Youth work should be in the limelight

Its approach is rightly to provide example after example of how youth work programmes across the country are benefiting young people in line with the Every Child Matters outcomes. It shows how youth work helps promote sexual health, counters drug and alcohol misuse, supports learning and keeps young people safe. Youth work's benefits might be more difficult to capture and isolate compared to other interventions with the young, but this document lays bare an abundance of concrete results.

Youth work is best delivered where practitioners are allowed to get on with their job free from the restrictions of bureaucratic micro-management and to help young people on their terms. There is always plenty of theorising about what youth work actually is.

But it is the demonstration of practice attached to tangible benefits that can win it support and hard cash.

This government has done plenty to try to advance the cause of work with young people through a raft of measures, but has for some reason appeared reticent in its endorsement of youth work per se. Alas, good youth workers are, in general, humble folk who gain their rewards, like most children's professionals, from seeing a young life fulfilled and transformed. Bragging about what they do is not in their make-up. That might be part of the profession's charm; but therein also lies its danger. If it isn't heard about, it risks slipping under the radar and being dispensed with during times of cost-cutting. However, it is in economically tough times like now, where many families are under increasing pressures, that youth work is needed most.

In society at large, youth work is generally held to be a positive thing, but compared to other parts of the children's workforce, the actual understanding of what it can deliver is probably quite sparse.

Greater exposure of practical examples will help build that understanding. That is why The Benefits of Youth Work is welcome and timely. But it alone is not enough. There needs to be wider, sustained publicity to promote the value of youth work. It is necessary so that local communities demand it of their decision-makers and representatives, and so that more people are driven to set up youth projects themselves. Watch this space.