Monthly Archives: July 2012

FRAMEWORK OF OUTCOMES : HISTORY, POLITICS, EVEN YOUTH WORK FORGOTTEN?

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 FRAMEWORK OF OUTCOMES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE : CONTINUING THE CRITIQUE

Following on from Bernard’s initial comments on Young Foundation’s Framework I would add the following general observations.

1. The Framework is in no sense neutral. Its underpinning assumptions are at one with the dominant neo-liberal ideology of the last three decades. This is so, even as this way of explaining the world is in profound crisis. Within its pages financial austerity is a taken-for-granted. This is so, even as many in the mainstream economic journals call for growth. There are references to the public purse, but none to the private purse, which siphons trillions of pounds into tax havens. Tellingly, in the Framework’s Outcomes model, the benefits to society accruing from the emergence of its ‘empowered, resilient young people’ will be ‘less need for health services’, ‘ less dependence on welfare’, ‘not subject to the criminal justice system’ and in a tortuous construction, ‘contribute to the economy through labour market participation’. The latter, I presume, means that the Framework’s ‘mentally tough’ young person will work without complaint for whatever pay and under whatever conditions the employer deems appropriate? Or indeed work for nothing , volunteering in the service of the Big Society? It’s not too difficult to sniff a synchrony here between the these ‘extrinsic outcomes’ and the Coalition’s agenda.

2. History gets rewritten to suit the argument. Thus Beitha McNeil tells us that “historically, services for young people have been regarded as ‘self-evidently good’.” As is increasingly the case nowadays we are faced with immediate uncertainty about what we mean by ‘services for young people’. Looking to the past the youth service equalled informal educational work with young people founded on voluntary association. Alongside could be found the Careers Service, the Leisure Service, Social Services and Probation with differing emphases on the needs of young people. Now I’ll speak only about my experience within youth work, but the idea we got the money come what may does not fit. Over the years we’ve struggled to improve local authority budgets, been decimated by massive cuts and forced increasingly to bid for short-term funding. In terms of the latter Beitha is correct to say this caused a shift to the supply of facts and figures – see the emphasis on accreditation. However throughout my career the dominant argument with managers, politicians and funders has hinged around our belief that we contribute to the development of the personal and social awareness of young people – read social and emotional capabilities if you so wish. In fact, given the Young Foundation’s reference to the post-riot return to ‘building character’, I shall be content historically with noting that the overwhelming majority of youth work has been rooted in the ‘character-building’ tradition. Immerse yourself in ‘Scouting for Boys’ and you will find references to leadership, discipline, communication, problem solving etc. in abundance. Spend time with post-Albemarle young person-centred ideas and practice and you will discover similar references abound. Now, let me allow that Beitha might be right in saying we didn’t get our message across, but it wasn’t because we were smug about our ‘do-goodery’ and it wasn’t because we were ignorant about personal and social capital.

Indeed we collided internally across youth work precisely because we didn’t think things were ‘self-evidently good’. Thus women workers in Wigan in the late 1970′s fought against a male-dominated Service for separate provision for young women. In winning this space they were under great pressure to justify to committees of all kinds the efficacy of their endeavours. Their reports were necessarily creative and rigorous with significantly an emphasis on the development hand in hand of both individual and collective consciousness. And, of course, this challenge to the prevailing status quo around gender was mirrored in the parallel struggles around race, sexuality and disability. What is remarkable is that a Framework for Outcomes in 2012 has no sense of youth work [and indeed services for young people] as a contested site of practice, within which what is good is up for argument and interpretation.

3. In his comments Bernard notes that ‘young people emerge as a monolithic undifferentiated group’ in deficit. This is a crucial insight. The Framework’s notion of a general young person, stripped of their class, gender, race and sexuality, takes us back fifty years. In the IDYW’s founding Open Letter we insist on the continuing necessity of recognising that young people are not a homogeneous group and that issues of class, gender, race, sexuality, disability and faith remain central. With the best will in the world it is difficult to take seriously a Framework for Outcomes that ignores utterly the structural inequality at the heart of contemporary society.

