Services for young people
Memorandum submitted by Bernard Davies, youth worker
A. Youth work as a distinctive practice
1.
With only some personal details changed, the above is a true story, related many years later by the, then, not-so-young man himself. It is included to illustrate, very simplistically, the kind of youth work experience from which this submission comes. Underpinning it are some of this practice’s features which, in combination, define youth work as a distinctive (which is of course not to say superior) form of informal education with 13-19’s. Evidence of this distinctiveness can be found in writings on ‘youth leadership’ dating back to the late nineteenth century.
2.
The core features this practice are:
·
Participation by young people which is voluntary – an essential condition for negotiating adult-young person relationships experienced as mutually respectful, owned by the young people and able to provide the springboard for educational work.
·
Starting points for this work which are set by young people particularly their personal concerns and leisure interests.
·
Stimulus and support for young people to take themselves beyond these starting points into often personally challenging learning.
·
Engagement with young people in and through their peer groups and networks –because these are often one of those key starting points; and because they can be the vehicle for new learning.
·
Working consciously with the power balances within youth work – recognising that young people are citizens now; and that, because they have chosen to engage with the youth worker, they already have considerable intrinsic power in the relationship which demands respect and can be extended and deepened.
·
Working consciously with the inter-personal processes of these encounters, on the premise that what in other fields may be seen as a ‘hidden’ curriculum is a crucial explicit element of youth work’s content - that the medium of the adult-young people exchanges is often a key message for young people.
B. Sources; focuses of the submission
3.
Though their interpretation is entirely my own, this submission draws heavily on the findings of two ‘modest’ Inquiries into the state of youth work in a small number of children and young people’s services in England, carried out in 2009 and 2010. Evidence from other sources is also used.
4.
Not all the items in the Committee’s terms of reference are addressed.
C. Which young people access youth work services?
5.
In 2006 PriceWaterhouseCoopers reported that around 70% of young people participate in sports and physical activities, clubs and societies and volunteering. Under-represented groups identified included young people from ethnic minorities; less affluent, lesbian and gay and disabled young people; and young carers.
6.
These findings need to be considered alongside:
·
Feinstein and colleagues’ conclusion that:
… children who participate in youth clubs tend to have personal and family characteristics associated with adult social exclusion. The opposite is true for those engaged in uniformed or church-based activities.
·
Youth workers’ extensive use of detached work to reach out to young people who are often not engaging voluntarily with any institutional provision in their leisure time.
D. What do young people want from youth work provision?
7.
A letter from a 16 year old young woman to her local newspaper concerned about the threatened closure of her local youth club offers a vivid response to this question:
·
We get confidential advice whenever we need it … eg (on) drugs, sex relations and family issues. …
·
We can talk to the youth workers about things that we may not be able to talk to our parents about.
·
Our youth workers are very good at doing educational activities … there is a stop smoking service… which has been a success…
·
(We have) activities … including rock climbing, kayaking and babysitting courses (which) can be accredited…
·
Having our youth club open … keeps ‘anti-social
behaviour’ down…
·
We have … computers, pool tables and a table tennis table … comfortable sofas and a quiet room…
8.
Young people interviewed for the DMU Inquiries added important personal glosses:
They (the youth workers) build up your confidence.
They… get us to achieve the best we can.
They are more fun.
They treat you like adults.
They let our ideas bloom.
They are teachers of life.
E. What is young people’s role in shaping youth work provision?
9.
As indicated above, one of youth work’s historic and integral commitments has been to tip balances of power in young people’s favour. A high priority has thus been enabling young people to shape provision – something confirmed repeatedly during DMU Inquiries:
… getting young people involved in interviews for the full-time worker. (Youth worker)
It wasn’t just a one-way street. (The worker) had power but there was never a power imbalance. (Young person)
10.
Given that some control of money is crucial to deciding the shape of much provision, at the time of the first DMU Inquiry the Youth Opportunity and Youth Capital Funds were highlighted as giving many more young people a more authentic leverage on decision-making. Many young people talked too of valued skills gained through these experiences.
I’ve learnt how to approach important adults. (Young person)
11.
The removal of the ring-fencing of these funds by the present government has deprived youth workers across the country of a resource and organisational framework for working with young people to extend their influence on shaping provision.
F. How do local government structures and statutory frameworks impact on
service provision?
Targets and target-setting
Within youth work, target-setting –for example for young people’s accredited outcomes - had been accepted and indeed welcomed by most of the youth work managers and some of the youth workers interviewed for the DMU Inquiries. Many young people also responded positively, particularly seeing accreditations as helpful additions to their CVs.
12.
However, the Inquiries also revealed field workers as well as some young people experiencing targets as both burdensome and a diversion from youth work as they defined it:
The emphasis is put on numbers (500 accreditations); nobody seems to care about the quality of the youth work behind it. (Full-time youth worker)
Consulting with young people is really a pretence; we know we have to meet targets of the county and the government. (Full-time youth worker)
Targets … make workers rushed. (They) end up putting pressure on young people – making you feel bad if it’s not done. (Young person)
13.
