Services for Young People

Memorandum submitted by Doug Nicholls

1 I became involved in the youth services as a youth club member in 1970. The youth centre I went to was established in 1928 within the voluntary sector by community minded local residents. This is typical of the origin of the entire youth service. Following the Albemarle Report on the youth service in 1961, like many other youth centres throughout the country, it was supported by the local authority in terms of building maintenance and the provision of qualified youth workers.

2 My youth centre in the 1970s was a source of association, friendship, fun and support. It involved me in sport for the first time. I am disabled and the encouragement I was given within the youth centre meant that I went on to play competitively in my sport at county and ultimately at national and international levels. My youth centre also taught me the benefits of collective and democratic practices and we had a very lively management committee of young people. It gave me many first time experiences including film making, financial management, outdoor education, political awareness and the general importance of good citizenship and camaraderie. It was a complement to my school education where I was fortunate enough to excel academically. So youth work involvement was by no means a substitute for me, it was a value added social and personal development service.

3 This youth centre where I had so many enjoyable and instructive experiences as a teenager is now due for closure as a result of local authority cuts. It still services a wide community and provides essential support for young people, yet it will disappear next year. There will be no replacement facilities.

4 When I went to university I was keen to retain involvement with youth work. I volunteered in a local youth centre for two evenings a week. I was working with a predominantly black community. My voluntary work was inspired by my positive feelings about my own involvement previously in a youth centre. My volunteering was sustained and only made possible by the active encouragement support and advice of the full and part time local authority funded staff who I worked with.

5 This youth centre where I had tremendous experiences as a volunteer supporting paid staff and young people in a variety of social history, identity and arts projects is now due for closure as a result of local authority cuts. It is located in one of the most deprived areas of Europe in a mainly black neighbourhood. There is absolutely no other form of provision for young people. This centre played an amazing role in ensuring community cohesion and solidarity even at the time of huge racial tensions and rioting in other parts of the country in the 1980s.

6 As I undertook postgraduate research at university I felt I would like to take on part time employment in youth work. I recognised that volunteering and being part of a mixed team of volunteers was an enjoyable thing, but I felt that if I was to make a real impact with young people and learn how to support them and informally educate them more effectively I needed to step up a gear and get training and get on the rung of professional development.

7 I became a part time worker in an area of multi ethnic tensions and huge adult animosity towards the youth population. My training by the local authority youth service was essential. I learnt how to plan informal education curricula and how to engage with young people more effectively and how to support and direct and relate to them in a way that was not teaching or social work. I learnt how to project youth work within a wider community context. The success of the youth work relationship as with all the youth work I had been involved with was that it was chosen by the young people. They did not have to engage with us as part time paid youth workers. Our work noticeably raised the self esteem and skills of young people who at that time felt hopeless and without a future and subject to unfair treatment in the community. We formed together some of the first sporting and arts projects in that area and took young people from the community on many occasions for their first experiences beyond the horizons of their local estate.

8 This youth centre where I had this invaluable part time paid employment and where our activities demonstrably reduced crime and self harming and drug abuse in the community is due for closure because of local authority cuts in March 2011. There is no other building for young people in the area and no other outreach projects to calm tensions and create positive activities in what still is a tense area.

9 Upon completion of my academic research I had a choice to make whether to go into higher education further or to choose a career in youth and community work. I chose the latter because I loved it and believed that it had a really cost effective and powerful transformative effective on groups and individuals.

10 I secured a position as head of a local authority youth and community centre which catered for all age ranges within a lifelong learning education service in an inner city area. My job was to manage the multipurpose uses of the centre by dozens of voluntary organisations, to support youth groups and community associations and encourage volunteers to manage community facilities, representational groups and programmes. This was an area of high unemployment and the encouragement and retention of volunteers was a challenge. Nevertheless it was achieved. During this period I felt that I should obtain the full JNC Qualification for youth and community workers. My local authority sponsored me to undertake this training on a part time basis. The training was an essential boost to my practice and open my eyes to the full complexity of personal and social education techniques which lie at the heart of youth work.

11 This youth and community centre where I worked is now closed because of local authority cuts. The volunteers have disappeared, the many local residents groups we formed from luncheon clubs for the elderly to youth clubs, to mums and toddlers groups and oral history associations have all gone. Crime rates in the area have soured again.

12 The youth services I was part of were regularly inspected by Ofsted HMI. We were proud to respond to a professional dedicated inspection service. This close scrutiny was vital for child protection ad safeguarding reasons and to motivate improvements in delivery and practice. No such respected inspection regime appears to exist today. Dedicated youth work inspection should be restored.

