England is out of kilter on youth policy
Howard Williamson
Tuesday, January 2, 2018
At the end of last year, Tracey Crouch, England's youth minister, announced the shelving of plans for a new three-year youth policy statement, despite this being promised by her predecessor a year ago. The argument was that a broader civil society strategy was needed instead, one that embraced much more than youth work and youth policy.
Yet on the other side of Europe, at exactly the same time, the Croatian Youth Network was hosting a residential seminar on "Shaping Youth Policies - Theory and Practice", to coincide with a massive online open-access course on the essentials of youth policy being delivered by the European Union/Council of Europe partnership in the youth field.
Some days later, the European Youth Capital, Cascais in Portugal, was the location of a meeting of the members of the European Youth Forum, which has argued forcefully in recent years for more robust, coherent and transversal youth policies.
Everything seems up for grabs.
In another development, Wales appointed a new minister for youth work, at the very moment a report reviewing Extending Entitlement, its youth policy from 17 years ago, was being finalised, having been commissioned by a previous minister. It will be interesting to see what happens to that.
Ukraine held its first All-Ukrainian Youth Worker Forum, eager to consolidate new "European" approaches to youth work and youth policy. The Council of Europe produced its first "self-assessment" tool for youth policy, focusing on participation, information, inclusion, access to rights, youth work and mobility. The European Commission is preparing its next European Youth Strategy.
At the moment when the idea of youth policy and the place of youth work within it has built up a significant head of steam and political traction in many parts of Europe, the UK - and England in particular - is twiddling its thumbs, peddling clichés and rhetoric yet doing absolutely nothing. It is dramatically out of kilter with the priority being attached both by individual member states and the European institutions.
We are completely overwhelmed and distracted by Brexit - which does not mean we are leaving the Council of Europe. Meanwhile, young people are struggling with a range of issues simply because they are young - a sense of anxiety and social dislocation, concerns over debt, future job prospects, the costs of housing, and so much more. Odd scraps of political concern are thrown in their direction, but any sense of "joined-up solutions for joined-up problems" - to steal a very Blairite phrase - appears to have evaporated.
We should not be thinking about problems, but about how we extend and strengthen opportunities and positive experiences for young people, across the policy spectrum. We've done all the thinking, but action seems more elusive than ever.
Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of South Wales