Incorporation of youth work into integrated youth support services (IYSS)
The transfer of youth work into IYSS has in many authorities meant the disappearance of a Youth Service with an explicit brief for its support and development and its relocation in departmental divisions or directorates whose titles emphasised ‘child-saving’ and a ‘deficit’ view of the young. This had not only overridden youth work’s historic educational philosophy and ‘potentiality’ view of young people. It had also imposed policy imperatives and procedures which seriously threatened youth work practice as outlined in paragraph 2:
·
Through the Common Assessment Framework youth workers were increasingly being required to work with individuals rather than groups, sometimes in ways for which they had not been trained.
·
Particularly where they had been referred, young people were increasingly being required to attend ‘youth work’ sessions.
·
The pre-determined programmes of work delivered through formally structured sessions often related little to young people’s own chosen starting points.
·
Youth workers were under growing pressure to share with other services young people’s personal information. Yet much of this was likely to have been revealed, ‘drip-drip’, at unguarded moments during the highly informal exchanges which are at the heart of good youth work and so outside any formal ‘contracting’ process based on informed consent. It may well also have been disclosed after the young person had had direct experience of the youth worker as trustworthy:
Youth workers are more confidential. They keep it to themselves, not share it with our families. (Young person)
The youth worker’s right to pass on this information was therefore, at best, highly ambiguous.
14.
To safeguard the features of their relationships with young people which they say they most value, youth workers have thus needed to respond in very creative ways to these new policy- and managerially driven challenges.
G. The relationship between universal and targeted services for young people.
15.
In recent years youth workers’ interventions have been increasingly valued by other services striving to work with young people seen as ‘excluded’ or ‘hard-to-reach’. The results have often been valuable for the young people concerned – and helpful to services striving to meet targets. What they have involved, however, has not usually been youth work but a wider (albeit welcome) use of youth work skills.
16.
One specific consequence of this growing emphasis on work targeted at pre-labelled young people has been to squeeze the work available to ‘ordinary’ young people via open access (universal) facilities. Evidence of this emerged from both DMU Inquiries:
There is a concern … about the reduction in ‘bread and butter’ open sessions in order to increase more specialised work… (Senior manager)
We have open access work in order to target. (Senior manager)
The trend was confirmed by OFSTED in an evaluation of IYSS in eleven local authorities:
The priority given to targeted support for a minority of young people seen as at risk had often undermined the contribution which universal youth services made to the development of young people more generally.
It was registered too by Clubs for Young People in a survey of over 400 youth workers:
Much funding is focused on targeted work, to the extent that it is now increasingly difficult to access funding for universal provision within clubs… (There is) an on-going policy debate about the changes in approach within youth work, influenced by government directives.
17.
The pressures here have come from two sources. One has been youth work’s increasing reliance in recent years on short-term external funding, most of which has been given only for targeted work. Secondly, within IYSS, especially where these had incorporated a youth offending service, the highest priorities have become early intervention and prevention, safeguarding, diversion from criminal activity and re-engagement with education – all therefore with pre-labelled young people.
18.
Though open access youth work has the potential to contribute to all of these policy objectives, policy-makers and managers have increasingly allowed it to atrophy. At a time when services’ budgets are being very severely cut, this process has been accelerated by the need to find extra resources to deal with the huge increase in child protection work following the Baby P case.
19.
When the loss of these universal facilities is placed in the context of what young people value about youth work (as recorded for example in paragraphs 7 and 8 above), it is clear that the consequences will be very damaging for them personally as well as for their relationships with their peers and our society overall. Paradoxically, this loss will also leave youth workers fewer opportunities for honing precisely those ‘on the wing’ skills of informal engagement and education which other services now value so highly.
H. The relative roles of the voluntary, community and statutory sectors in providing services for young people.
20.
During the DMU Inquiries the evolving relationship between the statutory sector and the youth voluntary sector (VS) was in some areas described by both partners as positive. More often however the tensions were highlighted - particularly in relation to funding and how local authorities managed this.
21.
Here the move from grants to commissioning generated particular concerns. Some were very pragmatic:
… the commissioning money doesn’t even cover our costs – for management. Especially the amount of monitoring it needs. (Voluntary sector manager).
Other managers and workers focused on the consequences for relationships within the VS:
Existing competitiveness is huge.
(I’m concerned) small organisations might lose out…
Certain of the bigger organisations have got the ear of the policy-makers. They’re not representative of the sector.
However, the issue which got most attention was how the move to commissioning was further narrowing the voluntary organisations’ freedom to initiate work which they defined as needed and appropriate to their primary ‘mission’:
With past money we had loads of different options. Now we’ve no choice – only what’s being commissioned.
