In Defence of Youth Work

I’m under severe manners to ignore Paul Oginsky. Thus without further ado it is good to bring your attention again to the Youth & Policy conference, Thinking Seriously About Youth Work and Policy.

• Thursday, March 15, 2012
• Time

  10:00am until 5:00pm
• YMCA George Williams College, Canning Town, London

Naomi Stanton writes, Youth and Policy’s fourth ‘thinking seriously’ conference, supported by YMCA George Williams College, will explore the implications of Coalition youth policy for the youth work field. The conference aims to bring together political, academic, managerial and practice perspectives for open dialogue about policy affecting young people and youth work.

Over recent months, many events have taken place with subsequent policy implications for youth work organisation and practice. Following the implementation of Coalition spending cuts, the Select Committee on Services for Young People, and the riots of summer 2011, a conference to reflect on these events and their policy consequences in early 2012 is timely and useful. We hope that the conference will present a challenge to practitioners, managers and academics to consider the new landscape, and how policy and practice might be better shaped in the light of evidence and experience.

We are delighted that Paul Oginsky has agreed to attend the day and will be subject to a Q&A session about the rationale of current and imminent youth policy – so bring your questions for him!

Other highlights include a reflection on the Select Committee by Ian Mearns (MP), a youth work panel session to be led by Bernard Davies, and workshops on the NCS, teenage pregnancy, the PREVENT agenda, and the role of faith-based and voluntary organisations in the Big Society.

Please contact conferences@youthandpolicy.org for more information and/or a booking form.

————————————————————————————–

Having passed on the info and I hope loads of you make it to the conference, I remain under discipline as to my true feelings about Mr Oginsky. However to help in your quest to find questions for Mr NCS, as he is fondly known within the social enterprise milieu, here is an interview with this ’self-made’ guru.

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/interviews/2007/10/paul-oginsky-an.html

And if you are looking for evidence of his theoretical accomplishments, look no further than this derivative exercise in egocentrism, the Oginsky model.

Oh, and I give in, almost a year to the day I posted these reflections on Oginsky, following his comment that “If youth work is being closed down, then youth workers aren’t communicating how effective and beneficial youth work is to their local authority.”

CUTS : BLAME THE YOUTH WORKERS!

I’ll own up, I’m just frustrated I won’t be able to be there! Don’t miss it and be the first to write a report on the shenanigans.

The Seventh Annual Huntley Conference is to take place on Saturday, February 18 from 9.30am – 4.30pm in the London Metropolitan Archives 40 Northampton Road, London EC1R 0HB. The overall theme is Arts and Activism : Culture and Resistance.

For the first time the event will incorporate in parallel, Step Forward Youth! The First Huntley Youth Conference.

The August 2011 Riots – what happened & why?
Come and be inspired by Professor Gus John, Symeon Brown, El Crisis, Akala, Kai Rutlin and others. Step forward and join in the debate. This runs at the same time as the main conference from 10.30am. Feedback to the main conference in the afternoon.

To Book:
Entry Fee: £8.00 (pre-booking essential, includes lunch)
Concessions: under 16 free
Call: 020 7332 3851
Email: maureen.roberts@cityoflondon.gov.uk

For full information – see this pdf Culture and Resistance : Step Forward Youth

I’m no film buff. Most of the time I’m hostile to the cinema – its conformity, its platitudes. However years ago I was entranced by the impressionistic, sprawling creations of Theo Angelopoulos, who died tragically in a traffic accident the other day. To get an idea, be patient though the opening credits and watch the opening minutes of his breakthrough film, The Travelling Players [1975] – a series of images Van Gogh would have given his other ear to paint.

As for what’s this has got do with youth work, I can only offer a personal view. The films of Angelopoulos are all concerned with life as unfinished business, with contradiction and doubt. We can have our best guess, but we remain uncertain about its outcome. With this in mind we can but hope to make our best contribution to a more just, equal and democratic society. To my mind doing youth work, desiring that young people might be more aware, critical citizens is haunted by the same uncertainty. We can never be sure of its outcome, which makes it all the more worth doing.

More about the wonderful Angelopoulos below.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2012/jan/25/theo-angelopoulos-chronicler-modern-greece

I’m in the midst of taking a breath after two challenging IDYW seminars, accompanied by frenetic and accident-prone travelling. A missed last bus and an 8 mile walk in icy drizzle sums up my ineptitude! Looking back it is clear that our discussions on both days took place against a backcloth of economic and political crisis. Talk of the market and of capitalism wriggled in and out of our critical conversations. Such a focus is not at all the obsession of  left-wing dissidents or indeed the contemporary Occupy movement. It is the deep concern of the mainstream.

Thus, while I am knocking together provisional thoughts on the themes of our seminars. I’m posting a video of Paul Mason from Newsnight, musing on the changing character of politics today and the role of social networking, particularly relevant in terms of young people’s grasp of ‘what’s kicking off’, plus a couple of reviews of Paul’s latest book and for the diligent a link to reading Marx’s Das Kapital via a series of videos created by David Harvey. Anyone pursuing the latter will be awarded a specially struck medal, which is not really in order, as Harvey has a serious crack at peeling away the layers of crap surrounding political economy. He shows that we can all understand how the capitalist economy works ; that this knowledge is not the special property of a super breed of supposed ’scientists’. Believe me, have a butcher’s.

Reviews of Paul Mason’s, Why it’s Kicking Off Everywhere

Charting the Way Forward in Revolutionary Times

Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere by Paul Mason – review

History in the making

And for the curious and inquisitive, Reading Capital, 1 and 2 – David Harvey.

In the last of the briefing papers prior to this week’s IDYW Seminars, Bernard Davies highlights and criticises key points in the Positive for Youth ’strategy’, supplemented by some more general observations taken from earlier posts on our site. As with all the papers it is worth repeating that our collective thinking is very much perceived as the catalyst for debate. In this sense we would welcome responses from people unable to attend the seminars. Obviously we will post summaries of this week’s discussions for your delectation and delight!

For discussion at the IDYW seminars: 19/20 January 2012

Notes on the Government’s Positive for Youth (P4Y) ‘strategy’

The purpose of these notes is to highlight some of the key points of the government’s P4Y ‘strategy’ as a basis for asking: what response – if any – should IDYW make beyond what has already appeared on the website. (See also the appendix for more general comments on the appearance of the document.).

Rhetoric and realities

• The ‘passion for ‘youth’ which this new ‘cross-government’ policy statement constantly proclaims converts into little more than ‘facilitating’, ‘supporting’, ‘monitoring’ and ‘committing to a “one year on” audit’ – and comes with no dedicated money.
• Its repeated emphasis on young people’s ‘voice’, their role in decision-making, ‘youth proofing’ etc is revealed as little more than empty gesturing. For example:
  • It all but ignores young people demand for open access provision – expressed in ‘demands for ‘safe and attractive places to spend their leisure time’ and holistic services ‘available in one place’;
  • Even as millions of pounds are cut from local authorities’ budgets, it rules out ring-fencing spending on such facilities.
• The paper also protests too much about how positive for youth the government is. Despite its stated intention to ‘move away from measuring negative outcomes prevented’ (Ministerial introduction), it repeatedly focuses on young people’s ‘risky behaviours’, on the need for ‘targeted support’ (paras 4.14 – 4.19) and ‘intensive support’ (paras 4.20 – 27), on ‘under 18 conception rates’ and ‘the number entering the criminal justice system for the first time’ (para 5.37).

Analysis – what analysis?

• These ‘negative’ conditions are largely explained as the ‘outcomes’ of being in ‘poorer families’ and ‘deprived communities’. No government or banker or indeed employer can apparently be held responsible for this poverty and deprivation – only individuals (especially individual young people with under-developed brains!), families and ‘communities’.
• Repeatedly this disconnect with the current realities of young people’s lives is masked by a dishonest shiftiness of language. A financial crisis reaching to the fundamentals of capitalism thus gets translated into ‘the current difficult economic climate’ (Ministerial introduction). Young people’s views on the resultant social divide are explained merely as concerns ‘about those who are materially well-off’ and those who aren’t’ (para 2.14).
• What is not owned up to further deepens this dissembling:
  • The paper contains no substantive reference to the current, only-too-real experience of the over 1M 16-24 year olds without jobs.
  • It never acknowledges that ‘not in education and training’ may now have something to do with the loss of EMA – and that many squeezed into that category are part of the 1M+.
  • Nor that the homelessness on which the paper dwells for four paragraphs may have something to do with cuts in welfare benefits.
  • And how is it that the battery of statistics quoted from the O2 research ‘Think Big, Start Small’ fails to mention the one that ‘almost one in four (23%) of young people feel(ing) depressed about their future…’¹?
• And then here are the examples of claiming credit for policies which were the previous government’s – such as the MyPlace developments; or which are inferior substitutes for them – such as ‘the new Bursary Fund’ (replacement for the much more generous EMA), and the ‘Early Intervention’ funding (replacement for funding streams which, with all their faults, were much more flexible and, again, more generous).

