Youth services should be equitable, not sufficient
Howard Williamson
Monday, March 19, 2012
What is the difference between adequacy and sufficiency? Possibly not a lot. But in relation to youth services, "sufficiency" is the current hot topic.
A couple of weeks ago, I received a request from the National Youth Agency to complete a questionnaire for its Sufficiency Commission (a grand name if ever there was one). And a few weeks ago, the Department for Education launched its consultation on what is understood by sufficiency, as enshrined in the Education and Inspections Act 2006, for the provision of positive activities for young people. In due course, no doubt, positions will be taken, assertions made and interpretations offered – and then much will roll on as usual.
That was precisely the reason, almost exactly 20 years ago, for the dismissal and demise, in the youth work sector, of the notion of "adequacy". Warwickshire County Council had cut its youth service to the bone, a decision that was subjected to a failed challenge in the High Court by the youth work union CYWU, when Lord Justice Pill famously said that if one pound was considered to be adequate by the local authority in question, then it was. With the national organiser of the union, I was one of a group of people who then took up the cause of converting the case to "sufficiency" – a platform, not a ceiling. Surely there had to be a minimum threshold, and it was not one pound!
But whatever features of a youth work offer are contained within some idea of sufficiency, it is all hollow rhetoric unless it is underpinned by some clear costings. And so we started the other way around. We sought to restore the principle that any youth work budget should be two per cent of the comparative formal education budget. This had been the position shortly after the 1944 Education Act established the duty on local authorities to make adequate provision for young people in their leisure time. The focus was on young people beyond the minimum school leaving age – to level the playing field for the factory boys and girls who were not benefiting from post-compulsory education.
Credible formula
By the early 1990s, the proportion of the overall education budget given over to youth work had been so corroded it was sometimes less than one per cent. So we searched for a credible formula that would restore the two per cent threshold, which was something more than £300m at the time.
The formula multiplied a population of young people within a clear age band, by an entitlement to youth work opportunities and experiences, costed at the same rate as formal schooling. It was a crude calculation. We suggested that, although all young people should be entitled to access the offer of two hours of youth work a week, the likelihood was that only about a third would take it up. Our age range was 13 to 19. We used the hourly rate for classroom education.
It was a pragmatic exercise. This latest round of debating "sufficiency" will certainly challenge the basis on which we made our calculations. But it was a platform that helped to hold the line at the time and changed the terminology from adequacy to sufficiency.
Perhaps we should not even be using that word any more. As part of a generational contract, perhaps we need to be thinking in terms that are less technical and more moral so that the two per cent threshold dedicated to supporting the learning and development of young people in their leisure time forms the basis of an "equitable" offer to young people. This should be their entitlement.
Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan