i am sparticus: Words

Edinburgh

Edinburgh, the best city in the country? Maybe. It's swell.

---

In some nice Italian café in the Grassmarket, the guy behind me in the queue looks like a member of The Beatles (late 60's period, if a member of The Beatles had curly hair). He orders food and from his mouth comes the most stereotypical Scouse accent ever. George is not dead! He is living in Edinburgh. And somehow lost 30 to 40 years. Or more likely one of the guys friends saw him that morning and said "you look exactly like one of The Beatles, dude, I dare you to put a Scouse accent on all day" and he accepted and now he's really regretting it.

---

Sarah: "I'm getting something from the shop, do you want anything?"
Me: "Cornetto."
Sarah: "YES."

---

The National Museum of Scotland is pretty much the British Museum, Natural History Museum, V&A and Science Museum all rolled into one with the dull bits removed (no-one cares about you obscure Greecian dynasty). Which I think summarises all of Edinburgh, it's small enough that you don't have room to throw things around all over the place, and you can't say "oh, we need to have more venues out in Zone 4" because there is no Zone 4. London I feel reaches the point where it's being torn apart because everything needs to be everywhere at once. In Edinburgh, there's no room for moving everything apart, or even leaving rubbish stuff in. It's a good city.

Burn

To top off my litany of complaint and illnesses I made yesterday I also managed to burn my finger on a kettle. While making Lemsip. I'd feel more foolish if I wasn't so jacked up on the stuff.

Wednesday The 28th

I've been ill lately. Really ill. Not just wussy man flu, but actual proper ill in bed for two and a half days and not got out of it save to watch Moulin Rouge and eat ice cream. My stomach is still in pain.

In being ill and off work, I haven't got around to updating you on the latest happenings in my life, or the latest things I wrote in a notepad and promised to put on here whilst I was in Edinburgh, they're all hilarious, be prepared. Being off ill I also managed to miss Spring and Winter giving up their ongoing struggle with each other and letting Summer take over. Someone should have texted me about not bring my coat into work. Finally, being off ill I managed to unlock an extra 15 stars in Super Mario 64 DS taking me up to 135 stars. If they'd only release Zelda DS, I'd be happy.

Theological conundrum of the day: Was Jesus enthroned in heaven before he came to earth, died, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven? Or did he only receive his throne when he ascended? Answers on a postcard / in the comments.

What's A JNC? (Part 3: Conditions)

As well as setting out what it means to be professionally qualified and what courses can train you in that, the Joint Negotiating Committee set-out what conditions youth workers should work under. This includes salaries, but also all the other exciting things like hours of work, maternity leave and twelve other sub-headings (but don't worry about most of them, iamsparticus.com; reading dull documents so you don't have to). Remember, in all this, if you accept government money for your youth work you are legally bound to keep these conditions.

Salary

If you remember from last time's discussion about qualifications you'll know that your qualification doesn't affect your pay directly, rather it affects what jobs you can get and therefore indirectly your salary. This works like so, someone creates a new job and they decided based upon the responsibility of the post whether or not it requires someone who is professionally qualified. Essentially, if the post will have overall responsibility for staff or service management (or a significant number of staff or large part of the service) the post will need to be professionally qualified. If it won't have that level of responsibility then it'll be a level one or two support worker post (if you really want the gory details of what makes a post professional or support level one or two see Appendix XI of the 2005 JNC Report). Having worked this out you then need to turn to Appendix XII and pick, based upon the difficulty of the post, the chance of recruiting, your generosity and any other factor you want to consider, what pay point you wish to give to the job. This will be the starting pay point, and then every year (from April if the post started before September of the year previous) the salary will increase by one pay point until it's gone up by 4 points at which point there'll be no more pay-rises (aside from inflation). Confused? I hope not, but given that you probably are, here's an example to clear things up;

You (for the sakes and purposes of this example, you are a multi-national charity) decide you want to create a new youth work post in Dorset working with young people who are addicted to Disney straight-to-tv movies. The post will involve recruiting other workers, overseeing a budget and the use of a rented space in Blockbuster. It'll also involve face-to-face work, some detached stuff, and interpretative dance tutoring. You decide the post will need to a professionally qualified one because of the responsibility and because it's quite a challenging post with setting up new work you decide to start on a fairly high pay-scale. So you start on pay point 23 –which will go up to pay point 27 in five years– paying a starting salary of £27,603 per-annum.

