Youth workers could be the missing link in PSHE
Ravi Chandiramani
Monday, May 13, 2013
Youth work and schools make strange bedfellows. The very essence of youth work as voluntary and non-formal is certainly at odds with the formal, compulsory nature of school.
However, as our special report examines, the National Youth Agency’s commission on youth work education, chaired by former children’s minister Tim Loughton, is exploring what role youth workers can play inside the school gates.
The commission’s work is a rare piece of youth policy activity, given the Department for Education’s current apathy towards youth affairs. It also comes as youth work faces acute pressure from local spending cuts, demonstrated by CYP Now’s survey of practitioners last month, which represented organisations working with 300,000 young people. Just as significant is what is happening – or rather, might not be happening – in schools.
The current Education Secretary has ratcheted up the emphasis on core academic subjects and, after 20 months reviewing the role of personal, social, health and economic education (PSHE), the government has decided the subject will remain non-statutory, leading to concerns that provision will deteriorate.
But the subject is vital to pupils’ general health and wellbeing. As our report reveals, key national advocates of PSHE would welcome youth workers delivering it inside schools. It matters that the subject is taught and discussed, not who delivers it. Indeed, “outside” professionals skilled in forming non-authoritarian relationships with young people might have more credibility delivering PSHE than classroom teachers, particularly on sex and relationships.
PSHE therefore provides one key opportunity for youth work to yield influence in schools and promote its value outside. Youth workers in schools can also reinvigorate less engaged pupils, inadvertently boosting their academic achievement, as some programmes have found.
But schools do not represent the future or the salvation of youth work. There will always be the more vulnerable, troubled and marginalised young people, for whom school is synonymous with exclusion, failure and unhappiness. They especially will continue to require a different space to give them direction and fulfil their potential.
Childcare ratio row reaches tipping point
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg might have sounded the death knell for childcare minister Elizabeth Truss’s desire to raise the ratio of children to professionals in his belated opposition to the plans last week. They would undermine his social mobility crusade because disadvantaged two-year-olds in receipt of free childcare from this autumn would get less personal attention.
The point of the free entitlement is to help narrow the gap in the early years. That becomes very difficult when you have one professional caring for six disadvantaged toddlers. Plans for a higher-skilled workforce to meet this challenge will not materialise overnight. The ratio that has risen in recent months has been the overwhelming opposition to Truss’s plans relative to the support – not just from the sector but, crucially, from parents. It would be foolish to still press ahead.
ravi.chandiramani@markallengroup.com