This apparently could happen even when voluntary organisations sought to work co-operatively through a consortium:
… I hate it. It narrows our choices.
Six organisations got together as a consortium. The Council insisted on an input into its programmes. It’s all corrupt.
22.
Underlying all this were two, if anything even more fundamental, concerns. Firstly, as this last quotation indicates, many VS representatives feared that they were losing both their independence as voluntary organisations and their flexibility to do what voluntary organisations are supposed to do best – break new ground:
We consult with young people about applying for money, then end up doing what (the funders) want, otherwise we don’t survive.
… It (commissioning) is changing the ethos of the organisation. Innovation … (is) being stifled.
… We need to take back our identity.
23.
Secondly, the second Inquiry revealed considerable resentment amongst some local authority employees, particularly field workers, at what they regarded as the privileged treatment of the VS. In one authority local authority youth workers talked of voluntary organisations being ‘parachuted’ into areas where they had worked for years – and then being allowed to proceed with only minimal monitoring.
The local authority doesn’t look first at the strength of its own services. It’s too eager to commission out to the voluntary sector.
24.
At a time of huge cuts in public services and of the government’s insistence that the ‘Big Society’ can go far to fill the resultant gaps, perceptions like these - regardless of their objective accuracy - clearly have the potential to create major rifts between voluntary and statutory sector staff.
I. The impact of public sector spending cuts on funding and commissioning of services, including how available resources can best be maximised, and whether payment by results is desirable and achievable.
25.
A plethora of examples could be offered of how the spending cuts are decimating youth work provision across the country, both statutory and voluntary – particularly universal (open access) facilities such as youth clubs. Only one is offered here therefore as illustration – Warwickshire County Council’s decision to, within two years, ‘cease the whole of the Youth Service’. It was against the very local effects of this decision that the young woman quoted earlier was protesting.
26.
This new ‘era of austerity’ has confirmed just how exposed youth work is as a dedicated provision. In part this is because of its weak and contested legislative base. Perhaps even more significant, however, is that its process-led methodology is repeatedly marked down by policy-makers and funders as responding weakly to the kinds of short-term statistical measures of ‘outcomes’ which have dominated public services monitoring for well over a decade.
27.
As these overwhelmingly managerial perceptions have overridden more strategic professional judgements, youth work has struggled to demonstrate how it is ‘maximising the use of available resources’. This is not of course because it is not as committed as any other service to do this. It is because ‘maximising’ here too often carries implicit expectations of quick (or at least quick-ish) ‘hits’, usually to be demonstrated statistically. Though youth work can offer up credible examples of such outcomes, most of its broader personally developmental impacts cannot be ‘proved’ in the short-term or with hard statistics. ‘Measurement’ of these needs to be made, firstly, against the starting points of the young people themselves, many of whom may have been rejected and indeed alienated by other public provision (not least their schooling). Secondly its outcomes need to be seen in the light of a young person’s journey from these starting points – something which is likely to take considerably longer than the six- or even twelve-month periods within which results often have to be demonstrated. To show that those outcomes represent a ‘maximised use of resources’ requires time and a valuing again of process – neither of which fit comfortably into politicians’ or policy-makers’ dominant timeframes.
28.
This wider context has now been narrowed further as cutting public spending has, it seems, become the only strategic policy-making rationale. A funding regime based on ‘payments by results’ would therefore almost certainly further speed up the demise of the forms of youth work for which this submission has been arguing. Indeed, any evaluation framework based on narrow, rigid and pre-set criteria of ‘success’ and ‘achievement’ would not only be disastrous for youth work as a distinctive practice. It would be entirely inappropriate for the kind of self-chosen, leisure-based, open access, young people-led provision described earlier by the young woman club member and experienced by the young man in the youth club vignette.
J. How should the value and effectiveness of youth work be assessed?
29.
The DMU Inquiries gave ample evidence of youth workers’ recognition of the need to be accountable and so of evaluation of effectiveness:
… although youth workers fought to hold on to their autonomy they are now more prepared to be more accountable to their seniors and their peers and partners
We should be accountable – we need to demonstrate a good standard.
30.
However, much of what has been presented in this submission questions fundamentally the managerially-driven evaluation methods dominant in most public services in recent years. As the ex-head of policy at the Institute of Directors, Ruth Lee, made clear:
…the public sector has been administered on a very basic, and misleading, interpretation of how the private sector operates... Education is not just a matter of turning sausages out of a sausage machine and hitting targets - and that's where it's gone wrong.
31.
What this devastating outsider’s critique reaffirms for youth workers is that procedures for evaluating their work need to be both congruent with and integral to the core features of their practice. This particularly means putting at the heart of the evaluation of their work such questions as:
·
Where do young people feel they started?
·
What interventions have for them made the difference?
·
How – by what processes - have those interventions been made?
December 2010
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