So that's how salary works, because of the flexibility of the pay points scale system, it's hard to work out how much a post should be paid, so if you are in the situation of employing, you'll just have to use your best judgement (though our borough has given a break down of what they point scales they give for certain roles to help out and get some consistency).

Conditions

I'm just going to pull out the interesting bits here;

6) Working Time: The standard working week for full-time youth and community workers is 37 hours (36 in London). Work... should not normally exceed 10 sessions a week. There should be no more than 8 evening sessions per fortnight.

Given the phrase "standard working week" I read the above as "if you work more than 36/7 hours a week you should be paid more, and likewise if you work less, you should be paid less". It seems to be quite discretionary though.

9) Training and Development: The JNC recommends that workers attending or undertaking approved training and/or development are entitled to payment of normal earnings, all prescribed fees and other relevant expenses arising.

In point 10 (pensions) there's a bunch of stuff that seems to imply if your Local Education Authority gives you money you can get teacher benefits. I guess it'll vary from region to region, but worth looking into.

11) Leave: Youth and community workers to whom this Report applies are entitled to six weeks paid holiday (thirty working days) [on top of national holidays].

According to point 13 (periods of notice) you have to give at least two months notice if you are making a post redundant, more if they've worked with you for more than nine years.

Gosh, fun eh? A couple of other things though if you employ someone part-time, then you're obliged to pay them according to the pay scale you would have paid them if they were full-time, taking into account that they work less hours, so to continue the example from last time;

You (for the sakes and purposes of this example, you are now a project manager in a multi-national charity) decide you want to create a new part-time youth work post in Dorset working in your young-people-addicted-to-Disney-straight-to-tv-movies project, working specifically with young people in the area of Lady and The Tramp 2. The post will involve detached work, setting up a video workshop and working with the project worker in charge of animal based films. You decide the post requires someone on support worker level 2, working at 18.5 hours a week. The stars are aligned to Saturn (and you're a stingy boss) and so you start the post on the lowest pay-point in their range, which is pay-scale 7, which pays £16,164 per-annum. Because the post will part-time and working half the hours you normally would be you would to pay £8,082. In five years you'll have to pay them £9,403.5, but you'll have made them redundant by then to keep costs down because, like a said, you're stingy.

That's a whole splurge of information and if you're not professionally qualified, working towards it, or thinking about it, or you're not employing youth workers and receiving government money, it's probably as useful as something not very useful (Disney straight-to-tv movies?). But if you are, then hopefully it's handy to know.

INVER - EDN

I love it that when you buy food from a train buffet, they give it to you with such flourish and effect. The bottle of orange juice with it's own doily coaster and little plastic cup. It's as if they're saying "we know that you'd rather the ground was a few thousand feet away and for that we apologise, here's a little elegantly folded serviette with your ready salted Walkers crisps though."

---

There are all these wooden posts by the side of the train tracks, all in groups of five or so, all standing to attention as we go past. I wonder why they're only seen in batches though, and why the gap between each group is so large? Why are there not ones or twos all over the place? Or is it that once one dropped the rest of it's company just said "Screw it, I'm not standing here alone" and threw themselves over to rot?

Church In Inverness

Church the morning I was in Inverness was, well, we sang the Psalms! And not in a "quote a line here or two to make the song seem biblical" but in a proper "these are just the Psalms and we'll sing them" manner. Oh and sing them without any music at all. The logic, I assume is that if you're going to sing stuff that builds each other up it can't ever have the chance of being wrong. So therefore, you should be singing Psalms, songs that are entirely correct because they're entirely in the bible.¹

I find this quite admirable, the values placed on worship and scripture is so high that you refuse to say anything not scriptural.² I think Ephesians 5:19 gives us the justification to sing other things; "addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart". Presumably the hymns and spiritual songs aren't Psalms, and it's cool to sing them.

