Campaign to reduce teenage pregnancy rates pays off

The latest figures for York show the teenage pregnancy quarterly rate has dropped to 20.5 per thousand young woman aged between 15 and 19, the lowest rate for 13 years and putting it as one of the best-performing areas in Britain.

Coun Carol Runciman, executive member for children and young people's services, puts the success down to a campaign of working with schools and youth centres to provide information to teenagers.

But with cuts to services looming, she says success will be harder to achieve in other parts of North Yorkshire.

"We are delighted with the latest figures and we hope they will stay down", she said. "We have made a very high profile campaign which has been run with the schools and other places where young people go to. It is all a matter of being accessible and very open to young people. This is going to be much more difficult in the rural areas of North Yorkshire than in the cities – that is the challenge."

Coun Caroline Patmore, North Yorkshire's executive member for children's services, said: "A lot of very hard work has gone into reducing teenage pregnancy in this county, and a lot of this work has been done by our young people themselves through undertaking training themselves and then training their own age group.

"I only hope that the budget cuts will not leave this service exposed again.

"It is so much harder in rural areas because services are fewer, entertainment for the young is few and often far between, and contacting the vulnerable young is often too late."

The highest teenage pregnancy rates in North Yorkshire are believed to be in Scarborough, although latest figures show they fell by 21.2 per cent between 1998 and 2008, they are still just above the national average.

Teenage pregnancy rates in North Yorkshire as a whole have fallen by 19.4 per cent over the same period.

A new drop-in service has recently been rolled out county wide to Harrogate College, Craven College, Pickering, Selby, Northallerton, and Skipton.