The National Youth Agency: Comment - Youth work and health: we know it makes sense

When I was leaving there were about 20 of the staff, mostly young women, standing outside having a cigarette. Given the contradictions and challenges, it is no surprise to hear from Ofsted that local authorities and their partners are still struggling to get to grips with "a number of intractable problems" in the youth health agenda.

This is deep and entrenched territory, with success hard fought but not guaranteed; we know, for example, that teenage pregnancy rates are clearly declining (let's keep remembering and celebrating that), but we also know there is significant variation across the country, both good and, well, not so good. This same Ofsted report, based on the annual performance assessments of 137 councils across England, goes on to tell us that "strategies to address substance misuse, obesity and smoking are not widely effective".

This is bad news for young people, and for those who care about their health and their futures, and who see that these are minutely interlinked. Worse news if you consider that, despite heavily increased resources invested in health over the last decade, the report concludes that "there is still insufficient focus on preventative strategies". So - while more cash will always help, it is not the only critique that has value in the adolescent health arena. Can we use what we have to better effect then? The Ofsted message is helpful here also, and massively important to the non-formal education workforce out there. It says that "some agencies do not fully understand their role in working alongside other professionals in preventing problems from occurring in the first place" and that "the full impact of education programmes has yet to be realised".

And that's why The National Youth Agency has been busy deepening and developing its work with partners in the health field - Brook, FPA, DrugScope for example and, perhaps most importantly, the Department of Health - to bring youth work approaches and techniques to bear on these same "intractable issues" and enable that full educational impact to be fully realised among a range of other professionals.

Central to that push is the release this month of the Good Practice Guidelines for Healthy Youth Work (see main story opposite), a tool that helps define just what and how youth support services might do with their partners to make that vital difference in terms of sexual and mental health, substance use and healthier lifestyles. The guidelines have been forged out of the experiences and good practice of more than 30 participating projects and 100 staff in the past two years; they are practice based, multi-agency linked and test driven in real life across voluntary and statutory sectors, working with the full spectrum of health and wellbeing.

The guidelines are, in short, a bottom-up approach, and the real deal. We think these will satisfy your needs, and you should not accept substitutes, many of which are not based on a robust knowledge of good youth work, or an understanding of everyday youth work reality and what really works. Getting this right is critical if we are to achieve what is perhaps the most fundamental of the famous five Every Child Matters outcomes.

What's also clear is that this version of the guidelines will continue to change and get better as we work with and learn from local services (like Middlesbrough and Coventry, to name but two) and as successful practitioners keep improving the case for non-formal education as a vital ingredient in the local health offer. Go on, take a leap and sign up for them - you know it makes sense.

Fiona Blacke is chief executive at The National Youth Agency. She can be contacted at fionab@nya.org.uk.