4. As Bernard notes the word ‘power’ itself never appears in the document. To talk of ‘empowering’ without an acknowledgement of the relations of power in society is mere cosmetics. The notion of empowerment has been much abused. A dictionary definition suggests it is the giving of authority or power from above to those below. In bureaucratic and business circles management talks endlessly of empowering its employees, all the better to exploit them. Within the Framework we are told that its contents will empower commissioners and providers to deliver what government policy demands. Wouldn’t ‘enable’ be a more accurate verb? A political definition based on the struggles of the oppressed argues that empowerment is the process of taking power in your own name. It is a collective and ever continuing effort to wrest power from the powerful.  Thus it is necessary to question the proposal that young people are being empowered as individuals. Certainly they might well improve their confidence, exert more influence on their situations. But if we are to claim that as individuals they are challenging the distribution of power in society, this can only make sense if intimately related to their self-organisation as the young unemployed , as young women, as young black people, as young LGBT people and so on. The Framework has nothing to say about the umbilical relationship between personal, social and political identities. In my opinion this is a fatal flaw.

Hopefully, in a further post, I will look more closely at the cluster of seven social and emotional capabilities and ask if they are useful to an open-ended, necessarily improvised practice, within which there is never a captive audience. As always we would welcome criticism, comments.

TT

LOCALISM : HAVE YOU A CLUE WHAT IT MEANS?

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Amidst our discussions about the threat to youth work posed by the agendas of commissioning and privatisation the Localism Act has lurked. To be honest we’ve struggled to get a grip on its significance.  However insight and illumination are at hand.

On his blog ToUChstone Matt Dykes notes:

The government claims that the Localism Act will “shift power from central government back into the hands of individuals, communities and councils”.

 But how far does it devolve to the local level? How will it affect communities and the voluntary groups that serve them? What impact will it have on public services and the workers who deliver them? What will it mean for social housing tenants? And how will its impacts be shared across communities?

In a new publication jointly produced by the TUC and National Coalition for Independent Action, Localism: Threat or Opportunity? a range of diverse voices from the trade union and voluntary sector including TUC, NAVCA, Age UK, Runnymede Trust, Women’s Resource Centre, Shelter, Adur Voluntary Action, Northampton Institute of Urban Affairs and NCIA assess the likely impact of these new powers.

He continues:

While there is a diverse range of perspective across the different groups included in our publication, a unifying theme that comes through is a shared concern about the government’s ‘big society’ and ‘open public services’ agenda and how the creation of public service markets and an individualist and consumer-led approach to public service reform might lead to growing inequality within and between communities, markets that exclude community participation, competition at the expense of collaboration and localism that devolves responsibility and blame but not resources or power.

Well worth perusing. After which send the link as a gesture of enlightenment to those in the Coalition’s thrall.

 

Framing Outcomes for Young People : An Initial Critical Response from Bernard Davies

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CYPN in a piece, Tool to help youth sector prove its worth reports that,

Moves to boost investment in youth work have taken a step forward with the publication of a guide to help the sector measure outcomes.

Think-tank The Young Foundation has created the document to help providers demonstrate evidence of their impact, by creating standardised measurements across young people’s services.

It forms part of the work of the government-funded Catalyst consortium, which is charged with helping the youth sector adapt to the changing policy environment.

Over on the Young Foundation site itself Bethia McNeil, co-author of the research, in a blog, When is self-evidently good not good enough? outlines the rationale for the focus on outcomes related to social and emotional capabilities and challenges us to take ‘ a collective breath and blink’.

Whatever our failings we never fight shy of ‘collective breath taking’. Thus several of us in the Campaign have immersed ourselves in the research and come up blinking with deep reservations. As a starter for debate we are pleased to post Bernard Davies’s initial critical thoughts.

A framework of outcomes for young people

The Young Foundation

Some comments

The Young Foundation framework

The Executive Summary sets out the paper’s purposes and approach for the Framework of Outcomes for Young People it is proposing. It sees this as:

… designed to highlight the fundamental importance of social and emotional capabilities to the achievement of all other outcomes for all young people. It:

  • proposes a model of seven interlinked clusters of social and emotional capabilities that are of value to all young people, supported by a strong evidence base demonstrating their link to outcomes such as educational attainment, employment, and health
  • sets out a matrix of available tools to measure these capabilities, outlining which capabilities each tool covers, and key criteria that might be considered in selecting an appropriate tool – such as cost or the number of users
  • outlines a step by step approach to measuring these capabilities in practice, that is illustrated in four case studies that exemplify how the Framework might be used by providers, commissioners and funders.

 

The Framework describes itself as aiming ‘to address the key challenges in measuring impact on the lives of young people’. It seeks to do this in order to ‘support progress towards a future in which providers are confident and able to evidence their impact, and commissioners are confident to supplement their focus on reducing negative outcomes with an equal or stronger focus on commissioning for positive and sustained personal and social development’

 

Positives

  1. These comments on the proposed Framework start from the overall proposition that this is important work; that is, that we do need to be trying to develop credible ways on gathering and presenting evidence of youth work’s value to young people.
  1. The paper is a careful and thoughtful attempt to do this – e.g:
  • It makes clear that it does not see its approach as ‘stand alone’ (21).
  • It acknowledges the difficulties and constraints of any exercise seeking to get beyond the ‘easy’ measures of numbers etc and to capture ‘soft’ outcomes. (7)
  • It also acknowledges the difficulty of distinguishing cause and effect in these kinds of human processes. (14)
  • It attempts to see how ‘intrinsic’ (personal) and ‘extrinsic’ (‘societal’) outcomes connect. (14-15)
  • It stresses the need for any evaluation scheme to stay proportionate (eg to the size and aims of the piece of work) and to ‘fit’ the people and the tasks involved. (27)
  • In seeking outcomes for young people, it recognises the need to focus on groups and group work and to get beyond targeted categories. (19-20, 27)
  1. It gives some recognition to the role of youth work in the services and provision it is considering with references to significant sources going back to the 1970’s (the Manchester Wincroft Project – 7) and including the Occupational Standards for Youth Work (6), the Merton et al ‘Impact’ study (11) and the recent London Youth ‘Hunch’ report (14). (This has to be seen however in the context of a later apparent conflation of youth work with youth development – 34).

 

Queries and cautions

  1. In some (key) ways this is a document of its time – for example:
  • It offers only selective and uncritical quotes from Positive for Youth (6) which miss its constant refocusing on targeted work rooted in deficit models of young people.
  • The audience addressed is repeatedly that of ‘providers’ – especially ‘funders, commissioners and investors’ (7) – so that, intentionally or not, definitions of what is needed emerge as primarily top-down. Though at one point the paper acknowledges that ‘the young people you work with, and how you work with them, will influence your practical approach to measurement’, (27)it is therefore hard to see most of the time where and how young people’s own starting points for the work – or indeed the strongly affirmed broader ‘youth voice’ – are going to influence its precise shape and direction.
  1. Despite the reference to the need for group work and a denial that the framework is seeking to ‘decontextualise work with young people’ (20), the only constraints on ‘empowerment’ explicitly recognised in the paper are the interpersonal (families, peers) or the institutional (schools) (14). (The word ‘power’ itself never appears in the document). Young people emerge as a monolithic undifferentiated group: indeed, tellingly, a reference to the effects of social class in a quote from the research by Feinstein (which so influenced New Labour youth policies) is completely ignored in the follow-up comment which again focuses on ‘personal and social development’. (32) No reference is made to the current ‘youth crisis’ in employment, income, housing or transport. The perspective adopted is overwhelmingly individualistic and psychological, repeatedly envisaging ‘empowered, resilient young people, who play an active role in navigating (their transitions)’, without any reference to the wider structural obstacles to such ‘navigation’. (4)
  1. Such ‘transitions’ are another of the paper’s repeating themes. Young people, it seems, cannot exist as people,now, for their own sake but only as individuals in the making for some future broadly pre-defined roles – efficient worker, good parent, law-abiding and contributing citizen. (38, 49). Moreover though the paper’s aspiration is for them to end up with a wide and fulfilling set of ‘capabilities’, these (even the ‘creative’ ones) emerge ultimately as largely conformist, offering no explicit encouragement to young people to play socially critical or social change roles in their society. (19, 21).
  1. Despite its stated commitment to viewing young people’s personal and social development in positive ways, it is striking how often the paper falls back on examples about and references to avoiding the undesirable (anti-social behaviour, poor employment outcomes). As I read them, three of the paper’s four case studies assume targeted work.
  1. The paper is concerned not to present itself as the only way of identifying and presenting outcomes, suggesting for example that it is implemented ‘alongside other approaches such as case studies and witness testimonies’ (21). Nonetheless, in these circumstances the risk exists that hard-pressed managers and practitioners will use it in simplistic and uncritical ways and as the way of demonstrating to ‘funders, commissioners and investors’ that they deserve their money. A critical and continuing commentary and debate on the paper, including on its limitations, therefore seems vital.

 

Perhaps understandably Susanne Rauprich, chief executive of the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services, which leads the Catalyst consortium is less cautious than Bernard.  CYPN reports that she believes the framework “will succeed in its aim of underpinning social investment work by enabling providers and commissioners to demonstrate the difference they make”.

She added that the youth sector often struggles to provide quantitative evidence of its effectiveness. “By addressing this problem, the framework will open the gateway for new finance and entrepreneurial capacity,” she said.

