Youth work must avoid being a slave to the policy machine

We all know about the parlous state of youth work throughout the UK, even though the story is rather different in its constituent parts.

We also know that youth work has always evolved over time to address different issues and respond to different concerns. Yet, increasingly over recent months, as I have attended so-called youth work meetings, read tender documents concerned with youth work and considered various funding and award applications for youth work projects and programmes, I have become first flabbergasted, and then deeply concerned, at the extent to which so many alleged protagonists for youth work have uncritically absorbed and regurgitated the contemporary jargon of intervention, prevention and engagement or re-engagement - to the point where "young people" themselves had become almost invisible in the narrative and the process.