Who needs an Institute for Youth Work anyway?

We have had "institutes for youth work" before, most notably the National Youth Bureau (NYB), which lasted over a decade into the early 1990s. NYB expanded impressively, establishing units and personnel for youth social work, youth crime, youth training and employment, and youth research. Much of this was not always popular among youth work purists. They wanted to know where the line was drawn between something they understood as "youth work" and broader ideas around "work with young people". The proposed new institute will have to grapple with such boundary maintenance, even if, for now, it proclaims that it would embrace the work of a range of professionals and volunteers working with young people.

The challenge will be both conceptual and operational. When NYB eventually transmuted into England's National Youth Agency and the Wales Youth Agency (in 1991 and 1992 respectively), under the pressures of defining a youth work curriculum, the national differences between England and Wales also heralded other differences of opinion: between voluntary and statutory youth service provision; whether advice, guidance and counselling was a legitimate component of youth work (alongside youth information, which was considered so); and the extent to which youth work should engage with other dimensions of youth policy, such as crime prevention, training, school inclusion and youth health behaviours (as ministers at the time expected it should).

In Wales, where I'm based, there was a protracted debate on these matters. I very much wanted the Wales Youth Agency to be an envoy for youth work into the terrain of economic development, health promotion and youth justice. In return, I wanted agencies in those sectors to bring staffing and resources to the agency to enable the youth work field to learn about those policy domains. I hoped that all these issues would produce a cross-fertilisation of understanding. Some colleagues agreed with me, others did not. Arguably, we fell between two stools and eventually we divided and finally collapsed.

In tough times, the talk is always about coming together, but as soon as things look a bit better, our internal divisions surface as different factions battle for the high ground. If an Institute for Youth Work is to be set up, it must be fit for purpose, for policy and for practice. As somebody once said, if we are to reinvent the wheel, let's be sure it's round.

Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan