In the run-up to the Election I ponder – where is youth work; where is the Youth Service? 

General election campaigns don’t usually put much of a focus on youth work or local Youth Services. And – perhaps this time particularly – why would they? Alongside, say, voters’ experience of waiting six weeks for a GP appointment or of schools struggling to put text books on their kids’ desks – to say nothing of the ‘let’s just get Brexit done’ syndrome – why would cheeky teenagers’ complaints about having nowhere to go in an evening be seen as a priority. 

Yet a number of top-down Youth Service/youth work policy initiatives have been in the pipeline over the last two-to-three months. They of course come with no guarantees that any of them will be picked up by a new government, and certainly not that they’ll be turned into effective action. Nor can they be treated uncritically by those of us committed to a practice which is open to any young person who chooses to engage and open to ‘outcomes’ as those young people might define them. 

Nonetheless as markers that for the first time in at least a decade national policy-makers might just be taking that practice seriously, it seems worth reminding ourselves of some of those interventions and of their pros as well as their cons. Because if we don’t give them some prominence in the run up to the election, who will? 

Government agendas

Gestures policies

Throughout the post-2010 austerity period, ministers have made repeated gestures to filling the gaps left by their demolition of local authorities’ year-round youth work provision. In comparison to the ninety-five per cent (£634 million) of government money for ‘youth services’ which by 2018 was going to the National Citizens Service (NCS) [1], these new ‘Funds’ – ‘Big Society’, ‘Youth Investment’, ‘Youth Engagement’, ‘Early Intervention’, ‘Life Chances’, to name but a few – have offered small amounts of funding for usually time-limited programmes. Often, too, allocated through competitive tendering, this has proved highly divisive, nationally and also within a local area. Significant proportions anyway have gone to government-favoured organisations and schemes such as Step Up to Serve’s #iwill ‘social action’ programme and uniformed youth groups, including ones linked to the armed services.      

Examples of such recent gestures include:

• An allocation of £4 million in August 2019 towards the development of an OnSide ‘youth zone’ in Grimsby – part of a wider government ‘Town Deal’ regeneration programme [2].
• A new £500 million Youth Investment Fund, first announced by the Chancellor Sajid Javid in his Spending Round statement in September. In response to the loss since 2012 of some 760 youth buildings and 4500 youth work jobs [3], this is offering money for 60 new youth centres, refurbishing 360 existing ones, providing 100 mobile youth facilities and ‘an investment in the youth workforce’ [4].
• £12 million allocated by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to help address ‘urgent needs in the youth sector – £5 million again for the #iwill programme and £7 million for a new ‘Youth Accelerator Fund’ to ‘expand existing successful projects … delivering extra sessions in youth clubs, and promoting positive activities in sport and the arts to help young people develop skills and contribute to their communities’[5].

Civil Society Strategy

In August 2018, the government published a Civil Society Strategy ambitiously sub-titled ‘Building a Future that Works for Everyone’ [6]. Framed by ‘a vision of the UK with better connected communities, more neighbourliness, and businesses which strengthen society’, it defined civil society ‘… not by organisational form, but in terms of activity, defined by purpose (what it is for) and control (who is in charge)’. More specifically it saw the term as referring ‘… to individuals and organisations when they act with the primary purpose of creating social value, independent of state control’ – with, in this context, ‘social value’ understood as ‘enrich(ing)lives and a fairer society for all’. 

The Strategy’s ‘Mission 3’ – headed ‘opportunities for young people’ – seeks ‘to change the culture of policy design and implementation so that young people are systematically involved in shaping the policies that affect them’. The aim of these policies are explained as to ‘broaden our approach so that all young people from an early age can access a range of positive and integrated activities including youth programmes, cultural activities, and volunteering’. Options are to be explored ‘for building on the cross-sector partnership created by the #iwill campaign, to identify how the existing offer for young people can be improved’. Also given strong endorsement, including via a ‘success story’ case study, are the National Citizens Service and uniformed youth groups.

As always in government youth policy statements of this period, one of the paper’s repeated emphases is on ‘ensuring … the most disadvantaged young people transition into work…’ and that they ‘… develop the skills and habits of social responsibility during their childhood and youth’. This is seen as applying, too, to what the paper calls ‘the transformational impact that youth services and trained youth workers can have’ which are described as ‘especially important ‘for young people facing multiple barriers or disadvantage’. 

