Weed out the poor youth workers

From Resourcing Excellent Youth Services in 2002 with its clear targets and standards for a sufficient youth service to the Youth Matters green paper in 2005, which shifted the emphasis to targeting services at the young people who needed them the most, through to Aiming High for Young People, which placed the focus on providing high-quality activities for young people outside of school.

Throughout all these changes little progress has been made in one area: the quality of youth work staff. Despite efforts made by organisations such as Lifelong Learning UK and the Children's Workforce Development Council to raise youth workforce standards, a very considerable gap between the best and worst performing staff remains. As a result, it is possible to have exciting, innovative youth projects where young people want to spend their leisure time and achieve, while also having some youth provision that is failing badly.