A clean and tidy team, summer work experience courses for youngsters and additional activities for teenagers. These are some of the projects being considered by Penistone Area Council, which expects to have £300,000 to spend next year.

It comes on top of the Walls and Woods project to teach countryside skills to youngsters who do not have an academic leaning.

Area Manager Elaine Slater said the first of the Walls and Woods courses was fully booked and organisers were very pleased with the trainees.

“There’s one young man who has come through the Youth Service,” she said. “He’s local and had been more or less written off by a lot of organisations and he’s doing brilliantly.”

The course aims to get all students through a qualifaction called LANTRA, a nationally-recognised country side skills award.

Councillors suggested arranging a formal presentation ceremony to recognise youngsters who had qualified and the training company running the courses was planning a video of their project, allowing youngsters to say what they got out of it.

Meanwhile officials are talking to South Yorkshire Community Transport about promoting the shopper bus operation, which links outlying villages with Penistone and Barnsley on Mondays and Thursdays.

Coun Joe Unsworth said: “Not a lot of people know this service exists.”

If the number of passengers can be increased, the Area Council will consider ways of expanding the service.

This follows two attempts to arrange a subsidised market-day service into Penistone which has failed to attract interest from bus companies.

The area is considering enlisting the help of town and parish councils to launch the “clean and tidy” initiative. Its aim would be to “maintain a clean, green and pleasant environment” in Penistone and the outlying villages. It would deal with litter picking, tidying vegetation, reporting and monitoring fly tipping, damage and vandalism and tree maintenance. The £100,000 cost could be shared with parishes.

The work experience programme would aim to provide two-week summer internships during the 2015 summer holidays and be aimed at Year 10 students.