Say “youth club” to most adults, including many politicians, and the images you’re likely to conjure up are of ping-pong tables and boxing rings, loud music and dancing teenagers – hardly high priorities for state policymakers and funders under pressure from a global pandemic and parents struggling to feed their children.
Open youth work
This was one key prompt for the sub-title of my book Youth Work Policies in England 2019-2023, Can Open Youth Work Survive? Another, justifying the label “open”, was this practice’s core assumption that young people will choose to engage – and, at any time, choose to leave. For negotiating such voluntary participation, its practitioners have to start, not from top-down definitions of “youth” and the statistical “measurement” of outcomes which policymakers often demand, but from how the young people they are actually meeting define their identities, their interests, their concerns – and their needs.
Also sitting uncomfortably within the current policymaking environment are other aspects of the practice’s defining features – such as its focus on how young people feel as well as what they know and can and do, and its commitment, both within the youth work setting itself and more widely within society, to help them tip balances of power in their favour. To have any chance of implementing youth work’s informal educational aspirations, therefore, youth workers in “open” settings have to negotiate the often complex inter-personal processes needed to build trusting relationships with these young people, both as individuals and within the peer groups which are often so important to them.
This practice has now been shown to have significant reach and value. In 2013, for example, the now defunct National Council for Voluntary Youth Services reported that one million eight- to 25-year-olds were using a youth club – facilities which by 2022 the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) was acknowledging were playing a “significant role” in the lives of an estimated 450,000 young people not known to other services. Research commissioned by UK Youth, also published that year, concluded that these had a “direct economic value” of £5.7bn and an indirect value of at least £3.2bn by improving health (including mental health), opening up employment and educational opportunities and reducing spending on criminal justice and antisocial behaviour.
This provision and its distinctive practice are now needed more than ever. The pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis have further exposed and exacerbated deep-rooted structural inequalities related to class, gender, race, disability and sexual identity which – though often labelled “disadvantages” by policymakers – have long affected this age group. With support services often failing to cope with huge extra demand, growing numbers in their teens are thus now struggling to attend school, find and keep a job, make ends meet and live independently while avoiding homelessness.
Open youth work’s capacity for responding, however, has been severely damaged by a £1bn austerity cut to councils’ youth service budgets since 2010. As a result, their average spend per young person has fallen from £136 to £54, 760 youth centres have closed, 4,500 youth work posts removed and 139,000 youth service places and at least 35,000 hours of “outreach work” lost. The number of students on youth and community work courses also fell, from 1,300 in 2010 to 432 in 2017.
Limited support
Some limited support to forms of youth work was offered over this period. The government’s statutory guidance to local authorities on their provision of “youth services” was reviewed; money for young people’s volunteering was increased; and during the Covid lockdowns youth work was recognised as “an essential service” and youth workers designated “key workers”.
A 2021 DCMS-led “youth review” aimed at setting “a clear direction for the out-of-school agenda” prompted a National Youth Guarantee focused particularly on using the money of a Youth Investment Fund to provide up to 300 new and refurbished “youth spaces and services for the country’s most left behind areas”.
However, following delays in its allocation and with its promised £560mn amounting to only just over half of that £1bn cut since 2010, this was judged by the YMCA in 2023 as hardly a “fitting replacement for [the lost] year-round youth services”.
At no point in this period did the government explicitly commit itself to fully reinstating those facilities. Indeed, in order to target high-profile “youth problems” such as antisocial behaviour, school absences and much reduced employment opportunities, it pursued a very different priority.
As the rationale for locating qualified youth workers in hospitals, schools, police stations and violence reduction units, with the support of some within the youth work sector, it broadened the conception of youth work. As a result, what limited state resources were available were often in effect diverted to settings which – with young people even perhaps required to attend – could be seriously at odds with those of open youth work.
Within what the government called its overall Civil Society Strategy, the voluntary youth sector also continued to evolve, including, while the Covid pandemic was at its height, by adopting forms of remote engagement with young people.
As well as traditional organisations such as UK Youth, the Scouts and Girlguiding taking new initiatives, newer ones made significant contributions. These included the National Citizen Service, though still open only to 16- and 17-year-olds, and OnSide – a charity first registered in 2008 which by 2023 had raised £118mn to open 18 youth zones across England.
These were offering “incredible spaces” where young people could “be safe, meet friends, get active…” Less clear was the nature of the youth work they provided for the 50,000 young people who, OnSide said, had by mid-2023 made 650,000 “visits” to the zones.
Strategic plan
The National Youth Agency was also highly proactive over these years. Within a “Strategic Plan” published in March 2020 focused on the organisation and delivery of youth work practice, in 2021 it set out a 10-Year Vision for Youth Work and – supported by 20 leading youth sector organisations – in 2023 published A Roadmap to a National Youth Strategy. It also carried out National Youth Sector Censuses; reported on the condition of vulnerable young people in the time of Covid; and sought to “enhance the skills of youth work practitioners” by setting up an online learning platform and offering regular youth work “tea breaks, supper clubs and regional roadshows”.
Most significant in the long run, however – especially given how many courses had closed during the austerity decade – was NYA’s role in reviewing, supporting and extending routes to youth work qualification. In 2019, its chief executive, Leigh Middleton, set out the NYA’s vision to “boost the number of youth work degrees, clear pathways for apprenticeships and open up career opportunities in youth work, from skilled volunteers to advanced professional training”.
By 2024, apprenticeships for support workers at Level 3 qualification level had been approved and, for those employed in a youth work setting for at least 30 hours a week, at degree Level 6. First announced in 2019 with £500,000 of government funding and extended over the following three years, a bursary programme was established for, initially, 400 youth support workers and volunteers who couldn’t afford to access approved Level 2 and 3 qualifications.
However, through personal involvement in recruiting youth workers for a new local youth club, backed up by feedback from colleagues in the field, suggests that projects are struggling to get applicants for paid posts. Many of those posts are thus now being filled by unqualified workers while, post-pandemic and as the cost-of-living crisis endures, there are also growing difficulties attracting volunteers. It is against this background that the NYA is now advocating that at least two full-time qualified youth workers and four youth support workers and assistants, supported by skilled volunteers, need to be recruited into each secondary school catchment area.
Where, then, does all this leave open youth work? If the two main parties’ 2024 General Election manifestos are any guide, the “survival” question posed in my book’s sub-title remains firmly on the agenda. The most the Conservatives were able to offer was a new version of compulsory national service for young people. And as well as promising £20mn to locate youth workers in hospital A&E units, Labour has recently reaffirmed its £95mn commitment to creating a network of “youth hubs” across England with a high-priority focus on reducing knife crime. The youth workers will be working alongside mental health workers, the police and youth offending teams.
Continuing commitment
With the new government’s financial priorities likely to mean another long period of austerity for public services, open youth work may thus need to prepare itself for another round of cuts. To head off this threat, in collaboration with young people and tapping into the continuing commitment of many of its front-line practitioners, the youth sector will need to campaign unapologetically for the distinctiveness of its open youth work practice.
Key, more specific, focuses will need to be countering the diversion of resources to “youth work” programmes which aren’t “open”; the full reinstatement of the lost “open” provision attended voluntarily by young people; and what the academics who contributed to the DCMS’s “youth review” called its “small-scale, flexible and locally determined…pop-up” facilities.
- Bernard Davies is a youth worker and author of Austerity,Youth Policy and the Deconstruction of the Youth Service in England and Youth Work Policies in England 2019-2023, Can Open Youth Work Survive? from https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-65636-1