 

Revisiting the Riots : Owen Jones speaks to young people and youth workers

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Our campaign covered the August 2011 events from the outset in Riots are the Voice of the Unheard, which spoke too of Toxteth 1981, in Views from the Street, within which Tania, a youth worker on the ground, noted, “the riots seem to have sprung from nowhere, but paradoxically they have been a long time coming. Policing is a massively emotive issue for young people where I work in Hackney” and in Reflections on the Moss Side Riots 1981, where Gus John stated, “I would not be surprised if in the coming period as European economies begin falling in on themselves you have another upsurge of pan-European fascism.”

In this context it is interesting to read the first and second of four reports, London Riots: One Year On, written by Owen Jones. He came to prominence as the author of the influential Chavs : The Demonisation of the Working Class and nowadays seems to be the leading and well liked, fresh-faced voice of a reviving Left outside and just inside the Labour Party.

In the first report he finds that racial strife, mistrust and frustration built up over generations show no signs of dissipating.

Drawing on his experience as a youth campaigner, Symeon Brown says young black men are “overpoliced as suspects, and underpoliced as victims”. But the impact could be subtle, he says. “You’re aware you’re being ‘othered’. You’re aware that you’re almost an enemy within the state, you’re a kind of danger.”

With the situation facing young people in Tottenham worse than it was a year ago, questions have to be asked about whether we have seen the last of the disorder. The relationship between the local community and the police seems unsustainable.

“I do think there needs to be a communication about why they’re doing stop and search,” says Seema Chandwani, a 34-year-old youth worker and former deputy head of Haringey’s youth services. “Because I don’t think in their right mind anybody wants to allow people to walk around with knives or to walk around with guns or for their little brother or son to be stabbed because the police weren’t doing their job, so it’s about finding that balance.” Hinds is in no doubt that, if this balance is going to be achieved, there has to be a change in police training, which fails to “differentiate between the real gangster and the people who just go about doing their regular business”.

In the second he discovers that young people’s feelings of disenfranchisement and disillusion haven’t gone away.

Those who dismissed last year’s rioters as the “feral underclass” will find Jahmal troubling. Recently released after serving part of an 18-month sentence for violent disorder in last year’s Hackney riots, it is difficult to describe this baby-faced, softly-spoken 22-year-old as being simply motivated by “mindless criminality, pure and simple”, as David Cameron described the riots.

With so many young people facing a precarious future, youth workers warn of potentially grave consequences. Dean Ryan, 46, works with what he says “are euphemistically called ‘hard to reach, hard to engage’ young people”. He is adamant that austerity is having a dramatic impact on the young people he works with. “Before the riots we were campaigning against massive cuts to youth services. There are over a million unemployed young people in this country. Coupled with stop-and-search, continued police harassment and so on, we were saying this is a recipe for disaster.”

Fear of the future is mixed with a deeply-felt distrust of authority. Like many young black men, they have stories of stop-and-search going back years. “The police are very arrogant and ignorant about what’s going on in the community,” argues David. “They choose not to understand where the youths are coming from and why crime is rising. It’s down to a hard fact: nobody has anything to do, youth clubs are getting cut and stuff, so there’s nowhere really to go.” When asked if they knew anyone who rioted, the three friends laugh and shoot knowing glances at each other. “You were involved – don’t lie!” one mutters.

The feel of both these pieces resonates with our Campaign’s analysis. The circumstances underpinning the unrest cannot be changed by an emphasis on the individualised solutions offered through so many of today’s programmes for young people.

Sitting in a pub near Hackney’s Clapton Park estate, a group of middle-aged women expressed to me their despair about the future. Amanda Thomas, 40, has three children aged under five. When I asked about their future, her response was chilling: “I’m dreading it. People say, ‘Get a job, get an education’. But even if you get an education, there’s nothing.”

Lynne Stevens, a grandmother in her 50s, was just as pessimistic.

“We’ll just get more discontent, more homelessness, more family breakdown, more social exclusion, more narcotics,” she says. “How can it be any other way? The work isn’t there.” For many of those who lived through last year’s riots in Hackney, the hope is for peace on the streets. But the despair and fear that existed before the riots hasn’t gone away.

If youth work is to play a humble part in shifting the circumstances underpinning this despair and fear it needs be self-critical about its incorporation into a world, which speaks only of personal resilience and well-being; which if social is mentioned, refers only to enterprise and the entrepreneur.  Youth work needs to rediscover a commitment to collective, politicised activity from below, organised on young people’s terms and armed with young people’s own agendas in all their diversity.

TT

Privatisation of Public Services : The Dogma Unravels. Whither the Youth Sector?

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Over the past few weeks I’ve bookmarked all manner of articles questioning  the dogma of privatisation, ranging from Kevin McGuire in the Daily Mirror exploring the Olympic Security farce to Matt Dykes on the ToUChsone blog asking, is the tide turning on public sector outsourcing? I’ve not known which way to post as the economic and political crisis unravels.  However Steve Richards in the Independent has furnished a hard-hitting summary of the arguments in his  Time to explode the myth that the private sector is always better, adding facetiously that “ministers still prefer the deceptive swagger of the incompetent entrepreneur.”

In his brilliant review of Shakespeare’s ‘Timon of Athens’, The Power of Money, Paul Mason suggests we are in the middle of a virulent and contagious ‘social meltdown’.

“Police testimony at Leveson speaks of “a network of corrupted individuals”. Criminal charges have been laid against newspaper journalists and editors. Companies charged with security at the Olympics have failed to deliver; companies charged with getting the workless into work likewise.”

He draws our attention to what Engelen describes as the debacle of the elite, the consequence of the overwhelming hubris of our political and economic rulers. And, as ever, he ponders what might be the basis for resistance and returns to his thesis that critical and rebellious youth will not follow gormlessly yet another hierarchical leader or party. We need to return specifically to this last point over the coming days in discussing how youth participation fits into this scenario.

For the moment I wish merely to pose whether the leadership of the youth sector, the plethora of executives and managers signed up to the market-led agenda of commissioning and privatisation, is experiencing even a sliver of doubt? As it is Children and Young People Now is advertising an Achieving Positive Outcomes for Children, Young People and Families conference.

On 26 September, join us in London for this exciting one-day event. Get detailed advice from industry experts to aid your organisation’s efficiency in planning, measuring and commissioning the most effective services for children, young people and families.

Amongst the usual mantra about evidence-based decision-making, efficiency, early intervention and targeting, delegates will hear how to

  • Assess the best methods for devising and managing payment-by-results contracts
  • Build investor confidence and access funding for payment by results contracts

 

Of course the explicit introduction of payment-by-results is at the heart of the government’s Troubled Families initiative, within which the definition of ‘troubled’ keeps changing, whilst curiously the figure of 120,000 remains steadfast. Given the £7.6bn budget squeeze on councils it’s hardly surprising they grab at any pot of money available. Pragmatism is inevitable, but principles do intrude.  It is clear that a diversity of youth agencies, including many from the voluntary sector,  are bidding to deliver this intervention. It would be illuminating to hear how these organisations explain their incorporation into a scheme, whose funding is linked intimately to top-down ‘behavioural improvement’ – £4,000 available for each troubled family that is eligible through a payment-by-results scheme (based on performance after 1 year of intervention). Indeed how do they rationalise touching with a barge pole a cynical, ideological exercise, which allows Eric Pickles to froth at the mouth, declaring, “These folks are troubled: They’re troubling themselves, they’re troubling their neighbourhood. We need to do something about it”?

Not to be upstaged the Tsar of the show, Louise Casey, echoing Keith Joseph’s infamous 1974 speech, “our human stock is threatened…. a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up”, declares that mothers in large problem families should be “ashamed” of the damage they are doing to society and stop having children. Not content with yet again ‘blaming mum’, she proceeds, “Yes, we have to help these families. But I also don’t think we should soft-touch those families. We are not running some cuddly social workers’ programme to wrap everybody in cotton wool.” It seems limp to observe that these crude and long-standing attempts to demonise the troubled at the bottom of society’s pyramid have no basis in the Department of Education’s own research. Is it limp too to ask how can an empathetic, critical young person-centred practice grounded in their lived reality survive in a straitjacket, which scoffs at youth work itself- not to mention the working-class pastime of fishing in the canal?

Under the £448 million programme, each family will have a dedicated worker whose job is to turn them around. Sometimes this will involve arriving early to ensure that children go to school. Miss Casey says that getting children to school, and encouraging teachers to keep them there, is the major challenge. “There are a lot of people who use the term ‘diversionary activities’, things like angling, netball and all these activities. I always smile when I go along and hear we must set up more youth clubs.

“Actually, I say, the biggest diversionary activity on God’s earth is called school. If every kid in the country who should be in school [was] there, all day, every day, you would transform all sorts of problems.”

Answers in an e-mail to tonymtaylor@gmail.com or indeed comment below.

