We need a 'grand council' to lead youth work of the future

This has been another really tough year for youth work across the UK. As youth work declines here, it is on an upward curve elsewhere in Europe - notably in countries such as Lithuania, Slovakia, Malta and Portugal. Throughout the Commonwealth, there is some acknowledgement of the useful place of youth work in youth empowerment and nation building. Within the United Nations, there has been effective advocacy of the role of non-formal and experiential learning in youth development and the encouragement of volunteering. So it is rather strange that youth work in the UK, where it has existed and evolved for approaching 200 years, should be so precariously poised.

This is not the first time, and it will not be the last, when youth work has been propelled to the margins or seemingly enslaved by particular policy agendas - at the moment, the re-engagement of young people who are "Neet", the promotion of "social action" or the rather strange exhortation to "do things differently".

In the last quarter of a century, we have had first the Ministerial Conferences on the Youth Service (1989-92), when a succession of youth ministers pronounced an abject future for youth work unless it could demonstrate its impact on policy priorities such as crime prevention; and second, the early Blair years (1997-2001), when youth work was nowhere to be seen within its radical youth policy agenda, until it was retrieved by Transforming Youth Work and Resourcing Excellent Youth Services after the turn of the millennium. Perhaps that was the outcome of some sterling advocacy by what was known as the UK Youth Work Alliance.

That body, composed of key representatives from youth work across the four nations, provided New Labour with sound arguments as to why youth work had a relevant and meaningful social contribution to make to the lives of young people and the communities in which they lived.

We need to form such an alliance once again, although the national bodies for maintained and voluntary youth work that were the backbone of the alliance 20 years ago have disappeared or significantly dissipated since those days.

We would have to constitute such a group in a different way. Today, I propose a "grand council", convened hopefully by the new generation of chief executives of those youth organisations that can reasonably claim a remit across most of the UK. Those national youth work peak bodies that still exist (the NYA, Youthlink Scotland, CWVYS in Wales) should play a central part, but otherwise membership should be established on the sole criteria that individuals are likely to command respect across the youth sector for their integrity and independent thought.

Such a new grouping is unlikely to be constituted by anybody else. Like the UK Youth Work Alliance before it, we will have to do it ourselves. We need to produce, as Children England have done before us, a Declaration of Interdependence committing to our principles of collaboration in the context of inevitable competition; like the European Youth Work Declaration, a statement of the common ground on which all our youth work stands and the contemporary new challenges, such as social media, that it faces; and like the Council of the European Union, a resolution on promoting new approaches in youth work to uncover and develop the potential of young people.

If they are not directly involved, we will need to enlist the voices of, inter alia, UK Youth, Ambition, Catch 22, LEAP Confronting Conflict, the Training Agencies' Group, In Defence of Youth Work, the Institute for Youth Work, the British Youth Council and Paul Oginsky's Personal Development Point. At the point of delivery, the concept of youth work is variably defined and executed. That may be no bad thing, but it is important to understand the driving forces, the ideologies and the principles, that lie behind such practice.

I have no idea how such a group might find the time to execute such a programme of inquiry. I imagine it would have to function rather like a select committee, taking written and some oral evidence on the direction for youth work in the future. But I do know that unless we bite the bullet with something like a grand council, we will actively or inadvertently collude in a catastrophic race to the bottom.

Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of South Wales