Anyway, if you've tried to sing a Psalm straight (or wondered if they are indeed songs) you'll know that at least in the English translation, they don't render themselves to much singing. To get round this, it seems there is a version of the Psalms that's adapted for singing. "The Metrical Translation of the Psalms" is the Psalms in Rhyming format. Now my knowledge of Old Testament Hebrew with reference to the Psalms doesn't extend any further than this one fact; Hebrew doesn't use rhyming couplets. Or rhyme at all. Maybe it hadn't been invented back then? Whatever. To say that this metrical translation has stretched things a bit to get the rhyming to work would be an understatement; this is a translation to make The Message blush. There are frequently two versions of the Psalms in the Metrical Translation, one with two couplets a verse, one with just one. So it's become acceptable, in the concern for biblically sound worship, to have two different translations of a book of the bible, one of which is twice as long as the other, and both of which impose alien literary devices.

Still, at least we didn't have to do any action songs

¹ Interestingly this logic didn't carry over to the prayers, which were clearly written of a man's own hand using the thoughts and examples of the bible. Possibly the best prayers I've heard in a church though. If we all prayed like that all the time, I'd be out of a job.

² It also makes me wonder if they're suffering from bible-magic-book-ism, but that's another post.

Half Pints

or if this website had sub-headings:

What We Learnt Today From The Puritans Which While Incidental To What They Actually Had To Teach, Is Still Quite Interesting (Though Not As Interesting As Their Profound Thoughts About God and Their Deep Pastoral Insights).

So it is with the spirits of men under afflictions: If they cannot bear God's potions [medicine] and bring them up again, or if they are insensitive to them and no more affected by them than the body is by a draught of small beer, it is a sad symptom that their souls are in a dangerous and almost incurable condition.

That's right, for the puritans, a draught of small beer has no affect on the body. Drinking for them clearly involved more than the casual half-pint. Though, I reckon Jonathan Edwards was more of a wine man. I doubt you could get decent beer in a barely colonised North-Eastern America.

Inverness

Inverness; "gateway to the highlands", "entry to the real Scotland", "porch to the cold good bits" (I made the last one up).

Inverness, as well as being all these things is also a British city of former industrial employment. It now exists from tourism, from being the only commercial centre for miles around, and from already having lots of people in it who can't be bothered to move out. Why am I Inverness? This is a good question, and one I'm glad I put into your mouth. To be honest I'm not entirely, well, I suppose I do know why. I had an outstanding obligation / promise to go visit Alasdair and Sarah in Edinburgh, a city which I love, but I thought, I have a lot of holiday and maybe I should do something really un-city like. So I took a train as far North as possible and ended up in Inverness. Obviously from here I could walk out to the remote parts and see the sky and get some fresh air.

Except Inverness is just like every other city and it sprawls for miles. It's not without it's charms, but climbing mountains and seeing the stars isn't one of them.

Friday The 16th

• Question of the day (which you're legally obliged to answer¹): What's a reasonable world-record to happen in two minutes and twenty seven seconds that's of interest to people and made-up? Or maybe more clearly worded; make up a feat that took two minutes and twenty seven seconds to do and that was the quickest time it's been done in, therefore making it the world record?

• I'll continue pushing up the things I wrote on holiday over the next week or so. Something I won't mention though because I didn't write it down then was this. Myself and Sarah where standing outside a shop when Sarah realised she craved chocolate².
  "Mark, do you want anything from the shop?"
  "Cornetto."
  And so we had Cornettos. And now I have a constant Cornetto craving gnawing at my very soul. I'm so tracking down one once I click save here.

• That is it, I only just came back from holiday

¹ A Lie

² A Girl

LDN - EDN - INVER

Countryside! With trees, birds and fields as far as the eye can see (well maybe not birds). There are cars waiting at train crossings! People have the time to wait at crossings! They haven't be re-routed and tunnelled under the train tracks to enable greater traffic flow and ease congestion!

---

The woman opposite me is writing up a report on a piece of paper entitled "Logging a Concern About a Child's Safety Or Welfare". I'd guess she is a social worker or a primary school teacher. The template is in Comic Sans MS so I'm going with the latter.

---

Who'd live in Darlington?

---

I can't write neatly with a pen on a train.

Still On Holiday

DEAL WITH THIS PEOPLE. I mean come on, I go on holiday for less than a week, and, well you know I'm here on holiday and you're not. So you know. Gosh. I don't know why I'm updating or where I'm going with this. Seriously at this stage I'm fifty-fifty whether I press save or I just press Apple-Q and watch Scrubs. Wait, Scrubs is on! I'm so just hitting save and closing this thing down.

