Labour Conference: Youth framework 'a mess', says Morris
Alison Bennett
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
The youth sector workforce infrastructure is "a mess", former education secretary Estelle Morris claimed this week.
Speaking at a Labour conference breakfast meeting co-hosted by CYP Now, Morris said the infrastructure and current qualifications framework are not up to scratch when compared with the education framework.
"Infrastructure is a mess," said Morris, who is president of the National Children's Bureau. "It has been fiddled about with so much. When working with schools, we knew what the structure was and how many kids go through it and had a huge trained workforce. None of these are true for this sector."
Morris warned that getting the infrastructure right was only a preliminary step in ensuring the youth offer was high quality. She said the 10-year youth strategy was "a really good opportunity" but raised concerns that it may not be as effective as hoped if change wasn't handled sensitively. She added that when implementing the strategy it was important to remember youth work is not a new concept.
"There are people thinking they know how to do it anyway and will refuse change," she said. "There will also be a lot of people thinking it's new."
Fellow speaker Viv McKee, director of policy and development at The National Youth Agency (NYA), backed Morris's views. She said youth work should be professionally recognised with qualifications in a similar way to teachers and thought it detrimental that anyone could claim to be a youth worker.
"We know that conversations between young people and youth workers are potentially going to stick with young people throughout their lives. We need to move to a graduate profession and get that body of skills and upskill young people themselves and volunteers to develop leadership and relationships," she said.
But Talha Ghannam, young trainer at The NYA, said any such qualifications would act as a barrier to young people wishing to enter the sector.
"That alienates the idea of getting young people to help young people," he said. "To me, this would be more effective but young people won't have those qualifications and older people will but they might be more disengaged."