Weekend working comes at a price

I'm always incredulous about such a position, and the same view applies to youth workers who somehow believe that weekends are sacrosanct. Now the debate about weekend working has fired up again, with a range of statements from senior professionals and in political quarters asserting that youth workers should be doing more work on the weekends.

The counter-arguments then immediately kick in, concerning the nature of the working week, appropriate time off in lieu, and ensuring suitable staffing levels. Doug Nicholls, general secretary of the Community and Youth Workers' Union, who is never short of a crisp and telling phrase, notes (quite rightly) that employers have often expected "too much, from too few, for too little".

Notwithstanding the twist on familiar Churchillian rhetoric, Nicholls makes a very important point. The other point to be made is what kind of provision there needs to be, assuming that staffing levels and commitment can be agreed. This is the essential ingredient of the debate, not whether or not weekend working should take place. I grew up believing that youth workers were exactly the people who worked when other people did not: in the evenings and on the weekends. That was when youth clubs were open and trips took place. As a practitioner, for more than 25 years I did more than 100 residential weekends, many in remote rural areas but some on exchanges with other city youth projects. It doesn't take a mathematician to work out that the average was four a year, but sometimes I did almost one a month. There were also events such as raft races and night operations that took up the whole of a weekend.

I can still feel the sense of overwhelming fatigue on Sunday evenings when everything had been done - safely, soundly and, hopefully, successfully. Young people would have got home at least a couple of hours earlier, but I would have still had paperwork to check, a centre to shut, colleagues to drop off and a minibus to return. And I would have started on the Friday morning, checking the paperwork, picking up the minibus, and packing my own kit before the agreed rendezvous with colleagues and young people.

If youth workers are to do more weekend working, something has to give. A full weekend can amount to a de facto working week. Let us assume that youth workers buckle down to this new demand. I can imagine that the next concerns will be that nothing is open on weekday evenings, a lack of attendance at inter-agency meetings, or insufficient compliance with bureaucratic expectations. Those who don't do face-to-face work with young people have to get real: youth workers can't do everything. We have to determine our priorities and then put our money where our mouths are.

Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan.