A chance for a rant…
I feel angry.
I feel angry, and I feel powerless, and I feel upset.
I feel this way because I’m seeing youth work being destroyed and I don’t know what to do about it. I feel powerless in some respects, as I see the people who do have the power (and don’t have the knowledge) trample all over good quality youth work.
It scares me, it upsets me. It really bothers me that I’ve seen so many professional, experienced youth workers lose their jobs and have to change career. All that knowledge and experience that is not being used. I don’t know how to overcome this, in some ways. But in other ways I guess I do.
I know so many workers who are totally burned out. The fight that they’ve had to put up with over the last few years has been enough and they are all out of fight. But, on a personal level, I have a real passion and a drive to make sure that good, proper, professional youth work does not die out. I cannot let that happen. I realise that I cannot take over the world and make everyone do it my way but the places and pieces of work I do have the power to shape will uphold that principle of youth work. I will not let that die.
But I’ve never seen a profession that is solely built to help young people and do nothing but good, be trodden down and crushed so violently.
Beyond “it’s somewhere to go, innit”
As the ever-increasing cuts mean that youth services across the country are disappearing, there are many campaigns – both on a national and local level – springing up to protest the closure of services and to draw attention to the good work that can happen in a youth service. At the heart of these campaigns are, of course, the young people. They are our service users and part of our very job role involves empowering young people to do things such as campaign against the closure of their local youth service.
However.
There is a continuing trend of young people speaking out about their youth service in a language that I don’t think young people use. The fact that a young person in Sheffield and a young person in Southampton will, more than likely, give the same answer to the question “what do you get out of your youth club?” either means we’ve got it sorted and have perfected the art of youth work, of they’re repeating what they’ve heard.
“It gives me somewhere to hang out with my mates”
“It keeps me off the streets”
“It gives me something to do”
These are all very valid reasons for being part of a youth club or organisation, but young people will give these reasons whenever someone asks them to justify their youth club. And I don’t think it’s totally true. I think we’re underestimating our young people’s ability to identify the true extent of what their youth group, and by extension, youth work itself, provides to them. Suggesting that youth work and youth services should be saved and funded to “keep young people off the streets” suggests that youth clubs are a babysitting service for the over-13s. We keep them amused and entertained with pool and table tennis (who plays this outside a youth club? How did this happen?) and then send them off home.
This misses the point of youth work completely and does youth workers and young people a tremendous disservice. The point of what we do shouldn’t be a secret to our young people. Yes we do informal learning, but then the process of that learning needs to be explored with those young people so they can see the process of it. The process of helping young people express what they get out of youth work is part of youth work itself, part of informal learning and part of helping young people to become self-actualised. This process should be part of every young person’s involvement with a youth project, and should be the basis behind any youth project that is developed.
This is also why we need qualified workers that know how to do this. Moving young people on from the rhetoric of youth work they’ve been taught to speak will only help us in proving that youth work is a profession, and a profession that needs to be kept.
How do we move forward?
On Tuesday, a whole raft of young people from all over the country decended on London to make people quite clear exactly how they felt about the closure of their youth clubs. And since then, youth workers have I’m sure been contemplating what happens now. We fight, of course, we ask for ring-fenced money and we fight to keep services open for young people.
But something still doesn’t sit right with me. Governments are well known for throwing money at the problem and calling it done when it comes to youth provision – a swanky new youth club with all the mod cons (a la MyPlace), a DJ project, a dance class, a football tournament. Throw money at something you can stick a sponsor’s logo on, get a nice picture of all those disaffected young people in front of a (usually we’ve-done-a-graffiti-project covered) centre and move onwards. There’s a real discrepancy between the outward picture of youth work and what it actually is. Youth work is not about stuff and things.
I feel really strongly that, if we’re going to be able to keep proper professional and excellent youth work in the forefront we have to have something we can attach the money to. And by this I mean that we need to fight to keep funding available and services open and youth work professional but at the same time we have to put forward a model of good youth work and say “This. This is what we want you to pay for, because it works”. WE are the practitioners and WE are the ones that know how to do this. Not Tim Loughton, not the head of the NYA who, when put in front of a select committee on youth work could not tell them what youth work was. Us, the trained, qualified, dedicated professionals on the ground. It’s up to us.
My list of requiremets for a post-cuts youth service:
* A recognition that this job can only be performed by trained professionals.
* A recognition that volunteers are a vital element of community and youth work but that trained professionals should be paid for the job that they do.
* A recognition that successful youth work cannot be undertaken by short term, quick fix projects.
* To develop a model of youth work, based on the voluntary relationship, the maintenance of informal social education and continual organic development of young people.
* That youth work is a continual process that is pro-active, not a fixed-term set of responses that are reactive.
* That, undertaken properly, good youth work can and will make sure that young people stay out of the criminal justice system, give them a base for positive and successful relationships and raise young people’s aspirations.
Afternoon…
Hi. Welcome to the inaugral post…trumpets and fanfares, maybe?
I should explain the point of this. I’m a professional youth worker, newly qualified. And I’m looking around me and I’m seeing youth workers losing their jobs all over the country. I’m seeing young people’s services being cut to the ground and I’m seeing the erosion of youth work. And I’m seeing this as a hidden battle.
I’m seeing people getting up in arms about the woodland in the country being sold off, and managing to turn it around. I’m seeing people absolutely furious that their weekly bin collection could be fortnightly, and forcing MPs to debate and change it. However for some reason we are not saving our vital youth services.
There are not many youth worker blogs out there. There are not many people championing the cause. So I’ve decided I’ve had enough of being quiet. I’m quite the experienced blogger, having had my own personal blog since 2003. So My blogging skills are going to the masses and I’m being public about my views on the decimation of young people’s services in this country.
