A few days ago, I was looking through a checklist of things that need to be in place if an organisation wants to hold a summer playscheme for children. This is something that I used to do in the nineteen eighties when I was a vicar in Doncaster. Reading the new instuctions brought me out in a cold sweat. All the adults on the scheme must have a CRB check. Well - I would have fallen at the first hurdle.
Why?
Well, in the Doncaster scheme I mentioned we had a local playing field, which was secure. It had a chain-link fence which was secure, and it had one gate. One person at the gate could monitor everyone who came in and out. But the field was huge. An adult in one part of the field could not monitor what was going on in another part of the field.
So we needed a lot of adults to supervise the kids. There were about forty kids, and I wanted to make sure that there were five or six adults there all the time. The trouble was that as always there weren't enough volunteers. At this point I hit upon a clever wheeze.
This was all happening during the Miners' Strike. Part of the reason we were holding the playscheme was to help out miners' families, by simply tiring their kids out so that they weren't hanging around the house getting under their parens' feet. But at the same time there used to be weekly confrontations between the miners and police outside the local pits. During these confrontations, there would ususally be one or two fights, and a young miner or two would be hauled off and charged with affray. The penalty for this would be, let's say, forty hours of community service.
Now the trouble was that the usual way of service this kind of sentence would be to help out at a youth club or after school club which took place once or twice a week. But doing this would 'burn off' the hours incredibly slowly. Twenty weeks in most cases. I approached the local police and made the suggestion that if three or four of these lads came to help us at the playscheme, it meant that the individuals could burn off their hours in a week, and it would unclog the community srvice scheem which was being inundated with bored and disaffected young miners.
This was a marriage made in heaven. We got our adult helpers, They got their hours burnt off quickly, and the kids had local heroes looking after them.
Of course this was the kind of thing that would have sent a SafeGuarding officer running off screaming. The helpers on our scheme were there precisely because they were criminal offenders. All of them had criminal records.
The trouble is that it was all born of tragedy. The Miners' Strike was a disaster for the miners. Within a year of the end of the strike those self same community service lads had been made redundant, and the villages and towns of South Yorkshire had their culture and traditions stripped away. The kids at the playscheme loved having the equivalent of their big brothers looking after them, and I think that the lads themselves got something more out of looking after the kids. It prepared them in some small measure for life beyond the pits, a different set of values from those of the macho men bringing out the coal. A tiny bit of a silver lining.