Just Three Things

A'right, as I said, I'm on holiday tomorrow so this'll be short and sweet. There are three things you should be reading today.

The NYA Guide To Youth Work and Youth Services, does what it says on the .pdf. I must confess to not having had the chance to read this yet, and if iamsparticus.com had a policy about these things it would be "don't link to something you haven't read" but we don't have policies and I'll read it as soon as I can and if I kept it from you, dear reader, simply because I hadn't read it yet, I'd be doing you a disservice. Said.

Youth & Policy, Youth Work: A Manifesto For Our Times. In which Bernard Davies tries to define what exactly secular youth work is.

Nor will it any longer do for youth workers to reach for their usual crutch: ‘It’s the
relationships, stupid!’ when professional colleagues and agency partners ask, as they so often
do, what is this youth work. The need is for an explicit and coherent ‘manifesto’ which by
unpacking such slogans, spells out the practice’s essential features, and then from these,
without claiming superiority, identifies those which set it apart from other practices.

And finally, if you are paid to do Christian youth work someone called Paul Nash is conducting a survey about you and why you do youth work. Read the details, and download the survey here. I did it, and what I found interesting, was how much my understanding of vocation has changed. Essentially if someone asks me why I do Christian Youth Work these days I say "because God has asked me to". Oh I can justify that biblically, but I start with my calling, not any other thing. Seeing as I never really thought about calling last year, I find that interesting.

On Holiday

Hello. I'm on holiday as of tomorrow very early morning. Don't try to contact me, be in touch or do any other fun cool thing, because I'll probably get back to you really quickly and you'll realise that actually I have no life that I still reply to things fast when I'm on holiday. And I wouldn't like you to realise that.

Back on Thursday, regular lack of service will continue then.

A Flashing Light

On the phone to Apple, seeing if we are eligible for educational discount for our youth centre and after three sets of options all I can hear is static. Somewhere, on someone's phone, I am a flashing light and no more, and this I feel, says everything you need to know about modern society.

The Most Frustrating Thing I Learnt In Primary School

The most frustrating thing I learnt how to do In primary school was how to sing a song that I didn't know the words or tune of whilst thinking about something completely different. I tell you this, because I want to. What did you learn?

Back In The Day: Aardvark God

A quick note on the title of today's past entry. My old R.S. class had, in the back, a paper-maché Egyptian god. I'm not sure which god it was, embarrassingly my knowledge of Egyptian god's comes from the badly remembered relevant Horrible History book and Stargate SG-1, but it looked like an aardvark. I remember planning that one day I would take the aardvark and put him in our teacher's chair, but for whatever reason I never got around to doing it. Probably I got scared because I thought I'd get into trouble. Faux rebellion was so cool at that age, but so hard to do in practice. The other reason I might not have done it would have been if I had realised that actually, the plan had no point to it whatsoever. Which brings us neatly to the actual content of today's post.

Today's entry takes a nice long mosey gently pointing out various things that did or will happen to me and then slowly slumps to a halt without ever finding a point. Why should did people read this stuff? Well one of the rules of weblogs is that the comments are never ever about what was written in the weblog entry. When you write deep and profound and meaningful stuff this is a bit of a bind, but on this website it's what keeps it going most of the time.

So, in the extra bonus part of the entry though (which if I can remember, used to say "Best Moment") you find this quote:

'"If I saw a jehovahs witness, I would beat him, with a shoe" Mr. Lewellyn, R.S. Teacher and Buddhist.'

And striking upon the only vaguely interesting thing in the entry the comments descend, all of which are far funnier than anything I wrote in the entry.

Mistakes, Money, and -um- Stuff

Things To Do Wrong In Youth Ministry

Are Short-Term Missions Becoming Faddish?. Spoiler: Yes, but you should read all of it just in case I'm lying.

Mistakes for church-based youth workers #1, Failing to communicate with the church!. Which if you don't do youth work or are involved in a church leadership team you might read and go "huh, that's obvious". Which is probably true, but you do it and don't forget. A good reminder.

Things that I can't put into the same category as each other so I won't try to bother.

