take action to close this gap. In 2016 the survey identified a participation gap of 9% points between the most affluent and least affluent, down from 20% points in 2014.<\/p>
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Government has invested £20 million of seed funding as part of the match funded #iwill fund to provide opportunities to young people to participate in meaningful social action. The #iwill Fund works closely with match funders to identify cold spots and directs funding to engage the hard to reach.<\/p>
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The National Citizen Service (NCS) Trust also ensure young people from all backgrounds are able to participate. In summer 2016, 17% of NCS participants were eligible for free school meals compared with around 8% of young people of the same age in the general population.<\/p>
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The Government will issue its response to the Review of Full Time Social Action by Young People in due course.<\/p>"} , "answeringMember" : {"_about" : "http://data.parliament.uk/members/3950", "label" : {"_value" : "Biography information for Dame Tracey Crouch"} } , "answeringMemberConstituency" : {"_value" : "Chatham and Aylesford"} , "answeringMemberPrinted" : {"_value" : "Tracey Crouch"} , "dateOfAnswer" : {"_value" : "2018-03-08", "_datatype" : "dateTime"} , "isMinisterialCorrection" : {"_value" : "false", "_datatype" : "boolean"} , "questionFirstAnswered" : [{"_value" : "2018-03-08T14:56:19.083Z", "_datatype" : "dateTime"} ]} , "answeringDeptId" : {"_value" : "10"} , "answeringDeptShortName" : {"_value" : "Digital, Culture, Media and Sport"} , "answeringDeptSortName" : {"_value" : "Digital, Culture, Media and Sport"} , "date" : {"_value" : "2018-03-05", "_datatype" : "dateTime"} , "hansardHeading" : {"_value" : "Young People: Voluntary Work"} , "houseId" : {"_value" : "1"} , "legislature" : [{"_about" : "http://data.parliament.uk/terms/25259", "prefLabel" : {"_value" : "House of Commons"} } ], "questionText" : "To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, with reference to the Youth Full Time Social Action Review published in January 2018, what steps he is taking to widen participation in youth full-time social action programmes, particularly by people from low income backgrounds.", "registeredInterest" : {"_value" : "false", "_datatype" : "boolean"} , "tablingMember" : {"_about" : "http://data.parliament.uk/members/4243", "label" : {"_value" : "Biography information for Dan Jarvis"} } , "tablingMemberConstituency" : {"_value" : "Barnsley Central"} , "tablingMemberPrinted" : [{"_value" : "Dan Jarvis"} ], "uin" : "131088"} ], "itemsPerPage" : 10, "page" : 0, "startIndex" : 1, "totalResults" : 1, "type" : ["http://purl.org/linked-data/api/vocab#ListEndpoint", "http://purl.org/linked-data/api/vocab#Page"]} }