The Strategy also promised to set up a ‘Civil Society Youth Steering Group’ to ‘oversee the development and implementation of policies affecting young people’. Action on this came in February 2019 with a DCMS 12-month grant of £170,000 to the British Youth Council (BYC), to be used in part to establish a ‘Youth Steering Group’ and a ‘Young Inspectors Group’ [7].

In October 2019, a new Civil Society minister, Baroness Barran, published a review of progress in implementing the Strategy. In this she talked of ‘continu(ing) to invest in positive activities for young people to enable them to fulfil their potential and contribute to their communities’. Again given particular emphasis was the NCS programme ‘that helps build a more responsible, more cohesive and more engaged society’. ‘Investments’ in other youth programmes and organisations were confirmed. These included £5 million for uniformed youth groups such as Fire Cadets and Scouts to create over 10,000 new places for young people in ‘disadvantaged’ areas and £40 million for volunteering and community engagement through the #iwill Fund [8].

Just two weeks after the minister’s review appeared, the ‘election manifesto’ of the voluntary sector’s umbrella body, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), suggested some significant gaps in the Strategy. For example, NCVO in called on the government to involve charities more in policy making and in particular to ‘strengthen its commitment to social value’. It made clear, too, that the sector required more, and more reliable, resources, specifically highlighting the need to ensure that lost EU funding to the UK was replaced at ‘a comparable level of investment’. It also proposed that some of the billions of pounds stuck in dormant bank accounts be used to set up a community wealth fund [9].

Review of the Statutory Guidance for Local Authorities on Services and Activities to Improve Young People’s Well-being 

A policy initiative with the potential for longer-term impact on local authority decision-making – a review of the statutory guidance on the provision of local youth services – was also flagged up in the Civic Society Strategy paper. Though starting from the somewhat limited rationale that since the 2012 revision ‘much has happened to change the way these services are provided’, the aim was explained as to ‘provide greater clarity of government’s expectations, including the value added by good youth work’ [10]

Almost a year elapsed before the then minister for Civil Society Mims Davies restated the original commitment to it and a further three months for her successor, Baroness Barran, to make a call for evidence [11]. With a closing date of 1^st December 2019, this is now being gathered through an 11-page questionnaire for service providers, a 4-page questionnaire for young people and a 6-page ‘Tool for Conversations with Young People’ [12]. The aim – set before the election was called – is currently for updated guidance to be published in the spring of 2020.

Any appraisal of these moves, however, has to start with some crucial cautions. 

• When the current statutory guidance was published in June 2012 even organisations whose ‘independence of state control’ was by then under growing pressure described the new guidelines as lacking clarity and the ‘objective measures’ needed for judging a local authority’s provision [13]. 
• In line with post-2010 governments’ highly individualised ways of defining young people’s needs and problems, the 2012 revision of the guidelines narrowed the local authority’s duty from a more broadly educational one to one focused on just young people’s ‘well-being’. 
• Though within two years of this guidance being issued a Cabinet Office report revealed that 56 of the 97 councils surveyed were not fully adhering to it [14], it had taken another five years to persuade ministers that another revision might be needed [15].

With most of the review questions framed in very bland ways, they offer no prompts for locating responses in the wider resource and infrastructure problems which have led to open youth work’s widespread demise across England. For example, question 12 of the questionnaire for service providers’ offers only four tick-box options – from ‘Very well’ to ‘Very poorly’ – for judging how well the existing guidance achieves the aim of ‘advis(ing) local authorities on what to take into account when deciding what services and activities to secure for young people’. No encouragement is given therefore for commenting on how the guidance’ may have allowed local authorities to marginalise open forms of youth work – by for example, in its very first lines, effectively de-prioritising young people who, it says, have ‘the right supportive relationships… ’; and then by repeatedly insisting that the focus must be on the ‘vulnerable’ and ‘disadvantaged’ [16]

Some embedded assumptions in a later question, number 13, also need to be challenged if the guidance is to contribute to the reinstatement of forms of open youth work. One, for example, by baldly stating that ‘the leadership role of local authorities’ is just about ‘convening key stakeholders’, seems to rule out what will surely often be crucial in the future – that those authorities again act proactively as direct providers. Another – on ‘the role of qualified youth workers’ – not only limits this to ‘leading positive activities for young people’. It also skirts round the fall in the number of students on qualifying courses between 2011-12 and 2017-18 from 951 to 432 [17] and, no less essential, the need for government and others also to re-establish the training routes for part-timers and volunteers.

One bottom-line demand, however, will need to underpin all such responses: the deletion of a phrase, used three times in the 2012 guidance (paras 2, 3, 5), which allows – requires? – local authorities to provide their ‘local offer’ for young people only ‘so far as is reasonably practicable’. Under the pressure of the major cuts to councils’ funding since 2010, particularly to their Treasury Revenue Support Grant, those six words have rendered the guidance largely meaningless.

The NYA: in support of government policy 

Under similar financial pressures, the NYA has in recent years often seemed to be operating like any voluntary sector organisation – by for example jointly managing NCS programmes in the North East. However, it still describes itself as ‘the national body for youth work’ and carries out important national functions – particularly, through its Education and Training Sub-committee (ETS), the validation of the youth work qualifications in England recognised by the Joint Negotiating Committee (JNC).

In seeking to play this national role, over the last year NYA has taken a number of initiatives which, though at times seeming to tack to what is likely to appeal to ministerial thinking, have supplemented some of the government’s own policy responses. 

• In 2018, after urging that a ‘youth covenant’ setting out the government’s overall commitment to young people be included in the Civil Society Strategy, it has now published its own Youth Covenant [18].
• Between July and October this year it ran consultation ‘roadshows’ in eight regions of England, one of whose agenda items was the DCMS’s review of the statutory guidance to local authorities. This was followed in October by a National Youth Work Summit attended by ‘80 youth sector leaders’.
• Also in October it published a youth service’s ‘Sufficiency Statement’, with ‘sufficiency’ defined as ‘at least two professional youth workers and a team of youth support workers and trained volunteers …. for each secondary school catchment area’. It proposed, too, that such guidance ‘… be supported by a clear statement from government on the importance of providing a sufficient offer to young people’ to include ‘easily available … universal settings’ alongside other services. The statement also endorsed proposals by both the government and the Labour Party (see below) that future Youth Services be managed overall by local youth partnerships, to include representation from young people and the voluntary sector [19]
• This month NYA launched the £500,000 scheme, announced by the government in July, to in its first year provide 450 bursaries for youth workers qualifying at NVQ Levels 2 and 3. Though greeted sceptically by the Chief Executive of London Youth for failing even to replace ‘the 800 youth work positions that have disappeared in London alone over the last decade’, the scheme was presented by NYA as part of its own ‘national initiative to grow the workforce’ [20].
• In its own ‘High 5’ General Election manifesto NYA sought commitments from the political parties’ to its proposed Youth Covenant and local youth partnerships and to its definition of Sufficiency [21].

NYA seems, too, to be intending to embed open youth work more firmly in its own programmes by appointing JNC-qualified and experienced staff as a Director of Youth Work and a Youth Work Specialist [22].

The opposition parties: where is the youth work?

The Liberal Democrats

Albeit without any noticeable pre-campaign build-up, in a sub-section in their Election Manifesto headed ‘A Public Health Approach to Violence’, the LibDems’ commitment to youth work is explained as:

Invest in youth services. We will provide a £500m ring-fenced youth services fund to local authorities to repair the damage done to youth services and enable them to deliver a wider range of services, reach more young people and improve training for youth workers [23]

The Green Party

Also framed as a primarily preventative – especially anti-crime – practice, the Green Party’s election commitment to youth work is expressed as:   

Invest in youth services and centres, to help turn at-risk children away from crime. All the evidence shows the cuts in youth services have increased crime, especially knife crime. To end knife crime once and for all we need to invest in specialist programmes provided through youth centres [24].

The Labour Party vision

In two separate sections of its Manifesto the Labour commitments are presented as:

We will rebuild our youth services and guarantee young people’s access to youth workers.

… Too many young people now have nowhere to go, nothing to do and no one to help them with their problems. Labour will build a properly funded, professionally staffed National Youth Service, and will guarantee every young person has access to local, high-quality youth work [25].