Christianity Today: New Report Reveals Extent of Faith Based Youth Work. YouthNet – "the Voluntary Youth Network for Northern Ireland, an independent agency which represents the interests and aspirations of more than 75 youth organisations in Northern Ireland" – does some research into faith based youth work. 68% of youth groups in Northern Ireland are faith-based and, interestingly, 74.4% of all volunteers work for them. I wonder how many youth groups it didn't hit because they're too little or too informal (I'm sure a lot of churches wouldn't hit them).

Warning over children who abuse. Near 2000 children were given police warnings or court orders for sex offences in the last two years. Harrowing stuff.

Funding Opportunities

The Camelot Foundation will apparently give you money for certain things, but I can't bear to look at the website long enough to work out how much and for what.

VCashpoint. Since their re-launch V seemed to be rolling in money they want to give away. This is a young people led fund, a bit like youth opportunities funding, but with a slant towards getting young people involved in volunteering. Seems perfect if you have a group of young people excited about being involved in going on a short-term mission which as we've seen they shouldn't be doing anyway.

Petley

Phil: Went 2 an amazing gallery on cork street tho-petley fine art..go there:-)
Myself: Petley? I'm sure there is petley!
Phil: What?
Myself: You misspelled a word.
Phil: No i didn't-petley is the name of the gallery.Ha,now who looks silly..
Myself: Ah. That is embarrassing. That's so website'd

Back In The Day: My Name Is Legion

My Name Is Legion

But basically it made me realise why my posts aren't so great anymore... to much internet not enough reading.

Probably a very accurate observation, well done myself!

I think I should read a lot lot more novels like fiction ones, coz the like like 5 books I have read have all been non-fiction making my writing more boring, so I am going to read Nick Hornby again right after I finish "NO LOGO" and "The Invisible God" both mighty fine books but not fiction. I suppose it explains why all my posts have been so serious lately and not so funny. Ah well now I know the problem I can fix it.

I never finished reading "The Invisible God", which I think explains everything.

What's A JNC? (Part 2: Qualifications)

Previously on 'what is the JNC?' we found out that the JNC was an organisation not too dissimilar to a secret cabal of spies at war with each other. Or something like that. Also, we found out they recognised people that were qualified to deliver youth work. Today, we talk about that.

First things first, if you've been told that your currently qualifying to JNC level 2.0 then, well, you're not. Like the unicorn, it doesn't exist. It may have existed once, but it doesn't any more and all jobs and qualifications are inline with a new scale framework type thing. So bear that in mind.

The framework for qualifications is this. There are support workers, and there are professional workers. If you have gone to university to study youth work and returned with a certificate qualifying you as a youth worker, you are almost certainly qualified as a professional worker. (My certificate reads "...has successfully passed the basic and advanced modules required to qualify as a professional Youth & Community worker. This qualification has been validated by the National Youth Agency... - JNC Recgonized [sic].")¹ Below the range of professional worker is the range of support worker, and this range divides into two other levels. Level one is for those who start unqualified and are under fairly tight direction, the expectation of the JNC is that those in this level will be put on a basic training course as soon as possible with the aim of getting them to do a NVQ/VRQ level 2 type qualification in youth work. Level two is for staff who have some more serious responsibility in a youth centre, but are still supervised by a professional youth worker. The minimum qualification should be a NVQ/VRQ Level 3 in youth work.

Those are the qualifications that exist. At the moment the JNC (through the NYA) recognises which courses can say they qualify people to a professional level and is working on approving courses that qualify in the support worker range.

The last thing to note is that what you level you are qualified to doesn't make a difference to what you're paid for a job. Pay rates for youth work jobs are tied to what responsibilities the job entails. The more responsibility and oversight the higher the pay scale the job will start on. If the job requires a certain amount of responsibility they may require you to be professionally qualified but just because you're professionally qualified doesn't mean you'll be paid more for a job. It just means you can get jobs with more responsibility.

Footnotes

¹ This is why you can't get qualified higher than a degree level course, because basically understood, either you're qualified or your not. Either you can do the job or you can't. If you've got a degree in youth work² that might count towards more in job applications, but you're just as professionally qualified to do youth work as the person who did his professional qualification in one year.

² If you got your qualification and degree through the Centre for Youth Ministry, the professional JNC validated qualification part of it isn't anything to do with Oxford Brookes. As far as I'm aware Oxford Brookes have nothing to do with the JNC qualification, they just care about the degree.