staff and trainees in education and training centres for disadvantaged young people have come together to form a national forum to lobby for better co-ordination of services and links with the formal education system.
The National Youth Development Network will be formally launched next month.
"At present, the young people we are concerned about are often clients of several agencies", says Ms Patricia McCarthy, development officer with the Stepahead project, a network linking seven FAS Community Training Workshops in inner-city Dublin. "They could be living in a hostel, attending a workshop or Youthreach centre, have a social worker or probation officer and be attending a drug treatment clinic. There is little or no co-ordination between these services, resulting in an expensive and ineffective service."
She called for a "one-stop shop type of service with front-line counsellors who would deal with the young person in a holistic manner and then refer them on to appropriate services and, most importantly, track their progress and needs over a relatively long period of time".
Ms McCarthy questioned the distinction between Youthreach provision for young people aged between 15 and 18 and Community Training Workshop provision for a wider age group.
"Increasingly, the two sets of provision compete for the same client group, while other groups such as lone parents and the very educationally disadvantaged cannot access either."
Local community leaders have expressed concern that the Stepahead liaison project is being wound up as its EU Youthstart funding comes to an end.
The project provides links between seven workshops catering for 240 young people who have left school with no educational qualifications and often have problems of drug use, family breakdown and involvement in crime.
About 40 per cent of the young people are on probation.
The project has improved literacy and numeracy in the workshops; sought to improve the unsatisfactory accreditation system for early school-leavers, to allow them to move into further education and training; and provided training courses for two-thirds of the workshops' trainers, 21 of them at third level.
In one of the workshops, half of the 60 trainees are on probation; in another, all 40 come from families involved in drug and alcohol abuse; in a third, eight are smoking heroin, 10 are on probation and up to 10 are "joyriding".
The number of young people in the workshops will not be reduced as a result of the ending of the Stepahead project.