Services for Young People

Supplementary memorandum submitted by Graeme Tiffany on behalf of The Federation for Detached Youth Work

I viewed with interest the proceedings of the Inquiry into services for young people on the 26th of January 2011. Please allow me to make a few comments:

·        There can be little doubt that universal youth services act in a preventative way and that they head off the need for targeted, more expensive, services. This can be described as Targeting through Universalism (Tiffany, 2007), in which, for example, street-based youth workers or those working with Looked After Children, can identify which young people will benefit from further support and can give it without stigmatisation.

·        It is a good question to ask to what extent universal services actually do work with the most marginalised. Many do not but this is why the Youth Service is and needs to be a broad church, with low threshold, street-based services as part of the mix.

·        The committee should ask deeper questions about social disengagement; doubtless they will find many drivers outside the control of the youth service, which is why it is a bit rich to suggest the Youth Service should be accountable, almost in it entirety, for NEETs etc. You will find that many of the experiences young people have are not inclusive and provoke disengagement. It is not a coincidence that many young people disengaged from school are involved in youth services. They embrace whole-heartedly the more inclusive pedagogies deprived of them at school. My own view is that the school of the future will draw much more heavily on informal, non-formal and community education pedagogies, and will be all the better for it (more inclusive and effective in its mission).

·        Following on, the NCS is welcomed by youth workers. But we have reasonable concerns about its accessibility and have confidence in arguing that some young people will need support both before and after their NCS experience if they are to get the best out of it. This is why my colleagues made a case for the NCS to be built on existing services.

·        Concern for social mixing, much needed in the context of polarised institutions and communities (and likely to be exacerbated through school choice and the degradation of an historical commitment to the Common School) is a related issue. Rather than ‘driving a wedge’ (Youth Crime Action Plan) between pro and anti-social peers youth work seeks to employ the former as a positive influence on the latter. Hence, the need for training in, amongst other things, group work methodologies. This emphasis on pro-social interventions needs to be seen in sharp contrast to the degradation of community caused by a surfeit of interventions such as the (now thankfully discredited) ASBO and Curfews that were part of a social policy agenda that had all the hallmarks of being anti-social itself. Academics from the world of geography have provided powerful evidence to this effect. One of the significant contributions youth work makes it to organise experiences for young people with others who are different from themselves. In this sense it perhaps makes a more profound contribution to social cohesion that many formal institutions.

·        The sticking point is invariably who the youth service is for. Politicians and policy makers have an ear for resources benefiting those who most need them. And so they should. But in explaining youth work we are at pains to resist talking up the ‘problem of youth’. As Fiona Blacke says, this is a deliberate educational process. Which is why we always try to articulate and promote it in positive terms (and fear a problematising narrative accordingly).

·        In the same vein, it becomes attractive to talk about getting young people off the street. I shall be having words with my colleagues for intimating that this is what youth work does! Those, like myself, who work in the context of the street argue strongly that many of the more negative behaviours we witness in young people are a direct result of their criminalisation for being in the street. We seek a more enlightened dialogue about how the state sees the street and its potential for being a positive place of learning; something that would happen if we adults took our responsibility for the socialisation of all our children more seriously. The effective personal and social education of young people necessitates learning in spaces other than the home and the school (where they are invariably subject to control and have limited opportunities to learn through their guided experience of autonomy and democracy – which strikes me as as good a definition of youth work as you could have).

·        Financing of youth services is problematic and desperately in need of a more enlightened approach. The pre-scription of outcomes, although advanced, (if it continues) could see youth work being youth work only in name. The very reason it is accessible, inclusive and of interest to young people (especially those marginalised) is that it negotiates with young people what these outcomes might be and is prepared to take the risk of  commitment to an uncertain process (which is essential if it is to be democratic). The continued pre-scription of outcomes and some aspects of payment by results appear not to be able to see the wood for the trees. Which is why relevance to young people informs youth work to the nth degree; the work is young person-centred, unlike school, for a jolly good reason. And yet this appreciation of what is relevant to young people enables us to cultivate interest and engagement in the things they might not have considered relevant when we first work with them (such as learning about healthy behaviours etc.). Many a teacher could benefit form this kind of approach. Pedagogically we see our roles as supporting inquiry into their wants (expressed needs). Through dialogue we can negotiate an agreed series of more substantive needs to be worked toward. But dialogue means we must, as youth workers, put ourselves in the position of being co-learners in this process and responsive to what young people say. Which is precisely why oppressive levels of pre-scription can really mess things up. We say, ‘outcomes are what comes out’.

