Doug Nicholls: Our National Youth Service

For every £1 invested in it, at least £8-worth of voluntary activity is generated. It organises about 500,000 committed adult volunteers to support it as well as 40,000 trained youth support workers and more than 7,000 fully professionally qualified youth workers. Their work generates hundreds of millions of hours of voluntary youth involvement each year.

This service is a partnership between the voluntary sector and local authorities. It is the one service working with young people that Ofsted has said is consistently improving. Funding agencies have consistently said youth workers’ relationship-building work to provide youngsters with personal and social education is highly cost-effective.

Empowering young people

Without our service there would be no UK Youth Parliament. Without it there would be no national infrastructure of young people’s centres. Without it there would be no supportive detached work contact on our streets. Without it, no really successful anti-gang work. It is responsible for initiatives as demanding as youth councils, through to building self-esteem and pride among those who have never experienced them. It is a service that has built tens of thousands of social action groups. It has empowered young people to express dignified civic voices. It has involved hundreds and thousands in creative and responsible community projects. It has helped heal bitterly divided communities.

Every day youth workers work to nurture hidden talents and make engaging work for idle hands. Through them, young people assert their rights and needs and innate goodness. We provide learning beyond the classroom. We motivate, challenge, entertain and open doors.

This established national service developed international exchange work as part of the reconciliation of post-war Europe. Youth workers remain often the only organisers of international travel and visits beyond the confines of local estates. Youth work was the first profession to call for inter-agency working at local level in teams respecting different specialisms. Hundreds of youth workers are currently overseas with groups of young people who have been fundraising to travel and expand their horizons over the summer months.

Youth work has for generations worked with young people on their own agendas and with young people’s concerns most in mind. This is an expression of the right of all young people to voluntarily engage in big society and take responsibility. It is a professional skill, taught in highly practice-based courses, that attract those with years of dedicated local voluntary work behind them, but who recognise that young people deserve trained practitioners working with them.

Youth work is a non-elitist profession with status and standing among those it serves. It combines great care for young people with great motivational skills. This is why a previous Conservative government set up pioneering and successful apprenticeship schemes targeted at marginalised individuals to qualify them to become skilled professionals. These professionals informally educate. They work with young people in their leisure time, but youth work is not a leisure activity. At heart, through fun and group development and individual attention, it creates a sense of worth, purpose, community and creativity and an ethical sense of action in a complex world. Youth work connects, challenges and changes. To do this you need to build long-term relationships through a publicly funded, sustained service.

Replacing permanent provision with temporary diversions

There is a place for recreational and diversionary activities in the summer months, especially in some real "hot spot" areas. But the problem with the recent announcement of summer citizenship placements is, like the rest of the big society agenda, they are replacing permanent provision. The amount spent on the pilots is equivalent to the cuts in the Youth Service in the five authorities I am dealing with at the moment. Overall, those five are cutting £200m this year from social services young people really need.

No one remembers short-term government gimmicks. Yet everyone who has been involved in the youth service remembers its impact. It is there for all young people to drop in and out of. Its offer is universal. It offers an infrastructure of support and engagement that can take a young person on a journey from active youth centre member, to volunteer youth worker, to paid part-time worker, to trainee, to full-time professional, to senior manager of a service.

All this is up for demolition. I have worked with Conservative councillors and Liberal Democrats recently who have given a lifetime of voluntary commitment within the youth service and on local youth management committees, who now see those structures being broken up, commissioned out, cut to pieces.

What is so painful is not the intention to give small groups of young people something to do in the summer, but the pulling apart of services that have been doing this for years. In many of our hardest-pressed communities, where a creative summer break would relieve problems and create opportunities for community cohesion, the traditional funding sources for summer activities have been removed.

The big society we have built since 1961 in youth work is now threatened more than at any time in its history. We should not be conned that cost-ineffective, short-term, fragmented, often non-professionally led summer schemes are going to convince anyone that they are a meaningful substitute for a universal public service run by and for young people, as our service currently is.

Doug Nicholls is national officer for community, youth workers and not-for-profit sector at Unite