Letters

While I totally agree with the need to protect and support open access youth work, I actually find quite a lot to be positive about the fact that youth workers are being deployed and applying their skills to other roles in the social care field (Councils redeploy youth workers to social care roles, warns report, cypnow.co.uk, 12 January).

Many of us have been making the case for some time now about the importance of youth work in early intervention and this feels like it could be a step in that direction. Many of the critical challenges that young people face - a lack of joined-up services, professionals in other fields without the necessary skills or empathy to understand young people's needs - could genuinely be addressed by deploying trained, high-quality youth workers into other roles. Indeed, the NYA report acknowledges that councils do "recognise the value of professional youth work" in making decisions to redeploy.