Action – what action?

• The ‘consultation’ on which the paper repeatedly claims to rest was from the start tightly boxed in my by non-negotiable assumptions. ² Two key ones were: minimum government funding and minimum direct government action – unsurprising given this government’s obsession with getting the state out of public services by the end of this parliament.
• The result: everyone but the government must do the P4Y implementing: young people themselves (in the name, of course, of ‘youth voice’ and ‘young people driving decisions’); ‘parents, carers and families’; ‘community leaders, volunteers and other adults’; the media and advertisers; ‘business leaders, employers and individual professionals’; professionals in education, health and care services, local authorities.
• This is why the government ends up merely as facilitator, supporter, monitor, auditor – as just to ‘set direction and promote new and positive ways of thinking and working’.
• For actual action we have to rely on commissioning others, on ‘growing the market’ and making it ‘more contestable’, on ‘social investment’ and ‘social enterprise’.

And youth work and Youth Services?

• In ways reminiscent of New Labour policy papers, P4Y manages to give youth work and youth workers (though not the Youth Service) an occasional rhetorical stroking. For example:
  • Youth workers … can make a crucial difference to young people’s lives, including by offering ‘informal learning and personal and social development’. (Para 3.12).
  • … detached and centre-based youth work and youth workers make a vital contribution to the lives of many young people’ – helping engage them in their communities and supporting their personal and social development through informal learning. (Para 4.73).
  • … investment in young people’s capabilities and character through high quality youth work … can have a significant impact on young people’s life chances. (Para 5.20).

The paper also ‘confirms’ local authorities’ statutory duty to secure sufficient leisure-time educational and recreational activities. (Para 5.7).

• However all these are qualified in ways which leaves at serious risk youth work with which young people choose to engage in open access settings, which starts from their concerns and interests and which is therefore genuinely emancipatory. For example:
  • The local authorities’ statutory duty is only ‘to secure’ provision and, as the paper twice reiterates, extends only as far as ‘is reasonably practicable’.
  • The government is now to consult anyway, ‘including with young people’, on new statutory guidance on this duty – which in present circumstances must raise serious concerns that it is to be watered down still further.
  • The ‘stroking’ inserts all end with caveats which betray where this policy’s priorities for youth work really lie:
    • Page 25 – The one substantive ‘youth work’ case study included focuses on ‘the most vulnerable students … at risk of permanent exclusion’ from college.
    • Para 3.12 – with ‘the needs of young people from socially excluded groups’;
    • Para 4.73 – with ‘those young people who don’t get the support or opportunities they need from their family or community’ – even though, we are repeatedly told, it is just these ‘communities’ which must now take over this provision;
    • Para 5.20 – with youth work as ‘an important form of early intervention for young people at risk of poor outcomes’.

• Para 5.20 also re-emphasises that ‘local areas will need to consider what balance of targeted services and open access services will best meet local needs’ – which, with up to £200M and 3000 full-time youth worker posts disappearing in this financial year, can only be a formula for abandoning open access provision.

• It is in this context, who then has the responsibility for providing the explanatory ‘narrative for the role and impact of youth work’? ‘A group of national youth sector leaders’ which, because ‘commissioned’ by the minister, can claim no representation of the field or guaranteed independence of government. (Para 5.12).

And instead?

Instead we could have the open access youth work as documented by IDYW book, with accounts of practice – contradictory and often unfinished – which illustrate how some of the very outcomes sought by P4Y could be pursued – for example:

• Releasing the ‘voice’ of young people. (‘On the boundary’; ‘Creative improvisation’; ‘The power of graffiti’; ‘A modest journey in self-discovery’).
• Helping ‘ethnic minority’ young people to confront ‘discrimination’ (‘Holding onto your dignity’; ‘Beyond stereotype and prejudice’).
• Helping young people to engage ‘positively with, within but also beyond their communities. (‘On the boundary’; ‘Creative improvisation’; ‘Beyond stereotype and prejudice’).
• Dealing with ‘knife crime’ (‘Creative improvisation’)
• Responding to young people’s personal, family and mental health stresses. (‘Pen and paper youth work’; ‘I wouldn’t be the person I am today’; ‘The youth centre as sanctuary’)
• Diverting young people from adult-perceived risks of ‘anti-social behaviour’. (‘The power of graffiti’; ‘Beyond aggression to eye contact’; ‘The youth centre as sanctuary’).
• Supporting young people to get the most out of their schooling and re-engage in education. (‘Casual – and informal’; ‘Getting accredited’; ‘A modest journey in self-discovery’; ‘The youth centre as sanctuary’).
• Making accessible ‘careers advice’ available to young people. (‘Casual – and informal’; ‘The youth centre as sanctuary’).
• Supporting young carers. (‘The youth centre as sanctuary’).

How to respond?

P4Y’s proposed ‘accountability and transparency’ arrangements include:

• ‘A national scrutiny group of representative young people … (to) advise Government ministers. (Para 6.12).
• An annual UK Youth Parliament debate in the House of Commons chamber. (Para 6.13).
• Meeting with the ‘partners’ who have contributed to the policy’s development – which in practice largely means those that signed a Guardian letter dated 20 December offering uncritical support for P4Y.³
• A ‘Youth Action Group’ made up of the Chief Executives seven ministerially selected ‘Large national charities’, two of whom signed the Guardian letter.
• Advise from Catalyst, the Department for Educations’ ‘strategic partner for the voluntary and community sector’ which include NCYVS and NYA (also a signatory to the Guardian letter). (Para 6.17).
• Scrutiny by the Children’s Commissioner – whose future role is now unclear as it is to be combined with that of Ofsted’s Children’s Right Director. (Para 6.19).
• Using these ‘collaborative arrangements’, a ‘one year on’ audit of progress in implementing the policy. (Para 6.20).

For discussion

What can IDYW do to influence P4Y via these arrangements?

Is that anyway where it should be putting its energies and limited resources?

Appendix

The Youth Service is dead : Long live youth services? A sorry tale!

20 December 2011

In the dying days of 2011 youth work as a distinctive form of voluntary, young people-centred education seems to have been laid to rest, no longer recognised as such within government policy. It’s been coming for a while. New Labour started the rot, replacing talk of youth work with an insistence on ‘positive activities’ and the targeting of ‘anti-social’ youth.  Reciting the same mantra the Coalition in the ‘P4Y’ policy statement of December 19 seeks to consign the unruly world of authentic social and political education to the graveyard.

If they could be bothered with my comments, the spin-doctors of such as the NYA, NCVYS and UK Youth would be aggrieved. Having had the ear of the Minister for the last 18 months they hail the report, its emphasis on the role of business partnerships, its vision and sycophantically announce, “Today we can be positive about the Government”.  From this position of utter capitulation they promise us they are going to insist on decisive Action Plans for its implementation. The Coalition, indeed Capitalism, trembles.

How did this come about? Let me try out the following as a simple starter for discussion:

1. Under New Labour, wedded itself utterly to the neo-liberal agenda, discussion about youth work was replaced by talk of ‘positive activities’ and youth services in the plural. If conscious the latter was a clever move. Youth work had always been synonymous with the Youth Service. The idea of youth services seems to retain this relationship, but in reality this is an illusion.
2. For under the Coalition the Youth Service is on the edge of extinction while a plethora of youth services are said to be rushing to the aid of young people. By now youth services means any and every intervention into young people’s lives undertaken by Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Some of these are useful and necessary, if flawed in their emphasis on young people and families as deficient – related to employment and training, enhanced PSE in schools, early intervention – but they do not constitute youth work. More and more these incursions into young people’s lives are imposed on the state’s terms. Youth work, let us repeat, starts from young people’s agendas and is founded on a voluntary relationship.
3. But the job’s been done. Today, youth service, youth services and youth work are used interchangeably as it suits. And in the vanguard of  those it suits are local authorities bent on outsourcing and commissioning, together with major voluntary youth organisations such as NCVYS and UK Youth and the host of aspiring social enterprise outfits queuing up to bid for contracts to rescue the ‘vulnerable and disadvantaged’. The rationale for this promiscuity of principle is that these agencies and their workers are taking with them their youth work values, skills and methodologies packaged neatly in an all-purpose tool kit – youth work is dead, long live youth work. Thus we come full circle. The notion of youth work is resurrected when pragmatically necessary to describe any form of work with young people [for which funding can be procured] and is thus rendered meaningless.

Postscript

In addition Tony Taylor gave the following responses to questions posed by Charlotte Goddard for her research for an article to appear in CYPN.

Why do you think many youth organisations are being so positive about the paper?

I think the senior management of major voluntary organisations made their and thus their agencies’ minds up that survival depended on adapting to the State agenda. I have to say too that the mentality of the present breed of chief executives is different than those of the past, who would indeed never have taken the title of chief executive. Frankly the present crop are new managerial in inclination and sycophantic in their relationship to government. Interestingly they have rationalised that the way forward is for their organisations to embrace the notion of youth services. Indeed I have heard at least one of them claim a higher moral ground than those of us defending youth work, suggesting that our stance is narrow and that he/she is concerned to address the width of young people’s problems. This is an attractive, if disingenuous stance, as it allows these leading organisations under commissioning/privatisation to put in bids to deliver almost any form of work with young people, be it early intervention family and youth social work, restorative justice, preparation for employment and training, soft policing/surveillance projects, leisure and diversion etc…..In essence what this means – and is shamefully brushed under the carpet – is that these organisations abandon their historical role as independent actors in civil society and become no more than agents for the delivery of the government’s welfare measures. I should modify this by noting it will be interesting to see if BYC, under pressure from its members, can chart a more critical course in leading the Youth Voice initiative.

Can youth work be delivered through the models suggested by the paper (mutuals, involvement of business, payment by results etc)?

If by youth work we mean an emancipatory practice that is a critical, creative and unpredictable form of informal education, any imposition of prescribed outcomes, necessary guarantees and results is its very antithesis. Whilst it is not impossible for mutuals or indeed business to support such open-ended work, the neo-liberal ideology underpinning P4Y seems to preclude this way forward.

What will be the effect on young people if the proposals for delivering services to young people in this paper come about?

I have never been one of those, who exaggerate the impact of youth work upon young people in our society. What I am convinced about is that where and when youth work holds to its democratic principles and emancipatory practice it contributes greatly to the nourishing of critically aware citizens. As a distinctive form of education it ought to be sustained and developed. Instead it is being suffocated. As we can see much work with young people will continue. It would be a terrible cock-up if, for instance, young people didn’t enjoy parts, if not the whole, of the NCS – at least the residential weekend, which is hardly earth-shatteringly innovative!! However the overriding emphasis of P4Y is upon social conformity. If I am to speculate I can see a trend in which the youth services engage with either  ‘anti-social’ young people defined as needing early intervention or the aspiring social entrepreneurs, would-be politicians, symbolised by the raft of Young Advisors, Young Commissioners. Young Entrepreneurs type initiatives. Many young people not falling into these contrasting camps will simply be sidelined. None of this is immediately measurable. None of this takes serious account of a profound economic and political crisis, ignored utterly in the government’s document.

Just to confirm that the venues for our IDYW Seminars are:

WHERE ARE WE UP TO? WHERE ARE WE GOING?

The London seminar will take place on Thursday, January 19 at the Bellenden Old School, 165 Bellenden Road, London, SE15 4DG – only five minutes from Peckham station.

http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=533865&y=175822&z=110&sv=533865,175822&st=4&ar=Y&mapp=map.srf&searchp=ids.srf&dn=891&ax=533865&ay=175822&lm=0

The Manchester seminar will take place on Friday, January 20 at 42nd Street, The Space, 87 – 91 Great Ancoats Street, Manchester, M4 5AG – only 10 minutes from Piccadilly Station.

http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=384915&y=398483&z=0&sv=M4+5AG&st=2&pc=M4+5AG&mapp=map.srf&searchp=ids.srf

Both days will run from 11.00 – 4.30.  Still a few places left, please contact Tony at tonymtaylor@gmail.com

The briefing papers have been appearing over the last few days on the site.

Ahead of posting our briefing paper on the Government’s so-called policy paper, Positive for Youth, we are pleased to feature Graeme Tiffany’s eloquent questioning of its content and intent.

Positive for Youth; thoughts from a detached youth work point of view

There is much to commend in the language of Positive for Youth, particularly its enthusiasm for young people’s participation in decision-making and the emphasis on challenging the media’s proclivity for demonising ‘youth’. Ironic then that the government is often the worst offender; its analysis of the riots took us no further than a ‘feral, thieving underclass’. One worries then that, like a good deal of the coalition’s rhetoric, it will become a triumph of spin over substance. Worst still, it could mask the plain and simple vindictiveness and fondness for coercion that has become a hallmark of recent policy, as it has revealed itself in practice. Will we see support for youth work as a form of community work, as suggested, or a further extension of targeting with all the individualising (and depoliticising) effects that that entails?

