I have the T-shirt, in fact I have 3

I have just spent the last three days in the New Forest. When most people say that they mean "I strolled around and looked at the pretty forest". What I mean is that, with a collection of kids, I was IN it. The Dreamwall thing involves doing things that other groups do not. So, I was chest deep in bogs (3 of them), ponds (1) and rivers (1, but for 2 hours). I will never complain again of getting a bit damp playing a round of golf or going to the shops.

The idea is that you take it like a man (pardon the sexist line) with no complaining and whilst doing this different thing you enjoy the camaraderie, help each other and work together. As a leader / grown-up (little they know) this rule applies doubly to me, so, as the freezing water passed my waist and I really really wanted to shout something a little bit like "My word this is chilly", I have to smile at the boys as if this all perfectly normal and there is nothing to worry about. I really enjoyed the whole thing and the "all in together" approach is infectious. As for the T-shirts, I now have 3, all bog stained, Dreamwall badged leader T-shirts. It is like being back at school or Uni and having the first team shirt!

The photo is as we dropped the 6 lads back in Portsmouth centre yesterday evening. I spent a couple of days with these boys, aged 12-15, with the group being drawn from Portsmouth's preventing youth offending programme. This means that they have found themselves in bother a few times with the local constabulary. Before meeting them I was not sure what to expect. Some things fitted my, and I suspect many of your, stereotypes. The lads all have hoodies, they all smoke and they can all perfect the sullen, teenage gang member look and swagger. If you walked down a road and saw a few of them on a corner most would swap sides of the street. The stories they tell are of their dad who is in prison for armed robbery, their brother in prison for armed robbery, being under ASBOs, being permanently excluded from school, how many coppers chased them.

The bit that I found more surprising was what I found out when I talked to them one-on-one. The excluded lad really, really wants to get back to school. He has had anger management issues and, if I had his family past, I would too. Now he thinks he is through the worst and needs to prove he can attend half a day a week before they let him back to full school; it is going to take months before he gets back and I do not quite know why. He does not want a life of crime, he wants to get a handful of GCSEs, including maths because he knows he needs it, and move on with a better start to his life. Two other lads are doing their exams this year but also with a vocational module doing car mechanic apprenticeships. They want to get some exams and then get a job working on cars. Now I can talk spanners and oily stuff with the best of them, so that and racing cars went down well; we found some common ground. Again, this was not a couple of kids lacking ambition or thinking the world owed them something they could just take.

A few stereotypes that were painfully evident were around the environment in which, in the main, these kids existed. I do not think one of these was from a two parent, still together family. That is not to say they were ill looked after in any way because of that, nor that single parents cannot bring up a child better, it is an observation. More significantly perhaps was the attention they did (or indeed did not) get at home. The prevalence of unemployment at home. The lack of role models for them at home. The lack of ambition that was held for them at home. You should be getting a theme here... This environment converts itself into a lack of perspective on life options and a lack of aspiration. Notwithstanding this, almost all of them wanted to work harder, wanted to move on, and were not making a choice around a life of glamorous crime. They had fallen into the situation they were in, lacked some self-discipline and were easily led astray given the few boundaries established for them.

Now that seems a bit depressing. What was uplifting was seeing these kids from different gangs, who would most often fight each other rather than so much as grunt at one another, work together and laugh together over the weekend. They were just kids, they made silly jokes, they put on silly voices, they impersonated their favourite TV shows and all copied each other. So, the weekends do make a difference and, for a moment, strip away the hard guy facade and bring out the kid just like any other. The moral is you can take the kid out of Portsmouth and you can even take Portsmouth out of the kid.

When we dropped them off they were singing in the bus. Five minutes later, as they dispersed, they aged before my eyes. The slouches came back, the cigarettes were out, the sullen and mean looks were back. I watched passers-by step around them. The mask was back on and I wondered whether we had changed things at all.