In Labour’s case, however, these two bald statements have to be seen as emerging from a process which, starting in late 2018 with a consultation exercise, led a month before the election to the publication of Only Young Once, Labour’s detailed 35-page ‘vision for rebuilding Youth Services’[26].This has now been followed by an 8-page ‘youth manifesto’, The Future is Ours [27]. Both in its grasp of the defining features of the practice and in its actual proposals, Only Young Once offers the most comprehensive and convincing blueprint yet of how, both strategically and on the ground, open youth work might be genuinely re-embedded in any future ‘youth offer’. Indeed, if Labour’s proposals ever actually get to be implemented, it could come to be seen as the Albemarle report for the 21^st century [28].

As I have already offered my response to the paper [29], what follows focuses on the conclusions and proposals which, in the run up to the Election, seem particularly worth restating and on some issues needing further clarification and debate. 

Starting from a recognition of the damage caused by the demolition of local Youth Services since 2010, the paper for example:

• Tasks Youth Services with recognising ‘the agency young people have as a group to be empowered’; with helping to ‘realise their full potential and live successfully in their communities’; and with ‘address(ing) social inequalities … including discrimination and racial disparities…’.
• Defines the main purpose of the practice as ‘to provide non-formal education that supports the personal, social and political development of all young people…’.
• Describes this provision as ‘based on relationships of trust between young people and trained youth workers’, with ‘voluntary participation … applying across all levels’ and ‘interaction … negotiated with young people from the outset’.
• Locates this practice ‘in a range of contexts and settings in which young people choose to be…’.
• Identifies youth workers as contributing ‘vital forms of skilled support…’, including to ‘groups with specific identities, such as LGBT+ people, young people with special needs, young women, or specific religious communities’. 

To help ensure that – ‘in its own right’ and ‘independent and complementary to other services’ – this open youth work provision is reinstated, Labour’s proposal include:

• Appointing ‘a Minister for Children and Young People responsible for the national youth service (to) sit within the Department for Education supporting the Secretary of State’.
• New legislation setting out local authorities’ statutory duties which, rather than offering ‘a get-out clause: that the youth work activities … be provided only “so far as reasonably practicable”’, instead ‘clearly defines a base level of (youth work) sufficiency’….
• Long–term, stable funding for youth services to ensure all young people have access to high quality youth work provision that matches their needs’.
• The development of ‘a national youth workforce development strategy’.

In relatively open-minded ways the paper also addresses two on–going youth work dilemmas:

• How to develop methods and processes of evaluation which ‘fit’ with the practice’s young people-led and ‘on the wing’ approaches and interventions.
• How to ‘professionalise’ the work and its workforce by, for example, establishing a formally endorsed ‘licence to practice’ while at the same time continuing to recognise and indeed give credit to the huge contribution made by volunteer youth workers.

Unavoidably, perhaps, given its scope, the paper does leave some important questions unanswered. Two which, for me, stand out are:

• Within Labour’s proposed highly ambitious open youth work offer, what is to happen to resource-hungry NCS programmes which have regularly failed to meet their recruitment targets?
• For actually delivering this offer in the young people-focused ways envisaged, can local authorities’ often inflexible internal power relationships, structures and procedures adapt – perhaps radically – to work with and through the paper’s proposed ‘collaborative partnerships at local, regional, national and international level’? 

Even allowing for these ambiguities – and assuming of course that Labour manages to get a handle on power – Only Young Once suggests that buried within those two brief Manifesto sentences are the best prospects we’ve had for a very long time for sustained and appropriately focused state sponsorship and funding for open youth work. 

FOOTNOTES

1. Neil Puffett, 2018, ‘“NCS found to Account for 95 per cent of Government Youth Service Spend”’, CYPN, 22 June

2. Neil Puffett, 2019, ‘“Government announces money for new youth zone”’, CYPN, 16 August

3. Unison. (2018) ‘Youth services at breaking point’, at  https://www.unison.org.uk/youth-services-report/

 4. Joanne Parkes, 2019, ‘“Javid announces £500m for youth fund”’ CYPN, 30 September; Gov.UK, 2019, ‘Chancellor announces support for post-Brexit future’, 30 September, at https://www.gov.uk/government/news/chancellor-announces-support-for-post-brexit-future–2

 5. Joanne Parkes, 2019, ‘“Government announces £12m boost for youth sector”’, CYPN, 25 October; GOV.UK, 2019, ‘£12 million boost for youth projects’, 25 October, at https://www.gov.uk/government/news/12-million-boost-for-youth-projects

6. HM Government, 2018, Civil Society Strategy: Building a future that works for everyone, August, at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/732765/Civil_Society_Strategy_-_building_a_future_that_works_for_everyone.pdf

7. GOV.UK, 2019, ‘DCMS launches new youth voice projects’, February, at https://www.gov.uk/government/news/dcms-launches-new-youth-voice-projects

8.  DCMS, 2019, at ‘Policy paper; #OurCivilSociety’, 25 October, at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/our-civil-society/ourcivilsociety

9. NCVO, 2019, A bigger Role in Building Our Future: Our vision for charities and volunteering, NCVO, 11 November https://publications.ncvo.org.uk/bigger-role-building-our-future/greater-role-more-open-democracy/; Liam Kay, 2019, ‘NCVO calls on the next government to do more to engage with civil society’, Third Sector, 12 November

10. HM Government, 2018, Civil Society Strategy: Building a Society That Works for Everyone, p 42, at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/civil-society-strategy-building-a-future-that-works-for-everyone

11. Joanne Parkes, 2019, ‘“Government launches review of youth work guidance”’, CYPN, 10 July; Derren Hayes, 2019, ‘“Call for evidence into council youth work duties”’, CYPN, 3 October 

12. GOV.UK, 2019, Statutory guidance review for local youth services: have your say’, 3 October, at https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/statutory-guidance-review-for-local-youth-services-have-your-say

13. Neil Puffett, 2012, ‘“Youth services guidance must be clearer, commission says”’, CYPN, 29 May; Neil Puffett, 2012, ‘“Revised youth service guidance still too vague, sector warns’”’, CYPN, 17 July

14. Laura McCardle, 2014, ‘“Youth funding and services cut as councils overlook legal duty”’, CYPN, 22 July  

15.  Laura McCardle, 2014, ‘“Youth minister Rob Wilson rejects statutory services motion”’, CYPN, 4 December

16. GOV.UK, 2012, ‘Statutory Guidance for Local Authorities on Services and Activities to Improve Young People’s Well-being’, p 7, at  https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/836238/Statutory_Guidance_for_Local_Authorities_on_Services_and_Activities_to_Improve_Young_People_s_Well-being.pdf

17. Dan Parton, 2019, ‘“Youth work training figures reveal record lows”’, CYPN, 12 August 

18. NYA, Youth Covenant, 2019, at https://nya.org.uk/youth-covenant/

19. NYA, 2019, ‘NYA Sufficiency Statement: ‘A base-line for youth services’, October, at https://nya.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/NYA-Sufficiency-Statement-Discussion-Paper.pdf

20. Joanne Parkes, 2019, ‘“Youth work bursaries dwarfed by scale of cuts, says charity”’, CYPN, 29 July;  NYA, 2019, ‘NYA to Launch new Bursary Fund’, November, at https://nya.org.uk/2019/11/nya-to-launch-new-bursary-fund/

21. NYA, 2019, ‘High 5 –Full Manifesto’, November, at https://nya.org.uk/high-5-full-manifesto/

22. NYA, 2019, ‘Vacancies with the National Youth Agency, at https://nya.org.uk/about-us/jobs/#id2, accessed 19 November 2019

23. Liberal Democrats, 2019, Stop Brexit: Build a Brighter Future¸ p 71, at https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/libdems/pages/57307/attachments/original/1574267252/Stop_Brexit_and_Build_a_Brighter_Future.pdf?1574267252

24. Green Party, 2019, If not Now, When?, p 65, at https://www.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/Elections/Green%20Party%20Manifesto%202019.pdf

25. Labour Party, 2019, It’s time for Real Change: Labour Party Manifesto 2019,pp 43, 51,at https://labour.org.uk/manifesto/rebuild-our-public-services/

26. Labour Party, 2019, Only Young Once: The Labour Party’s Vision for Rebuilding Youth Services, October, https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Only-Young-Once.pdf

27. Labour Party, 2019, The Future is Ours: Youth Manifesto, November, at https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/The-Future-is-Ours.pdf

28. Ministry of Education, 1960, The Youth Service in England and Wales, HMSO

29. See https://indefenceofyouthwork.com/2019/10/15/the-labour-partys-vision-for-open-youth-work/. See also Tony Taylor, 2019, ‘Labour’s Radical Manifesto commits to a National Youth Service’, at https://indefenceofyouthwork.com/2019/11/23/labours-radical-manifesto-commits-to-a-national-youth-service/