POSTSCRIPT

Organisations funded to work with NEETs
The Government has announced the names of the organisations, including many NCVYS members, who will be working with 55,000 16- to 17-year-old NEETs with no GCSEs at A* to C, who are at the highest risk of long-term disengagement. The new programme, part of the Youth Contract, is the first to use payment by results to help get NEETs re-engaged. Funding worth up to £126 million will be made available to organisations across England. Organisations will receive an initial payment for taking young people on, but will only receive subsequent payments when they show progress. The contracts on offer are worth up to £2,200 for every young person helped, with the full amount payable only if a young person is still in full-time education, training or work with training six months after re-engaging.
http://www.education.gov.uk/inthenews/inthenews/a00212063/radical-scheme-to-rescue-neets

Boy Scouts of America affirm ban on gay members and volunteers, not to mention atheists and agnostics!

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Forgive my ignorance I hadn’t realised that the Boy Scouts of America is homophobic. Following  a two year review it has unanimously agreed to uphold a ban that prevents “open or avowed” gay people from being part of the youth organization. Agnostics and atheists are also excluded. Created in 1910 it has more than 2,720,000 youth members and more than 1 million adult members. Not small fry, by any means. It is difficult to separate this decision from the overwhelming preponderance of Christian organisations in its make-up. Is there any chance that the Scout Movement or indeed leading Christian youth  groups in the UK will condemn this decision?

Top 10 Chartered Organizations associated with the Boy Scouts of America, by Total Youth[47]
Name of Organization Total Units Total Yout
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 37928 412720
United Methodist Church 11287 371499
Catholic Church 8795 286733
Parent-teacher groups other than PTAs 4039 160007
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) 3714 126969
Lutheranism 4030 121096
Groups of Citizens 3782 110248
Baptists 4282 108435
Private schools 2975 97869
Parent-Teacher Association/Parent Teacher Organization 1775 72321

Going military is no aberration, it’s at one with the desire for generalised conformity

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Military academy for blokes only?

New Labour’s embrace of the libertarian right-wing Respublica’s ‘military academies’ proposal has inevitably lit a few fuses.  One passionate fusillade of criticism comes from the pen of Seema Chandawani, the feisty champion of young people and youth work in Tottenham. Within her assault she comments,

What some people may not be aware of is my background is in Youth Work and Teaching, a profession I have had my whole adult life, working mainly in urban “working class” areas, often with young people who have complex needs. I will refrain from calling them ‘disruptive pupils’ as it leads to the assumption it is the young people themselves who have initiated the disruption to society rather than actually being a product of a disruptive society.

Working up close with such young people, I do not see them as the ‘problem’ politicians are keen on always finding bizarre solutions for but see their circumstances as where we need to concentrate our efforts. The ‘disruptive’ young people are probably those that have more strength than people give credit to, it astonishes me that some of them even make it to the classroom, and that has to be acknowledged before we explore what takes place within school environment. There are young people who are living lives that are beyond comprehension, in Lammys own constituency there are school boys on the streets of Tottenham who have HIV/AIDS that are paid rent boys, an image we attribute to the ‘third world’ and many will only encounter on a documentary on developmental aid projects in another continent.

We have children growing up in not only ‘broken homes’, but violent and abusive homes, situations where the capacity of the parent has diminished and a 14 year old female is juggling the role of parent, exams and normal puberty related issues extended by lack of nutrition, low self respect, no purpose and severe stress related illnesses, often not diagnosed. If we are really serious about raising the aspirations of our young people, in areas ‘like’ Tottenham we have to explore a holistic picture of needs and not piecemeal solutions that ignore the wider framework of young peoples real lives.

Read her piece, FADS ARMY in full.

It is necessary too, I think, to resist seeing the military academies proposal as an aberration. Central to the neo-liberal project is a desire to create the compliant citizens of its imagination.  It wants us to believe we are expressing our individuality in the very act of conforming en masse to its mantra of ceaseless consumption. It wants us to believe that ‘having’ rather than ‘being’, as Erich Fromm puts it, is the purpose of life.

There is little doubt that the neo-liberalism has enjoyed great success over the last three decades in influencing enormously how many of us see the world. Inevitably education has been a primary battle ground in its quest for supremacy. Until neo-liberalism’s accession to power in the very late 1970′s education witnessed a pluralist tussle between a traditional, ‘we know best’ perspective’ and a liberal ‘ we must listen to them’, child-centred outlook, enlivened by interventions of a more radical, politicised nature. Since then, insidiously and unevenly, this space has been squeezed. Nowadays a ‘new managerial’ authoritarianism dominates. Instrumental and behavioural in inclination it is obsessed with testing and measurable outcomes. Of course there has been resistance to this imperative, but, if anything, the majority within teaching has accommodated in differing degrees to its demands. The very existence of our own campaign suggests that something very similar has occurred in youth work.