13 The JNC qualification course which I enjoyed has also now closed. The discriminatory funding regime for youth and community courses meant that the University did not consider the course economic in the new environment. In addition the local authority that sponsored me to get vocational qualifications no longer sponsors staff in this way due to cuts..

14 JNC qualification training courses are a model of good practice as far as I am concerned. Like myself most entrants onto the courses were only selected because of their demonstrable commitment and voluntary and part time paid commitment to youth work in their communities. Unlike myself most were non traditional entrants into higher education. The youth and community profession had, despite its low HE funding base, managed to get lots of non traditional students onto high quality courses and support them through intense practice based and theoretical learning.

15 Upon qualification under JNC I was subject to a salary increase, this was not resented by the community but appreciated as a symbol of the importance of the youth and community work we did. While youth workers are equivalent to school teachers in a different educational context, their salary levels have since the mid seventies when full comparability was reached, been significantly lower. They can access the teachers’ pension scheme but not teachers’ salaries. A move under JNC to such equivalent salaries is highly desirable and hardly a costly matter.

16 In 1987 I had the honour of being first elected to the main national leadership position for youth workers throughout the UK and Ireland. I have been elected to that position subsequently and have spent the last twenty three years working with youth workers to enhance their status and position, defend their services, improve the professional qualifications, comment on youth policies and examine all aspects of the youth service and advocate for its expansion. I have been a member of the JNC national bargaining committee since 1986 and since 1991 have been regularly involved in the validation of training courses and the development of youth services at home and overseas. I have advised the lead professionals in several countries on the formation of their first youth services. The UK Youth Service has been highly regarded internationally and our overseas counterparts are now looking in amazement as they see it collapse. I have been closely involved with all aspects of professional formation and development. I have also written widely on the development of youth work and youth services in Britain.

17 I have been involved since 1991 with the discussions about the statutory basis of youth work. I tested the inadequacy of the prevailing 1944 Act provisions in 1991 in the High Court. From this experience work was then was undertaken in England and Wales to secure the position of youth services more fully in statute. I believe that the provisions of Extending Entitlement in Wales and the Education and Inspections Act in England are now being systematically broken by most local authorities and the Minister should intervene. The Education Select Committee should consider whether it is legal for a local authority to disestablish its youth service as many are now proposing with no alternative provision whatsoever.

18 Historically local authorities failed to invest the funds that governments allocated to them for the Youth Service on the Youth Service. Despite new legislation these funds are now being not just eroded but removed altogether. There needs to be core national funding to enable sufficient provision in each local authority area. The benchmarks for this are contained in the Resourcing Excellent Youth Services document and I urge the committee to review these as a matter of urgency. The Youth Service will be the first public service to disappear unless urgent and immediate measures are taken to create a national service with benchmark levels of provision in each area.

19 In this context it will be clear that the development of the Youth Service since Albemarle, while being one of incremental progression, did also lead to consensus around standards and structures and resources. These were based on an important principle that there should be a service for young people that they choose to use on their own terms that is equally available in Cardiff and Cornwall, Colchester and Crewe. The Youth Service gave us the notion that there was a social right to education beyond the classroom, to access to skilled youth workers who could make a difference, listen and talk with and respect young people as no other groups did. The governmental statements in all UK jurisdictions commit themselves to this and see youth work as an educational practice.

20 The uneven levels of provision throughout the country meant that we had a growing aspiration of a universal entitlement to young people to find a voice, a place of support and comfort, health and well being, free association and fun. The door of the youth service was just about open in most parts of the country and the entire youth population could choose whether or not to enter.

21 However, if we survey the Youth Service now we can no longer say nationally there is a universal service. The extreme unevenness of provision has taken us back to the pre Albemarle period. There is a total post code lottery in provision.

22 But worse than this. In England the development of Integrated Youth Support Services and a tendency towards commissioning of services has led to pressures that have diminished the capacity of youth workers to promote universal educational out of school time services. Whole youth work management teams and youth services have been dismantled. In the formation of IYSS Services there was a resource bias towards safeguarding and casework, and various forms of targeting. As economic circumstances for young people worsened and unemployment rates soared a ridiculous vicious circle developed whereby services pretended they were effectively targeting, while their demolition of universal youth work provisions meant that in fact they were merely patching over more serious long term cracks than previously. An ideological drive, led by much of the preposterous work of he Children’s Workforce Development Council tried to water down specialist professional interventions under the false premise that a generically trained worker could be a social worker one minute, youth worker the next, and welfare officer the next. The huge public investment in many of the ill considered schemes of the CWDC was a flagrant waste of money. If the youth service had been given a quarter of this a real difference could have been made. There needs to be some direct investment in youth work workforce development.

23 The nature of the youth service offer is that it is in the preventative end of the spectrum and ample evidence exists to prove its very high cost effectiveness and its ability to prevent expenditure by other government departments. This is why youth service cuts are amongst the most foolhardy false economies in the current spending round and why they must be reversed by a special programme of investment. The most appalling insult to youth services has been the development of the National Citizens’ Service. As £300m starts to disappear in the 365 day a year youth service, suddenly £370 m emerges to fund summer schemes. What is more these huge resources are being allocated to organisations with no track record in youth work, no professional infrastructure and no health and safety capacity. I am entirely confident that were these funds allocated to a national infrastructure of a Youth Service they would generate at the very least ten times that amount in saved expenditure elsewhere, volunteering and year round safeguarding and opportunities for young people.

24 Much policy making recently in relation to the Youth Service has been prejudiced against its local authority location. The effect of this both in resource and political terms is that there will be no meaningful local authority youth service in England to speak of by the end of 2011. There will be a resistance to ring fencing funds through local authorities for a youth service. Commissioning out and the formation of mutuals will be a flagrant waste of money. There therefore needs to be an emergency national programme, a modern Albemarle, to form Youth Service in each local authority area combining all the structures of professional youth work in former local authority and voluntary sector organisations to deliver a properly inspected, education based accountable Youth Service.

25 Over recent years we have worked hard to increase the Youth and Community Student intake, there are now around 3,000 youth and community students and their qualification level has increased to a degree level. There should be a guarantee of a job in a National Youth Service for these students and there should be a labour market plan to marry supply and demand more effectively to a ratio of one full time qualified youth worker to every 400 young people. It is imperative that Parliament gives protection of title to JNC qualified youth workers as part of wider safeguarding concerns and in order to demonstrate a commitment to standards.

26 Youth work’s own development as a profession has been subject to what is now termed Big Society. For example the main validation bodies which approve of the national qualifications run almost entirely on voluntary effort and the JNC Committee which approves of standards and negotiates terms and conditions operates similarly. In addition the Academic Benchmarks and Occupational Standards for youth work were established by voluntary, professional commitment. Thousands of youth workers give voluntary time to supervise student placements. All of these voluntary efforts are now under severe strain as financial pressure effect even the small core funding streams which make such voluntary effort and professional standards possible. There is great disappointment that our Sector Skills Council Lifelong Learning UK which is the custodian of our occupational standards has not been relicensed. The Select Committee should seek clarification on who will now be the custodian of our occupational standards and specific youth work inspections.

27 I have remarked on the relative under-funding of youth work training. This is now being worsened with the removal of even Band C funding from youth and community courses. This will reduce the money to each university for its youth and community students. Given the non traditional entry route of youth and community students, the heavy reliance of fieldwork placements on their courses and the overall demanding requirements of their courses this will be a significant blow and already some courses are considering closure. This destroys the whole big society ethos and meaning in this sector. There needs to be a special enhancement of youth and community course funding.

28 The committee should carefully note the fact that there are two elements of youth and community raining of particular importance now. Firstly, youth and community workers are trained in interagency work and how to bring community partners together and sustain volunteers. This is a vital function in community cohesion. Secondly, youth and community workers are taught to fund raise. Most local authority youth services and voluntary organisations augment their main funding streams successfully through the work of youth and community workers to raise additional funding from a variety of sources. This added value is disappearing fast each day as so many redundancies begin to bite.

29 At all levels, professional development, qualification training, resourcing, infrastructure, skills development, inspection, specialist delivery, universal and targeted support, the Youth Service now faces absolute decline. The post war period of fifty years of growth and development and success since Albemarle is being torn apart. There is no mandate for this and no coherent youth policy from the government to do anything about it. The Youth Service is not just withering on the vine but being uprooted as a service providing a powerful and popular broad spectrum of services to young people. We need to urgently arrest decline and build a new service for young people between the ages of 13-25. Youth work originated in the positive faith hope and charity work of churches, philanthropists, trade unionists and political parties in the nineteenth century. It is now being thrown on the scrapheap. There are no positive measures to replace provision with mutuals and social enterprises. There is no great boost to the voluntary sector projects that have for so long done so much with so little with such passion. This is the first government I have been aware of that has absolutely no plan for the youth service other than its disappearance. It is therefore vital that this enquiry leads to urgent protection and a rebirth of a new national youth service. This needs to be done on the full recognition that this is the most cost effective public service akin to the strategic benefit achieved by investments in early years.

December 2010