• £22 million is spent on flowers
• Seven million red roses and;
• 12 million cards are sent

But in 2001, with the text message explosion, around 30 million "WUBMV" messages were sent on Valentine's Day. Now the old cynic in me is thinking how romantic is that...a 12p acronym to show how much you care!?!  But according to my very reliable research  - from BBC Children's News Round:

• Half of all mobile users expect a Valentine's text messages from their loved one
• One in four people use a text message to ask someone out on 14 February
• and this is my favourite....
• One in four have sent soppy messages to wrong person!!!

It made me wonder (and chuckle) trying to imagine how many of those wrong text messages were sent to the Boss!

But February is a fairly short month, with a half-term holiday and St. Valentine's Day popping inconveniently up in the middle.  I do not have any outstanding news items for this moth's blog, but as usual I have a few thank you messages to pass on. 

Firstly, I strongly believe that all of the staff, community partners and year 11 students at Portchester Community School would join me in congratulating Bianca Nicholson (Connexions PA) for organising another successful Year 11 Survival Day on the last day before half-term.  It took a huge amount of work to arrange and feed so many support agencies who attended the whole day event at the school.  These included Catch 22, Fareport Training, Youth Services, Solent Youth Action, Police, British Red Cross, Early Intervention Psychosis Service, ARC, Sex-Sense, Fire and Rescue, V-Project and Connexions.  The young people who attended seemed to gain a great deal of information (and freebies) to store in their duffle bags.  Not to mention how useful the networking opportunities for agencies to meet occurred as a result of the project. 

One of the professionals who attended the event commenting how beautifully the Year 11 students at the school behaved and how polite they were to their visitors during the day.   Portchester Community School has every right to be extremely proud of their year 11 student's behaviour during all of the sessions.

That very same evening many of the young people we'd met during the Survival Day joined us at Portchester Community Centre for 'Battle of the Bands' (and rather encouragingly one of them was still carrying his free duffle bag!)  Huge congratulations must go out to James Cannons from V-Inspired Project for organising this ambitious and successful event.  Although my ears and toes didn't remain unscathed, I was proud to offer my help at such a well received event.  Again, the young people from both Cams and Portchester Schools behaved beautifully; albeit a bit 'boisterous' for an oldie like me!

If anyone is interested in running a similar V-Project with young volunteers (the project manager doesn't need to be under 25  - but the volunteers do) then please feel free to take a look at the documents below to see how you can get 'V-involved' and get paid for it!  We particularly need someone to manage a group of young volunteers for Portchester Gala, and also someone with artistic flare who can organise a mural for Portchester Community and Keepsake Children's Centre as stand-alone projects. 

V - Job Description

V- Project Plan Document

While I am on the subject of young volunteers, I would like to say well done to all of our young people who completed their Young Leaders Youth Work Training with Youth Clubs Hampshire and IOW during the school half-term break.  All of our young volunteers, who are under the age of 16, gave up two days of their school holiday to attend the training, and many of them have already completed their basic food hygiene certificate during 2009.  Added to this they regularly contribute to Friday evening sessions at Westland's Youth Club and special events at Portchester Community Centre.  Thank you and well done to our young volunteers from both Cams and Portchester Schools who are making such a positive contribution.

So onto important extended services 'strategic' matters.  Firstly I would like to remind all of our stakeholders about our Area Action Plan Event. The idea behind this informal event is to give all of our school and community stakeholders a chance to contribute to our 2010/11 Area Plan, and hopefully align our individual priorities and targets.  As always, I'm bursting with ideas for the year ahead, but one relatively small person can't make all of this happen. 

Even more importantly...I shall bring cake! 

Please RSVP by Friday 26th February (and/or if you require any special diet).

If you are not able to join us at this event, then please send any ideas, comments, or your own organisational targets in advance (many thanks in advance to the Library Service for sharing their targets for 2010).  Extended Services covers all aspects of the Every Child Matters agenda, so I would love to hear from as many agencies as possible who work with children, young people and their families in Fareham.