Despite this shift, though, those young people described variously as ‘anti-social’ or ‘disadvantaged’ continue to be a pain in the side of the establishment, not least because of the vacuum in opportunity created by the economic crisis. With all their contradictions the riots struck fear into the heart of the ruling elite. Indeed, according to Respublica, the military schools idea is a response to ” last year’s riots and launched as part of the institutional response which we believe is needed to tackle the full extent of despair and educational failure in Britain’s poorest communities.” Targeting and pathologising ‘recalcitrant’ youth is  thus given a distinct institutional form, informed by the hierarchical ‘character-building’ culture of the armed forces. Lest we smile too quickly the targeting and pathologising of young people and their families is central to the interventions being undertaken by youth workers as part of the dysfunctional Troubled Families scheme.

If the military school comes to pass, it will be a bitter blow to our efforts to defend a critical and pluralist education. Such an institution will be a closed ideological shop, wherein dissidence will be an offence. Although my eldest grandson does keep telling me that his own secondary school of excellence brooked little in the way of criticism. More immediately within youth work the continuing shift of workers and resources into imposed, targeted relationships with young people begs the question of whether it can be called youth work any longer.  The outcome of the relationship has been decided beforehand. The young people at odds with an exploitative and corrupt system are to conform, become pro-social in their behaviour. Perhaps the military academy and positive youth activities are not so far apart – both in their own ways schools of generalised conformity.

Where’s the tipping point? – asks a cross Andy Benson!

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As usual the new NCIA Newsletter is packed full of comment and conjecture. Andy Benson opens by lamenting his tendency to be cross!

Where’s the tipping point? Where’s the breaking point?

A friend once said to me that my problem was that my ‘circle of concern’ was wider than my ‘circle of influence’. Maybe this explains why I spend so much time being cross? But consider the following. Over the last week I have heard that:

  • Bob Diamond of Barclay’s Bank resigns in disgrace but is given £1.5M and a nice pension to make him feel better;
  • A spokesperson for an official report on school examination boards says on the radio that “competition is driving down quality”;
  • The director of Lambeth’s Children’s Services declares that paying lots of money (£200k per child per year) to private and charitable care homes does not buy quality services;
  • Homelessness is up by 20% in one year;
  • The charity Kids Company has started feeding centres for children and families – up to 70 at one centre alone – to stick a finger in the dyke for the 2.2 million children living in poverty.

All this stuff concerns our world of voluntary action and history will ask – in looking back – what we all did about it. We’re currently doing a tiny bit of research to try and sort out who, in the VCS, can be called an ‘activist’ in these terrible times. What’s coming up, again and again, are groups that we are calling ‘(maybe) getting ready for activism’. These are mostly professionally oriented, obsessed with funding, overtly complaining about what is happening but still playing the game, trying to keep their seat at the table but feeling deeply uneasy about the cuts and compromises that are being demanded. These groups are the backbone of the historic voluntary sector. In truth they are being decimated by the commissioners, the SERCO’s, the NACRO’s and the rest of the corporate charity raiders. Whether they decide to bite back or give in will be an important sign of just how lost we are in the fight for social justice and a radical alternative.

In addition the NCIA and LSVC have produced some excellent notes from their May conference, Is Competition Killing Us? Commissioning and the independence of the voluntary sector. The pdf contains a real spread of opinion and concern – well worth a read by both proponents and opponents.

For example:

Lin Gillians, LVSC:
Commissioning isn’t going away – how can we get engaged in the commissioning process? The voluntary and community sector is there to
serve its users, but where do you draw the line? For some of us the grants process worked well, but if you were outside the grants system it was hard to break in. Organisations that got grants continued to get grants. Whether campaigning and commissioning are compatible and how to retain independence are interesting questions.

Colin Rochester, NCIA:
Is competition killing us? If not it is doing a serious amount of damage:
• Increasing competition, and in any competition there are losers – valuable work will be lost.
• The winners find themselves bound into onerous terms of engagement.
• Voluntary sector organisations become sub-contractors to large private concerns, taking all the risk and getting little in return.
• Engagement in commissioning damages all of us by making organisations compete against each other.
• We are becoming not more business-like, but more like businesses.
• We are focussing on being service providers rather than on fighting for service users.

AND STOP PRESS – FOR A FURTHER CHANCE TO CHAT CRITICALLY – THERE ARE STILL SOME FREE PLACES.

Last chance!! Gaining power: the challenges facing activists – 19th July – London

The next in the series of events to look at the crucial issues facing us will focus on activists and community action and will take place on the 19th July. This is being organised jointly with the National Community Activist Network (NatCAN) and will be at the Resource for London, 356 Holloway Road, N7 6PA.

If you’re taking action on behalf of people in your area, want to share tactics with others, or find out how to get help to keep going, then this event is for you. The morning is for discussion about big issues around democracy, markets, and community action and includes a presentation on People’s Assemblies from World to Win. The afternoon will hear from people active around different themes including anti-racism, anti-privatisation, provision of local services and solidarity networks. We’ll be looking at how to keep going and figuring out what support activists need. There will be plenty of room for discussion. And lunch. And FREE.

To book a place, email Maxine at Maxine@grantmoarcommunities.com

 

Shared Views, Collective Action : July 26 Community Sector Coalition conference

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Shared Values, Collective Action

How can the experience of the community sector help us set an agenda for the future?

Thursday 26 July 2012, 1- 5pm
Community Sector Coalition in partnership with Third Sector Research Centre
Held at London Voluntary Services Council, 200a Pentonville Road London N1 9JP, venue fully accessible

Book a place:Email Matt: so204ms@gold.ac.uk or call 020 8692 8784 We need
to know numbers to plan the event, so please let us know if you are
coming!

This event will explore issues faced by the community sector and help identify ways of working and actions to take forward. More details

Hanging Out – Youth Culture Then and Now

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A great opportunity for folk in the metropolis to take a critical trip down Nostalgia Lane, courtesy of the Victoria and Albert and Full Spectrum Productions – see Hanging Out web site.  It would be a good crack to go with a group of young people – plenty room for banter!

Hanging Out – Youth Culture Then and Now
Celebrate the Victoria and Albert Museum display, ‘Hanging Out – Youth Culture Then and Now’ and its influence on young people today. It brings together historic material with work made by youth participants in response. The 50s and 60s were a highpoint for youth culture and saw innovation in fashion, film, music, entertainment, sport and protest. This was a time of social change and mass immigration of people from the commonwealth countries, events that would have a lasting impact on British culture.
Join us to celebrate Hanging Out – Youth Culture Then and Now with two special events:
Where Did You Hang Out?
Saturday 14 July 2012, 12:30 – 17:00
Explore the London scene and popular culture during the 50s and 60s with Golden Globe and BAFTA Award winning actress Rita Tushingham (‘A Taste of Honey, ‘The Leather Boys’), Ace Cafe’s Managing Director Mark Wilsmore and Cue Club performer Fred Peters (formally of Freddie Notes and the Rudies), as they share their accounts of growing up and hanging out during this era with Royal College of Art Cultural Historian Barry Curtis.
Avril Horsford former Head of Academic Diversity at the London College of Fashion will take you on a whistle stop tour of all things popular during the 50s and 60s. Gavin Maitland Curator, Archivist and Photo-historian offers a regional perspective and a rare account of The Bamboo Club, Bristol’s first West-Indian social club that was active in the St Paul’s area between 1966 – 1977.

 


Take a self-guided tour of the Hanging Out display, watch the Hanging Out documentary and enjoy live monologues with young actors, based on the oral histories of elders today, who were the teenagers of yesterday.
FREE but booking required Receive a free copy of the Hanging Out Publication.

 
After the War – Youth Protest, Style, Image and Identity
Sunday 22 July 2012, 12:00 – 17:00
Spend a day exploring the cultural revolution after WWII through 50s glamour and the image of austere times, the modern housing estate and interiors. Examine the social and political frameworks that influenced a new counter-culture and identity, fuelled by the ‘birth of the teenager’ and the swinging 60s.

 

 

Enjoy a DJ set featuring songs of protest, resistance and freedom spanning the 60s and  70s with DJ Mistah Brown (Tighten Up and Trash & Ready)
Watch rare feature length films about introspective life in London during the 50s and 60s including the Hanging Out documentary.
Hear talks by curators, historians and cultural commentators about fashion,entertainment, the home and interiors during the 50s and 60s.

 


Come dressed in 50s or 60s vintage and have a make-over, before having your portrait taken in traditional black and white.
Design and make a 60s paper dress or create a protest poster or t-shirt design.
View the Hanging Out display and watch live monologues performed by young actors wearing outfits made by the Hanging Out project participants.
Make a statement and have your say by taking part in a massive digital installation campaign for ‘FREEDOM2012’.
Free but booking required. Receive a free copy of the Hanging Out Publication.
Hanging Out – Youth Culture Then and Now is in collaboration with Full Spectrum Productions who are sponsored by The National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund.
Book your place on any of these events by calling 020 7942 2211 or visit
www.vam.ac.uk/whatson

Hanging Out Public Programme – pdf