Youth work must avoid being a slave to the policy machine
Howard Williamson
Monday, August 31, 2015
Howard Williamson on why youth work must avoid using dehumanising policy jargon
We all know about the parlous state of youth work throughout the UK, even though the story is rather different in its constituent parts.
We also know that youth work has always evolved over time to address different issues and respond to different concerns. Yet, increasingly over recent months, as I have attended so-called youth work meetings, read tender documents concerned with youth work and considered various funding and award applications for youth work projects and programmes, I have become first flabbergasted, and then deeply concerned, at the extent to which so many alleged protagonists for youth work have uncritically absorbed and regurgitated the contemporary jargon of intervention, prevention and engagement or re-engagement - to the point where "young people" themselves had become almost invisible in the narrative and the process.
It has become a language of referral, depictions of young people as clients, and then technical measures that purport to produce dramatic impact in terms of reducing antisocial behaviour or better participation in education, training or employment.
I have become increasingly conscious, even in core youth work circles and certainly in the youth work-related circles that flank them, of discussion of a category simply referred to as "the Neets".
Have we forgotten the battle won when we stopped referring to disabled young people and started talking about young people with disabilities? We seem to have lost sight of the principled position that we are relating to, and working with young people.
Instead, we talk just in the jargon of those backgrounds, circumstances and behaviours: LAC, SEND, Neet ASB and so forth. And our job is portrayed as LAC inclusion, SEND progression, Neet engagement or ASB reduction. Ugh! There are, of course, striking exceptions where individuals and paperwork continue to talk about responding to young people. But, in comparison with the sharp-nosed business jargon coming from new or rebranded entrants to the youth (work) sector - many of them private companies - this comes over as the wishy-washy utterings of the dinosaur.
Youth work is now a slick and technical practice where you lock on to your client group of marginalised, disaffected and vulnerable teenagers, and turn their lives around through often relatively modest intervention over a fixed period of time.
Much of this must, in fact, be absolute rubbish, though I do not question that such processes can and do work in some situations - particularly with young people motivated to change and those who are not so far away from the right side of the tracks. On the other hand, the complexities and challenges of many young people's lives suggest that there cannot be any simple, linear road of transformation.
The track will often be one step forward, two steps back. And while some facets of young lives will undoubtedly be improved through exposure to music projects, exchanges, video making, outdoor activities and other experiences, other domestic and economic circumstances are likely to remain unchanged. That is also my point in another way.
The jigsaw or mosaic of young people's lives is multi-dimensional and it is often hard to see the whole picture. The young person depicted by the youth project as turning his or her life around may continue to be a persistent young offender.
Conversely, the young person defined by the youth project as Neet or vulnerable may also be someone pursuing a commendable personal project or taking responsibility for an aging relative.
In either case, we often simply don't know the whole story, however skilled we believe our frameworks of inquiry and assessment may be. To see that picture and to know the story usually, if not always, takes time, patience and perseverance.
That is, indeed, what a relatively independent youth work practice was able to achieve, thereby producing a more calibrated response to the needs of different young people - in terms of both personal and collective support and the provision of new experiences.
A youth work practice subordinated to the demands and expectations of school inclusion, or the prevention of crime and antisocial behaviour inevitably struggles to work with young people in the round. That is not to say that a more autonomous youth work should not engage with these agendas. Good youth work connects in many ways with the concerns of health, education, employment, criminal justice and social services policy, but it needs to be able to do that from a position that started somewhere else - with the young person, not the policy agenda - or otherwise it becomes a slave to the machine, almost unrecognisable from its former self.
Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of South Wales