Analysis

The decline of open-access youth work and how to turn it around

6 mins read Youth Work
Academic’s book charts the continued decline of open-access youth work over the past five years and concludes that positive moves could be undermined by a shortage of staff and focus on targeted services.
Open youth work’s capacity for responding to young people’s needs has been damaged by major cuts to councils’ youth service budgets - ДОВИДОВИЧ МИХАИЛ/ADOBE STOCK

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.

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