It’s been a week of getting the little things done. According to colleagues who are old hands at this councilloring lark, August is the quiet time, and I should prepare for the deluge in September as everyone comes back from holiday, drives over the pothole at the end of their road and decides that this time they’ll actually get around to writing to their councillor about it.

I had a bit of a success this week. As regular readers know, one of the big frustrations about representing Rose Hill is that youth services are run by the county council - the one I’m not a member of - and by my reckoning, are inadequate to say the least. Our youth workers on the estate do a great job with lots of young people, but they can’t reach all of them, and in particular, what’s sorely lacking is an indoor supervised social space for young people, where they can just hang out and see friends. Representing an estate where anti-social behaviour and the lack of things for the kids to do were the major issues (by a factor of ten or fifteen) on the doorstep, I reckon I’ve a mandate to be bolshy.

So, step by step, the campaign continues. And I had a bit of a success this week: I got Connexions to agree to start delivering regular one-to-one support to some of our most difficult kids from the youth centre on Rose Hill. I should explain that Connexions are the government’s agency for getting young people to make positive decisions about work and education. For the most part and for most young people, it means they are careers advisors; for the toughest kids, the ones classed as NEET (not in education, training or employment), they’re supposed to offer intensive support to get them back into education, training or employment. Oxfordshire has about 750 NEET kids, just over half of whom (unsurprisingly) are in the city; a fair chunk of those live on Rose Hill. So, the breakthrough is to get Connexions to come to Rose Hill to work with our kids, rather than get the kids to go to them. Small things, but I hope for a few young people who probably don’t have much in the way of family support, it will make a big difference, having a regular adult around every week whose sole aim is to help them find a job, college course or apprenticeship that would suit them, get onto it, and make a go of it. Some days I really like being a councillor.