Chop the managers and risk decapitating the youth service

The injunction of this government to local authorities and other public service providers to cut ‘back office functions’, bureaucrats and managers is at best naïve and disingenuous and at worst malicious and irresponsible. While jobsworths exist in most organisations and unhelpful divides sometimes open up between fieldwork staff and their managers, who are sometimes seen as needlessly interfering and obstructive, the frontline needs back up. To strip it away is to deprive public services, including those for young people, of what they need to ensure reach, impact and quality.

We know about the decimation of services caused by these damaging cuts. We know the frontline is not spared. But even if it is, or if some skeletal provision is still on offer in neighbourhoods and communities, it imposes huge strain on those who are left to stand and deliver.

Working with young people can be extremely challenging and on occasions dangerous. It can be complex, unpredictable and easily take us beyond our comfort zone where reliance on proven methods and approaches may no longer be viable. It requires of workers the same levels of resilience, resourcefulness and resolve that they try to encourage in young people. There are inevitably setbacks, putdowns and screw-ups from which recovery is essential. If we have a fall, we must get back in the saddle. If we fail to clear an obstacle, we must step back so we can jump higher next time.

At the very least, frontline workers need support and supervision; and opportunities to develop new skills, knowledge and insights. Services need quality frameworks so they can improve. We know that when resources are stretched, two of the early casualties tend are quality assurance and professional training and development. Investment in the workforce - or what remains of it - is diminished.

It has always been important to give frontline workers the opportunity to stand back and reflect on their practice; on the timeliness and appropriateness of their interventions; or their repertoire of skills and knowledge and how it might be developed; and to draw on the experience of someone well versed in the practice. It has also been a hallmark of good services to build a team of professionals and a community of practice; to share a common language and understanding forged out of sound values and methods; to create the social capital that provides the glue that binds otherwise fragile communities; and to develop specialist skills such as group work.

The best services are led by those who seek to discover which interventions work best with which groups of young people under which circumstances; who seek to know the kinds of conditions that foster the motivation of young people to be their best; and use this knowledge as a basis for creating a quality framework. This can then be applied to the process of observation and review, when youth workers are visited ‘in situ’ and take part in professional conversations that inspire them to enhance their practice.

Can all this support and supervision, professional development, quality improvement be done without leaders and managers? Without it, can we develop the professional knowledge and skills that comprise a relevant response to the contemporary needs and aspirations of young people?

If we cut the managers, there is a serious danger that we lose professional memory and not just the expertise accumulated through decades of experience. We lose the memory of how the organisation works; how to get things done; and who to influence. Decapitation also places in jeopardy a sense of professional service, of people bound together by shared vision, principles and ethical standards.

It is galling to watch youth services left so lamentably undefended. It is like watching a car crash in slow motion. Is it not deeply ironic that while leaders and managers oversee the contraction of their services and themselves receive their marching orders what remains becomes absorbed into something known as ‘prevention’? We know what these initiatives are designed to prevent and certainly we would subscribe to services that keep young people out of harm’s way and hopefully on the road to somewhere. But does it not invoke a negative mind-set, encouraging us to stop things not encourage them? We want youth work to remain a profession that can look young people’s lived experience in the eye and speak to it and of it with a strong and clear voice. There is something strangely Orwellian in workers who are dedicated and professionally trained to promote young people’s personal and social education are brigaded under a service called ‘prevention’ where the impulse is to apply surveillance and control and to see young people more as a problem to be managed than a resource to be developed.

We are living through a period of unprecedented high levels of youth unemployment. Politicians ritually play pass the parcel or the blame game. The last time levels of youth unemployment were so high, the economy was in less dire straits. In 1997 New Labour set about trying to remedy the problem by establishing firstly the New Deal, then the New Start, the Learning Gateway and Connexions. Here today and gone tomorrow, as new governments all appear to become infected with the "not invented here" syndrome. In ministerial eyes, the past is a land of failed policies.

But in the late 90s and early years of the past decade there was a viable – indeed one might say a vibrant – youth sector, an array of services and partnerships, ready to take up the challenge of reaching out to the disaffected and marginalised and bring them back into the mainstream. Now that has either gone or is going to be replaced by the Big Society and the National Citizens Service.

The crisis facing youth work demands different kinds of responses. Here are just four:

• Campaigns and direct action to raise public awareness and try to reverse short-sighted political decisions
• Research into the effects of these draconian cuts on the life chances of young people and their communities;
  different forms of organisation of services for young people that keep youth work as a principal method of working
  different types of investment that we might need to explore if the public revenue tap is turned off
• Investment from the state and other sources  - charitable trusts, new philanthropy, private equity — in what is left of the workforce to ensure that the core skills of effective youth work are not lost and that there are some ready to pick up the pieces when the economy recovers and we can build decent public services once more.
• And forums where those with policy memory can engage in discourse with those who may not have it; so we can learn lessons and apply them and ensure that the guttering flame is not put out

 
Bryan Merton is a consultant and former youth work inspector