·        Awareness is needed of the relationship between schools and youth services; there are times when the provision of ‘alternative curriculum’ programmes represents a hole in the ground for schools to despatch their ‘unteachables’. Which is why I would take issue with the evidence given of "managed moves" {from school). What is this if not exclusion? The progressive agenda is in many senses a merger of non-formal and formal educational experiences thereby retaining young people in school.

·        Competitive commissioning regimes add to the mix and lead to, at best, ‘weakly collaborative partnerships’ (findings of the Nuffield Review). Which is ironic when we all know strong partnerships help young people the most. Let us be very clear that regular changes in contracting arrangements always cause disruption and fracture the very relationships on which all good youth work is predicated.

·        A model in which professionally trained workers are sidelined also risks being a false economy. Each one plays a powerful role in catalysing, developing and supporting volunteerism in the community. They are the backbone of any Big Society.

·        Funding directed at those projects that can show higher levels of young person involvement and participation might, like so much in youth work since a pre-scribed outcomes culture came to it, be profoundly counter-productive. From the now fabled ‘bus journey certificate’ to street workers targeting easier young people to work with because of oppressive targets (see Tiffany, 2009, ‘The Pistachio Effect’ – in which the social exclusion of the most marginalised is exacerbated by workers engaging those easier to work with) performativity is rife. The danger is setting these parameters for funding will see services cherry pick the most articulate and, as a consequence, take their eye off those for whom a developmental process (with higher order participation as an aim) is needed. These young people need to learn the skills of participation through the experience of it. A further irony is that where more confident young people are involved in decision-making systems they will be making pronouncements on the lives of others of whom they have little or no experience. It is these young people we need to get into decision-making systems; and it is then that we get services meeting their needs. The economic benefits of this are obvious; where service actually meet needs money is well spent. Different methodologies, such as Community Philosophy, are needed, rather than the councils and parliaments that they judge are alien to them.

·        Of course youth work needs statistical data but, as was said in the inquiry, this takes investment, not least giving part-time workers the time to record (and hopefully reflect on) their practice. As was said by a committee member, there is the ‘danger of drowning in a sea of measurement’.

·        Of course youth workers recognise that they need to demonstrate and give evidence of impact. But to avoid youth work becoming formalised to such a degree that it ceases to become youth work we must invest in the development of evaluation systems that are sympathetic to its pedagogies. Without this the work will inevitably fall foul of a shift toward more instrumentalised interventions, thereby depriving many young people of perhaps their only experience of learning in a democratic framework and alienating many at the same time (especially those marginalised). Talk of best practice has a similar tyrannical ring. If youth work is to do what it says on the tin we need a system devoted to good local practice. It is what works there and for those young people that really works. Any standardisation of intervention is doomed to dissuade many from engagement with it. As one of the witnesses said, ‘there is no universal matrix’; nor can there be in youth work. The litmus test is always ‘does the young person benefit?’; which is why they have to be at the heart of evaluation processes. Descriptive accounts are the basis of this; only they are able to capture the subtlety of good youth work. Young people have shown they are only too happy to be involved in this process and that they learn through so-doing. There are several academic institutions who are working on these social impact tools (a number quoted at committee). They must be further explored and disseminated. Sometimes I think of youth workers as being a bit like vicars; how could you judge if a vicar was doing a good job without asking their parishioners?

·        Finally, Fiona Blacke quoted an executive of PWC who had experienced first hand the work of detached youth workers in Leeds. I am a director of that organisation and I interviewed him. I contributed his testimony as part of a submission from the Federation for Detached Youth Work. I would urge you to read our expanded report and, in particular, that interview. It speak volumes about the importance of promoting a wider understanding of what youth work is and how it can be accountable for the investment in it.

·        Please do not hesitate to contact me, particularly about detached and street-based youth work which, by definition, aims at supporting the marginalised young people and those who, for a variety of reasons, are not accessing wider opportunities in the youth service – a concern for which I recognise in the questioning of the committee.

January 2011