Youth cadets do not deserve to be placed in the line of fire

Proponents of old-school youth work sometimes still celebrate and advocate such a position, but arguably it has never existed. Youth work has always been attached to one agenda or another, beyond the idea of producing and providing an holistic, person-centred and young people-focused approach.

Historians of youth work point to child saving, health promotion, character building, crime prevention and cultural rescue as dominant frames within which youth work was, over a century and a half, supported and developed. Personal and social development may have remained the mantra in more recent times, but for at least 35 years, certainly since the ministerial conferences on the youth service from 1989 to 1992, youth work has been harnessed to wider policy objectives. Today, it might be the re-engagement of young people who are Neet. Then, the first minister to set out such expectations talked in terms of insisting on a "concentrated fusillade" and not a scattergun approach. The imagery is apposite, for one context in which these issues are particularly acute is in relation to the army cadets.