Detached youth workers in particular, whilst always focussing their efforts on those experiencing exclusion, know full well that a social and democratic model works best. This means respecting voluntary association and ‘targeting through universalism’ – making youth work and support available to all but having an eye for those who need it most. This avoids stigmatisation and builds upon the reality that few young people choose social groups homogeneous in the sense that all are ‘excluded’. Targeting undermines the very group work methodologies that seek to draw upon the resources and positive influences of others.

Detached youth workers are concerned also about being further diverted from working in places where young people choose to be – into the institutionalised context of new style PRUs and family intervention. We know well that young people need a space – their space – beyond the home and school, if they are to become autonomous. And we doubt the conclusions drawn about ‘troubled families’ and the ‘underclass’ (as if their ‘aspirations, self esteem and parenting skills’ and lack of ‘character’ is where all fault lies). It’s as if policy makers are influenced more by watching Shameless than the evidence of the structural violence inflicted by policies. The effect of downsizing the public sector, the housing benefits cap, the closure of youth centres, removal of the EMA, and the ‘autonomy’ of the academies programme are all coming home to roost – exacerbating exclusion and child poverty and inhibiting social mixing. Social mobility, typically seen as the answer to everything, is actually in reverse. The youth recognise full well that the subliminal message is that you have to ‘get out to get on’. Wither community cohesion and regeneration.

As privileged witnesses of social reality, don’t doubt that detached youth workers will “feed back to local and central government on the needs of young people from socially excluded groups”. So as cuts bite and it gets even uglier we’ll certainly be looking to work with partners amongst all those identified in Positive for Youth to mitigate the social fall out caused by the wider policy agenda. Let’s hope the government is one of these partners, and resists invoking dodgy ‘evidence’ (watch out especially for a wider narrative on risk factors, pre-birth determinants and the ‘teen brain’ – and the ever earlier intervention and pharmaceutically-based conclusions that are likely to follow). Detached youth workers will continue to state that identifying needs independent of a dialogue with young people is deeply problematic. As ‘outcomes’ have become predetermined though performance and results-led regimes and prescriptive commissioning arrangements (especially those based on measurement rather than values) there is the concern that youth participation will be mere tokenism. And if a profit motive enters the equation there is likely to be further pressure on workers to engage in programme-led rather than negotiated practice. Detached youth workers especially will tell you ‘what works’ depends … on the individual, the community, the context, the culture, and a commitment to democratic ways of working. So let’s start realising that ‘evidence-based’ programmes are often tyrannical and not reasonably transferable to each and every street corner. And that outcomes are what comes out, and can never be pre-scribed or predetermined with the kind of certainty that the scienticism that belies this document suggests. The danger is that an ideological bent will conspire to raising thresholds to services rather than reducing them. If detached work is further pre-scripted its inherent flexibility will be undermined – simply making it less, rather than more, effective. Making interventions more ‘decisive’ and ‘assertive’ can only exacerbate this and undermine the relationships on which all good practice is based. It seems activation rather than education is the order of the day. We should remember that just because something works this doesn’t make it right. We need more low threshold practice, not less. Trust can be secured no other way.

As poverty and social exclusion increases, the danger is that those best equipped to help young people are to be further constrained by policy. We will be left with more rather than fewer young people attempting to navigate the world alone. Detached youth workers will need the freedom being muted for teachers, and tangible resources, if their capabilities are to be best utilised. No doubt what resourcing ‘sufficient activities for the improvement of well-being’ will reveal itself in good time. ‘So far as is reasonably practicable’ may well be the classic opt out clause. Let’s hope not. And let’s have a respect for all youth work as an educational endeavour – rather than, at best, a mere diversionary and compensatory programme; and, at worst, just control in another guise.

What about a small test of governmental sincerity? Just ban the Mosquito device; at least we might think politicians are serious about being Positive for Youth.

Graeme Tiffany

This piece can be found on Graeme’s blog at: http://www.graemetiffany.co.uk/

Here it is in Word form – well worth printing out of you are coming to either of the seminars in London and Manchester – Positive for Youth – Graeme Tiffany

Thanks to Jethro Brice for the illustration, which is taken from our book, This is Youth Work.

Thanks to Adam Muirhead and the young people of Bevendean, East Brighton for permission to post this video of their experience of the Choose Youth lobby of Parliament. It’s especially worth watching the section featuring their astute questioning of a somewhat fumbling Member of Parliament.

In the third of our briefing papers Susanna Darch and Tania de St Croix reflect on how well we have lived up to our rhetoric on making alliances.

Making Alliances : Broadening the Struggle?

Discussion paper for ‘Where are we up to? Where are we going?’, 19^th & 20^th January 2012

From the outset, the In Defence of Youth Work campaign has stressed the importance of making alliances. We have always felt that it is a necessity that we should play a part in the wider struggle for equality, justice and democracy. The open letter suggested in 2009 that, if we took action on youth work, we would “not be alone. Organised, dissident resistance is growing.” The past three years have shown this to be the case.

As argued in our book This is Youth Work: Stories From Practice: “Defending youth work provision is of course only one contribution to the defence of public services overall”. So, what alliances do we have already? We have sought to work closely with the trade unions, Choose Youth, the National Coalition for Independent Action [NCIA], the Social Work Action Network [SWAN], the Federation of Detached Youth Work, youth work training agencies / university courses, and various campaigns against student fees and public sector cuts. Other links may well exist informally, perhaps especially in local and regional groups, or are being developed at the moment.

How have our existing links developed? Which alliances have not flourished, and why?, Often, alliances and links work at least partly on the basis of personal connection. Some IDYW folk are active in some of these other organisations already; others have made an effort to commit themselves to going along to the meetings or conferences of some of these groups.

Despite our limited time and energy, are there things we should be doing that we’re not? For example, we have tried to keep in touch with and provide support to groups of young people defending their youth services, but should we be linked more closely with youth movements? Are there youth organisations we have been slow to approach, for instance in the so-called Faith sector and, if so, why? To what extent are we in touch with the current and recent wave of (mostly youth-led) activism: the student marches, school walk-outs, university occupations and Occupy movements? Given that we talked at our first conference in Manchester about campaigning on ’stop and search’, should we be involved with supporting young people against increasingly violent policing, negative media coverage and repressive anti-demonstration tactics? What are the other issues of concern to young people that we could support them on? Which youth-led groups should we be looking to?

Possible questions for discussion:

What are the benefits (not just for ourselves) of working alongside or in alliance with other campaigns, organisations or networks

Are there any drawbacks or potential drawbacks to building alliances? How can we (have we) manage(d) these drawbacks?

Which organisations, campaigns and networks do we already have alliances with? What is the quality of these alliances? How can these alliances be strengthened?

What other alliances should we be building? What needs to be done and (practically) how should it be done? Who has time to do it?

A Word version of Making Alliances to print and/or circulate.

In the second of our briefing papers ahead of next week’s seminars Lenny Sellars is challenging, even provocative. I’m sure he’s talking about me at one point and it’s not flattering! Brilliant, should make for an animated and necessary debate. There are still a few places left in both London and Manchester, so get in touch at tonymtaylor@gmail.com

‘WHERE ARE WE UP TO? WHERE ARE WE GOING?

COMPLEMENTARY SEMINARS

JANUARY 19 IN LONDON and JANUARY 20 IN MANCHESTER

Defending Democratic Youth Work and Fighting the Cuts – one and the same struggle?

Have we lost our way in forgetting, sometimes, the fundamentals of our campaign; whilst defending provision which practices are far from emancipatory? How do we view the spectre of major organisations such as NYA and NCVYS, along with many local authorities, accommodating uncritically and opportunistically to the government’s targeting and commissioning agenda

Is it possible to accept both these statements?

“Thirty years ago Youth Work aspired to a special relationship with young people. It wanted to meet young women and men on their terms. It claimed to be ‘on their side’. Three decades later Youth Work is close to abandoning this distinctive commitment. Today it accepts the State’s terms. It sides with the State’s agenda.”

IN DEFENCE OF YOUTH WORK CAMPAIGN

“Britain’s youth services are world class. They’re far too good to lose.”

CHOOSE YOUTH CAMPAIGN

Campaign-wise, I think we face a bewildering conundrum and I’ve been confused ever since a campaign that defended youth work methodology was lost behind the banners and the chants about saving youth services. You see, I’m up for rescuing youth workers jobs but I feel really uncomfortable about actively protecting a youth service that accepted, nurtured and fed the strategies and systems that undermined youth work practice.

It seems uncharitable to be pedantic about youth work principles when jobs and livelihoods are at stake but I’m not suggesting that we as individuals should be celebrating the collapse of youth services more that we as a campaign need to be clear about our actions regarding the cuts in services.

Whose face do you see when you read the “Choose Youth” slogans? Maybe it’s the accumulated frustration that’s blurring my perspective but I don’t see the front-line worker. I see the bureaucrats and strategists who have (mis)shaped the service through rejecting and corrupting youth work values. The publicity says “Send them a message; a message that youth services change lives”. That isn’t the message that I want to send them (whoever “them” may be).

