It's a culture clash, but youth work in schools can work

How should youth work connect with formal education? That is the subject of an independent commission formed by the National Youth Agency, although I wonder whether it will come up with any useful answers. Youth work can, might, should or could do many things in relation to formal education.

During the Blair government, the then Welsh secretary Peter Hain announced a significant grant for the Wales Youth Agency to experiment with different models around the relationship between youth work and schools. It was called the Youth Work and Schools Partnership Programme. Over three years and across all 22 Welsh local authorities, a host of approaches were tried, tested and tweaked.

There were many challenges. Setting the agenda and the approach often got bogged down as youth workers questioned the values, priorities and procedures of the schools, and head teachers demanded to be in control. Some youth workers were embedded in the school, physically present, while others worked off campus with excluded young people considered to be in the last chance saloon.

Those inside schools sometimes still operated in both imposed and self-imposed isolation – operating, for example, lunchtime sessions and special projects – whereas others worked closely alongside classroom teachers in creative and purposeful curriculum delivery.

The issues that emerged were legion. The informality of youth work often clashed with the formality of school. There were always questions around how the youth work contribution should relate to the wider regulations of the school: what should it do when young people showed up wearing baseball caps back to front, used bad language, not wearing school ties or slipped off for a sly cigarette? And schools had many, very different, reasons for choosing to engage with youth work.

Some seemed to want youth work to support young people in returning to mainstream learning, or to assist young people in more motivated engagement with that learning. Others seemed more eager to dump their more challenging young people on the youth workers and wash their hands of them. 

Schools had to be cautious about seeming to invest disproportionately in the difficult kids, especially if the youth work input involved outdoor activities that were not available to other young people. Teachers could become resentful of a professional and financial commitment to those young people they considered to be the most troublesome, when they were continuing to struggle along with the “ordinary kids”.

Ultimately, in any discussion of the relationships between schools and youth work, the core question is the balance to be struck between responding to demands and needs for formal educational achievement and the desire to support young people’s non-formal learning and personal development. One of the original partnerships, constructed on an alternative curriculum platform, was sustained for years afterwards by a progressive head teacher. I was its “critical friend” for five years.

Our objective was in line with the recommendation of a parliamentary select committee at the time: to keep young people as close to learning as possible. That meant formal learning – real, credible qualifications that had some meaning and currency with local employers. But it did not mean forsaking non-formal learning, because that was an important stepping stone, as well as incentive, for the young people concerned. At the start, those young people were destined to leave school with no GCSEs.

By the end, six or seven out of 10 were getting five GCSEs, albeit with modest grades. But they were still getting maths, English and information technology, topped up with physical education and art, which had initially been more the “bribes” to get them turning up.

The framework revolved around attendance, attitude and attainment, moving along a continuum from predominantly youth work engagement and relationships to approaches more prevalent in mainstream schooling. This required real partnership between youth workers, literacy and numeracy tutors, and the school’s teachers. Sadly, the programme was eventually abandoned when the head retired and the costs had become prohibitive to fund solely from the school budget.

Although it was never an easy set-up, over time it was made to work, and more and more participating young people came out the better for it – with both certified achievements and a stronger sense of themselves and where they hoped to go in their lives.   

Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan