Youth &Policy

YOUTH &POLICY No. 106 MAY 2011 INSIDE THIS ISSUE: Running Out of Options: Re-Modelling Youth Work Freedom, Fairness and Responsibility: Youth Work offers the way forward Youth work stories: in search of qualitative evidence on process and impact Struggles and silences: Policy, Youth Work and the National Citizen Service Liberation or Containment: Paradoxes in youth work as a catalyst for powerful learning An Opportunity Lost? Exploring the benefits of the Child Trust Fund on youth transitions to adulthood Editorial Group Ruth Gilchrist, Tracey Hodgson, Dino Saldajeno, Tony Jeffs, Jean Spence, Mark Smith, Naomi Stanton, Tania de St Croix. Associate Editors Priscilla Alderson, Institute of Education, London Sally Baker, The Open University Simon Bradford, Brunel University Judith Bessant, RMIT University, Australia Lesley Buckland, YMCA George Williams College Bob Coles, University of York John Holmes, Newman College, Birmingham Sue Mansfield, University of Dundee Gill Millar, South West Regional Youth Work Adviser Susan Morgan, University of Ulster Jon Ord, University College of St Mark and St John Jenny Pearce, University of Bedfordshire John Pitts, University of Bedfordshire Keith Popple, London South Bank University John Rose, Consultant Kalbir Shukra, Goldsmiths University Tony Taylor, IDYW Joyce Walker, University of Minnesota, USA Aniela Wenham, University of York Anna Whalen, Freelance Consultant Tom Wylie, Consultant Published by Youth & Policy, ‘Burnbrae’, Black Lane, Blaydon Burn, Blaydon on Tyne NE21 6DX. www.youthandpolicy.org Copyright: Youth & Policy The views expressed in the journal remain those of the authors and not necessarily those of the editorial group. Whilst every effort is made to check factual information, the Editorial Group is not responsible for errors in the material published in the journal. ii Youth & Policy No. 106 May 2011 About Youth & Policy Youth and Policy Journal was founded in 1982 to offer a critical space for the discussion of youth policy and youth work theory and practice. The editorial group have subsequently expanded activities to include the organisation of related conferences, research and book publication. Regular activities include the bi- annual ‘History of Community and Youth Work’ and the ‘Thinking Seriously’ conferences. The Youth and Policy editorial group works in partnership with a range of local and national voluntary and statutory organisations who have complementary purposes. These have included UK Youth, YMCA, Muslim Youth Council and Durham University. All members of the Youth and Policy editorial group are involved in education, professional practice and research in the field of informal education, community work and youth work. The journal is run on a not-for-profit basis. Editors and Associate Editors all work in a voluntary and unpaid capacity. iii Youth & Policy No. 106 May 2011 YOUTH &POLICY No. 106 MAY 2011 Contents INSIDE THIS ISSUE: Running Out of Options: Re-Modelling Youth Work Freedom, Fairness and Responsibility: Youth Work offers the way forward Youth work stories: in search of qualitative evidence on process and impact Struggles and silences: Policy, Youth Work and the National Citizen Service Liberation or Containment: Paradoxes in youth work as a catalyst for powerful learning An Opportunity Lost? Exploring the beneﬁ ts of the Child Trust Fund on youth transitions to adulthood Introduction – Running Out of Options: Re-Modelling Youth Work Tony Jeffs 1 ➤ Freedom, Fairness and Responsibility: Youth Work offers the way forward Viv Mckee 9 ➤ Youth work stories: in search of qualitative evidence on process and impact Bernard Davies 23 ➤ Struggles and silences: Policy, Youth Work and the National Citizen Service Tania de St Croix 43 ➤ Liberation or Containment: Paradoxes in youth work as a catalyst for powerful learning Annette Coburn 60 ➤ An Opportunity Lost? Exploring the benefits of the ChildTrust Fund on youth transitions to adulthood Lee Gregory 78 ➤ Reviews 95 ➤ iv Youth & Policy No. 106 May 2011 Contributors Tony Jeffs teaches on post-graduate youth and community programmes at Durham University and the University of Bedfordshire where he is a member of the Institute of Applied Social Research. Viv Mckee has been a youth worker, service manager, policy expert and consultant. Bernard Davies is an independent trainer and consultant. He is a visiting professor at De Montfort University. Tania de St Croix is a detached youth worker in Hackney and is studying at Kings College London. Annette Coburn teaches in the Community Education Division of Strathclyde University, She is co-editor of the Scottish Youth Issues Journal. Lee Gregory is a PhD student in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University. v Youth & Policy No. 106 May 2011 © YOUTH & POLICY, 2011 INTRODUCTION Running Out of Options: Re-Modelling Youth Work Tony Jeffs HE WOEFULLY inadequate attempts of the chief executives of arguably the three leading youth work organisations to make the case for youth work before a Parliamentary Committee T 1 last month may prove something of a watershed. Given that the committee chair felt obliged to upbraid them for failing to make ‘a fist of it’ their impoverished efforts must produce a backwash of sorts. Coming at a time when youth work projects, both statutory and voluntary, are being threatened with closure, or at best retrenchment, on a scale not witnessed for over fifty years, this feeble performance has perhaps acquired an exaggerated significance; one it would not have been bequeathed even a few months ago. A great deal of almost certainly, misguided faith was invested in the capacity of the House of Commons Committee to arrest and even reverse the decline in public spending on youth services. One has to say misguided because such hopes were founded upon a quaint 1950s reading of our constitution. A belief that such committees can influence the policy decisions of the executive is a relic of a bygone age when the sort of ministerial responsibility conjured up by the words ‘Crichel Down’ existed.2 Inevitably a youth worker in Barnsley, Barking or Barnstaple struggling to keep their project afloat may with good grounds shrug their shoulders and wonder what the fuss is about. Especially those who have been around for any length of time and will therefore be painfully aware that the poor quality of youth work managers has been a running scandal for decades. They, if they can be bothered, will probably whisper in your ear ‘what did you expect’ before heading into the night. Apathy is after all a perfectly rational response to events one cannot influence. Therefore why bother oneself about the meeting of a committee that on past evidence will produce a report that will achieve little or nothing? My answer to that question is that the consequences of that failure to present a coherent case for investing in informal education with young people will eventually have an impact on youth work – at all levels: that it will, and already has, led to responses some of which may make a bad situation worse. Think for a moment about the way in which a failure to undertake some routine safety checks on a set of points on a railway line north of London led to a fatal crash, the bankruptcy of the employing company and the re-organisation of the railway system. Consider how the incompetence, even cowardice, of a few individual practitioners preceded the neglect and killing of a young girl in a London borough. That tragedy resulted in ministerial panic, the publication of an abysmal report which justified ever-greater bureaucratic micro-management of 1 Youth & Policy No. 106 May 2011 RUNNING OUT OF OPTIONS: RE-MODELLING YOUTH WORK social workers and an ill-considered and hurried re-organisation of services for children and young people. Mathematicians, sociologists and others look to something called ‘chaos theory’ to partially explain the ways in which dynamic systems become highly sensitive to seemingly inconsequential events. Leaving aside the valid point that a fatal train crash or the killing of a young child are far more serious occurrences than a failure to provide a group of politicians with the sort of answers they want to hear, parallels between the three events do exist. Notably, seemingly minor or trivial over-sights or errors that at another time have minimal or no impact, can on other occasions have a profound long term influence. This disproportionality is far more likely to occur when the given organisation or structure is in an unstable and dysfunctional condition – as youth work is currently. So what has been the immediate outcome of the failure on the part of the chief executives ‘to make a fist’ of explaining the value of youth work? First and foremost it has fuelled a frantic search to provide evidence that youth work works, to assemble a portfolio of research findings that it has a quantifiable beneficial economic and social impact; in MBA speak that it delivers positive outcomes for young people and the economy. At one level such evidence has been in existence for around two centuries. For example, ever since Sarah Trimmer described for her readers the benefits of Sunday Schools, or Thomas Pole presented to his fellow citizens the case for investing in adult education, a succession of academics, practitioners and social reformers have endeavoured to provide evidence that informal education, whether with adults or young people, can achieve virtuous results. Abundant evidence, of admittedly variable quality, that youth work works, is readily available. The fact that some practitioners, high and low, as well as some policy-makers are unaware of it is inexcusable, but their ignorance does not constitute a valid argument for producing more. Nor does the fact that individuals who should have made the effort to discover for themselves such evidence but did not do so suffice as a justification for accusing others of failing to ‘disseminate’ such findings. Excuses of this ilk too readily trip off the tongue and they need to be to be faced down by practitioners and academics.

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