Is this the wrong time for us?

Maybe it’s the wrong time to be stirring opposition. Are we sure anymore what the opposition is?

We’re like someone who’s just been voted off the X-Factor; REFUSING to leave the stage; DEMANDING to be famous. We stand our ground looking bewildered, stomping our feet and screaming at the judges “But my mate Eric reckons I’m the new northern Sinatra!!”

We’ve tried to rationalise the nature and value of our craft for decades (not me personally, I’m obviously far too young) and look where it’s got us. And the most frustrating aspect of defending youth work is that we seem to be doing it in conflict with other youth workers.

It isn’t easy to keep standing up after you’ve been knocked down, time and time and time again. And we get beaten from every angle don’t we? The bureaucrats want us to give them something to count; funders want complex business plans; government want us to be an effective careers service – getting kids work-ready for jobs that don’t exist. Let’s face it, we just aren’t taken seriously. If we get too professionalised we lose the essence of our work and if we’re too informal we just become a laughable liability. People either detest and fear you because they think you’re a social worker or undervalue you because they think you’re a Butlins redcoat. We are an entirely misunderstood breed.

I think (in my current state of disillusionment) that a large percentage of people involved in youth work services prefer the incumbent culture of pre-determined outputs and formalised methodology and I think they prefer it because…

(a) it’s often safer and easier to work to a set structure
(b) the language of our campaign sounds like scary, left-wing extremist political sloganeering
(c) it’s the way of the world
(d) All of the above

And I think this is one of our biggest drawbacks to gaining recognition. We’re not even split down the middle, we’re split somewhere over to the far left hand side.

I’m still pursuing this notion that PURE youth work has no right to exist under the current socio-political conditions. Youth work was built on a foundation of philanthropic acts, where informal methodology was entirely acceptable. The rot set in as soon as we institutionalized it as a public service. Gradually, the informal methodology started to become unacceptable!

Or is this the best time for us?

And just to push the boundaries of controversy a little further – has the time ever been better for youth workers to reclaim youth work?

Positive for Youth. Is this the new focus for our defence?

I’d like to have at least seen some kind of apology written into ‘A Narrative for Youth Work Today’. How dare they brazenly rewrite the value system of youth work as if they own it? You would hope that at least one member of the commissioned advisers would have expressed the shame and disgrace of overtly butchering and crucifying the last remnants of ethical pride left under the battered banner of “youth work”. I suppose though that queuing up at the front of the line for your privileged meaty morsel of “youth work” commissioning that scruples are best left in a separate place along with your pride.

Are we too clever for our own good?

…on the intellectualism of youth work. Sometimes, to intellectualise something you have to remove the emotion and the passion. You remove the qualities of the environment that surround a given situation. The noise and the smell of the inside of the mini-bus when the kids are starting to get bored and they want the “happy hardcore” turning up so loud that the inadequate speakers are buzzing like flatulent rhinos/hippos. If you give your heart to your work, then it’s your heart that speaks.

When I talk to youth workers about the campaign they describe it as either too political or too intellectual.

And I understand what they’re saying. I’m just a bloke from a background of poverty and coal-mining. I’m a product of an education system that expected very little from a raggy-arsed kid like me. People from my community didn’t go to college or university unless it was linked to the coal-mining industry. If you became an intellectual you moved away from “us” and moved towards “them”. Also, the closer you move to understanding Freire the further away you move from understanding the group of kids who are sat on your mini-bus.

I envy my uncles (on my father’s side) who were all prominent Union officials during the Miners strike. They were far from erudite but they spoke passionately and we all (the miners) understood what they were saying. Are we connecting with youth workers?

I would say that in my own youth work ethos and practice that intellect drives my actions and my method and my language but it does not present unless it is appropriate and required. I suppose for me personally this is an issue of semantics and cultural perceptions. From my cultural background, intellectuals and academics sit around in leather chesterfield chairs in tweed jackets, smoking pipes and stroking beards speaking in a language too technical for my own modest grasp.

So could we use a more direct, accessible and immediate language in the open debate about ‘defending youth work’ – so that maybe we can all join in? A debate that moves ‘outwards’ and not ‘inwards’. I think it is so easy to become detached from reality/practice when you’re not immersed in it on a day to day basis. I generally find that people who immerse themselves in theory tend to create theoretical solutions and become (accidental) idealists.

A Word version of Crisis of Identity to print out/circulate.