Having attended all three ministerial conferences between 1989 and 1992, which forged the last youth work curriculum for England (and contributed to the one in Wales), I looked forward with anticipation when I saw that the National Youth Agency (NYA) had, after 30 years, produced a new version (‘NYA launches new national youth work curriculum’, cypnow.co.uk, 30 September). Regrettably, it is a bit of a curate’s egg – great in parts, but sadly deficient in others.
It is emphatic that youth work is “a form of education” which, as the seven-volume History of Youth Work in Europe goes to some lengths to explain, is not how youth work has often been perceived or executed. The document invokes stale and blurred definitions of informal and non-formal education – and, worse, it shifts to the term “learning”, though that is what it should have used in the first place.
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