Youth Work, Performativity and the New Youth Impact Agenda: Getting Paid For Numbers?

Author T. de St Croix

Published by Journal of Education Policy, 1-25 (2017)

The article is based upon research undertaken between early 2011 and late 2013, using in-depth semi-structured interviews and focus groups in different areas of England, as well as participant observation in two youth organisations in East London.

Impact ‘agenda' and austerity

The author traces the emergence of new public managerialism under the 1979-1997 Conservative governments, through to the creation of "Resourcing Excellent Youth Services" (REYS) policy under New Labour, to the claims made in 2011 by a House of Commons Education Committee that the youth sector was inadequately evidencing its outcomes. The author argues that a "youth impact agenda" has emerged where qualitative forms of research and evaluation have been "sidelined" by quantitative data-based approaches that normalise the idea that "outcomes" can be "proven", and hence monetised. Consequently, when combined with the politics of austerity, it is argued that understandings of "quality" have become intrinsically tied to value-for-money where "funding agencies reward organisations that are able and willing to measure their effectiveness in numerical and monetary terms".