Youth and Local Community Engagement in Devon in the 1960S: Voluntary Sector Or State Control After the Albemarle Report?
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Youth and Local Community Engagement in Devon in the 1960s: Voluntary Sector or State Control after the Albemarle Report? Submitted by Lyndy Pooley to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History In December 2019 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. 1 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank Mark Jackson who has given me encouragement and supportive criticism over the years, and helped me to believe in myself. His humour and kindness cannot be underestimated. Secondly, I would like to thank Matthias Reiss for his enduring support and encouraging words, and for occasionally challenging me when I needed it. I would also like to thank the interviewees for this research who made me laugh, inspired me and not only answered my questions, but provided me with insights, photographs, books, pamphlets and other primary sources which have added unique perspectives and information to this thesis. I would also like to thank the staff at the Devon and North Devon Records Offices for their kind help in sourcing the many elusive local authority records that I needed to find, and suggesting others I didn’t know existed. And thanks also go to my family and friends who gave me encouragement and support. A final acknowledgement goes to all the dedicated workers in the Voluntary Sector, and particularly my colleagues at Exeter’s CoLab (Exeter Council for Voluntary Service), who tirelessly and cheerfully support the city’s diverse communities year after year, in spite of increasing demand and decreasing funding. 2 Abstract Between the publication of the Albemarle Report on the Youth Service in 1960 and the findings of the Fairbairn-Milson Report into youth and community work in 1969, local authorities in England attempted to rationalise services for young people in line with State directives. The decade began optimistically with policies that aimed to engineer an expansion of the State’s role in influencing after-school activities. However, throughout the period progress was hampered by economic constraints and doubts about how to attract an expanding section of the population that appeared to be increasingly influenced by popular culture and consumerism. By the time the Labour Party took over from the Conservative Government mid-decade, debates were already questioning where exactly the Youth Service was going and what it stood for. The research presented in this thesis contributes to understanding the uneven progress of services for young people during the 1960s by focusing on a specific geographic space and exploring the relationship between local authorities and voluntary organisations. This will contribute to understandings of the negotiated spaces between the two sectors, and consider whether a closer working relationship developed along shared ambitions to provide a service that appealed to all young people, including those harder to engage. This thesis uses the memories of people in Devon who were involved at the time, as well as local documentary sources, to weave together a case study that sheds light on one specific region in time. By placing small-scale experience under scrutiny it will explore the effectiveness of the State’s philosophy in the 1960 directive, and its impact on the voluntary organisations that determined local strategies for engaging young people. The tensions between voluntary agencies and 3 their official counterparts are rarely researched at a local level and this thesis will place these key actors at the centre of the narrative to give them agency and status in this account of the development of the Youth Service in the 1960s. Studies of the development of the Youth Service in England are largely histories from above and make no claim to have traced how local and national policies became practice on the ground. This thesis attempts to address this omission but also makes no claim that Devon’s response was the same as other parts of England and Wales during the 1960s. History from below has a valuable contribution to make to national studies of the Youth Service. This is enriched by the oral contributions and primary sources that help to develop an understanding of how local authorities responded to the young people in their area, the challenges they faced in improving services, and how far their relationship with the voluntary sector changed as a result of the Albemarle Report. 4 Devon A geographically diverse county with two distinct coastlines, and the longest county road network in England and Wales. The Blackdown Hills: an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty 5 Table of Contents Abstract ………………………………………………………………………. 3 Map of Devon ………………………………………………………………… 5 Introduction………………………………………………………………….. 8 The Focus on Youth: Society’s ‘Seed Corn’ Youth as Problem…………………………………………………….. 11 The Impact of National Socio-Political Change…………………… 17 Gender and Family …………………………………………………… 21 Youth and Culture……………………………………………………. 25 Class …………………………………………………………………… 32 Identity and Community ……………………………………………… 38 The Voluntary Sector and the Power of the State ………………… 41 Methodology and Sources …………………………………………… 45 Structure of the Thesis ……………………………………………….. 54 Chapter One ………………………………………………………………….. 58 The 1960 Albemarle Report as Social Policy Background to the 1960 Albemarle Report …………………………. 58 The Albemarle Report ………………………………………………….. 66 Chapter Two …………………………………………………………………… 79 Local Governance: Policy and Practice The Response in Devon…………………………………………………. 80 County Council Commitment to Albemarle…………………………….. 95 The Role of Local Governance ……………………………………….. 102 Chapter Three ………………………………………………………................. 110 Exeter: In Pursuit of the ‘Unattached’ Research and Debates ……………………………………….............. 111 Engaging the ‘Unattached’ in Exeter ………………………………… 128 The Role of the Exeter Voluntary Sector ……………………………. 150 Chapter Four ………………………………………………………................ 160 Devon: The Progress of Albemarle in the Rural and Coastal Areas The Challenges of Rural Youth Work ………………………………… 160 Devon’s Response to Albemarle in its Rural Areas ………………… 165 Coastal Infrastructure and Conflicting State Policy ………............... 179 Chapter Five …………………………………………………………………… 192 The Youth Service in Devon: the Challenge of Change The Youth Leader ………………………………………. ………………192 The Community Funded Youth Club ………...................................... 195 The Role of Youth Clubs in Devon …………………………………….. 198 Gender, Class and Youth Clubs …………………………………….. 205 Schools, Teachers and the Changing Community …………………... 213 Chapter Six …………………………………………………………………… 229 A Golden Age and a Turning Point? Raising the Status and Expectations of Youth Workers …………… 231 Re-awakening of Local Authority Responsibility …………………… 243 A Youth and Community Service for the Future …………………….. 248 What Does Youth Work Achieve Then? ……………………………… 255 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………… 261 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………. 280 6 INTRODUCTION THE FOCUS ON YOUTH: SOCIETY’S ‘SEED CORN’1 “Our motto was ‘Vigilance and Service’....we took it seriously.”2 In 1961 a young teenager living on the north coast of Devon was recruited at his school by the police to train to save lives in the sea. Aged just fifteen Brian spent all his spare time on the local beach and knew the dangers as well as the fun to be had in the surf. He was also aware that increasing numbers of summer visitors were flocking to the area and that there had been regular drowning accidents when the force of the sea had been underestimated. Brian and his friends used their knowledge of the local conditions to help other people, and continued as surf lifesavers throughout their adolescent years. This is a unique example of how community activism gave the impetus for organising groups of young people in Devon in the 1960s. Connected by a love and an understanding of the sea, young off-duty police officers and local youths from the community joined together and established an effective response team, and a club where young people felt they had agency (Figure 1). The launch of this surf lifesaving initiative coincided with the early implementation of the Albemarle Report which was published in 1960, and was the first influential attempt by the State to raise the status of a national Youth Service. The Report reasserted the responsibility of local authorities across England and Wales to use the central funding they received to give young people appropriate after-school activities. This was a turning point after previous attempts to shift the responsibility for providing after-school services from the Voluntary Sector to the 1 Bernard Davies, From Voluntaryism to Welfare State: a History of the Youth Service in England 1939-1979, (Youth Work Press, Leicester, 1999), p. 4. Davies states that the State focussed on nurturing the section of the population openly defined as ‘seed corn’ – or the emergent ‘human capital.’ 2 Keith, interview 5 April 2013. (See Bibliography for details of interviewees). 7 State had failed, and the favourable political climate aided its rapid ratification. In From Voluntaryism to Welfare State: A History of the Youth Service in England from 1939-1979, Bernard Davies claims that