The Youth Work Heist

Encouraging critical thoughts from our supporters is high on the list of the Campaign’s concerns. Thus we are really pleased to post two challenging responses from workers still immersed in the ‘muck and bullets’ of practice.

Lenny’s piece begins:

So… I attended the Federation for Detached Youth Work Conference at Wigan in November last year and I must declare that I became increasingly charged throughout the weekend with a delightful positivity and felt an unusual level of intense inspiration from the radiant enthusiasm and passion of the guest speakers and other attendees. And then Tom Wylie spoke. He charged youth work purists with being hopeless romantics and scoffed at the thought that there was any value in the convivial relationship between youth worker and young person. My positivity plummeted and my hope wilted with every word that fell from his lips. There seemed to be a cruel irony in that a conference with the theme “Positive About The Street” should end with such a negative tone.

I get the feeling that I’ve been climbing a mountain for fifteen years only to find that the architects of social policy have built another mountain on top, twice as big and twice as steep. Metaphorically the mountain represents the daily grind of wading, chest-high through the formalised social control that is currently trading under the title of youth work^©. I’ve got my own vision of the summit and the clarity is startling. But that’s just a vision. The reality is a jumbled mess of strategic clichés.

Read the whole and Lenny’s suggestions for the future: The Great YW Heist

Meanwhile Steve in two pieces, Thatcher,_Blair_and_all_that_jazz and YOUTH_WORK – to be or not to be blurts out, to use his own phrase, his thoughts on the individualising imperative of the last 30 years and the state of Youth Work today.

Meanwhile, youth workers, and many others, dare to do youth work because they are working with young people. Recent figures say approx. 2800 of approx. 8500 full-time youth workers are JNC qualified. I was trained to work with young people informally to encourage their participation in the practices necessary for everyday living as part of a community.

I wasn`t trained to label young people so as to prescribe a set course of action to remove their mistakes and make them a model citizen. Whilst this has alluring tentacles its premise is faulty except for some young people(human beings) who may respond to this approach.

Both Lenny and Steve would love to get responses, to have you join in the debate. All of us need one another’s help in  escaping the trap of passivity, in refusing to keep our gobs shut.

MOVING FORWARD

My effort to give an overview of what’s going on within the campaign begins:

The past few weeks have been hectic. The first national steering group meeting was held in Wigan, whilst Sheffield and Huddersfield hosted differing, but significant gatherings of students and workers, young and a little older. Regional steering groups have met in the North-East and the West Midlands with the South-East due to meet any day now.

Within I try to mark major issues such as the way in which we might organise:

I have been caught off guard by a significant feeling amongst some supporters that we need a new professional association for youth workers; that there is a collective organisational void; and that a powerful independent voice is lacking. For what it is worth I had not seen beyond the development of a campaigning network. Ironically too I have been reading Doug Nicholl’s fascinating account of the Community and Youth Workers Union’s journey from professional association to trade union. Indeed I remember back in the late 70′s clashing within the then Community and Youth Service Association with members, who opposed the shift to becoming a trade union. In this context, is talk of a professional association a step backwards or forwards?

The full summaryMoving Forward IDYW touches also on relations with trade unions, training and education as well as reports on the many meetings held in November.

TT

In Defence of Intellectually Rigorous Youth Work?

On July 10 in Leeds Jean Spence on the platform offered an honest and provocative contribution to the ‘In Defence of Youth Work’ debate, partly based on her experience at the North-East regional, which had taken place earlier. It begins:

Clearly if we feel the need to defend youth work, we must be also feeling that it is somehow under attack. The nervousness, not to say antagonism of some of the managers of local authority services to the North East event highlighted the fact that organising to defend youth work cannot be undertaken naively – it cannot be assumed simply that defending youth work is a straightforward matter of supporting good workers who are working for the good of young people and not being appreciated. Life is more complicated than that. At the very least, if we are discussing attack and defence, we are inevitably engaging in conflict – and there is some need to understand who will be on what side in the conflict, and for what reason.

Throughout her challenging argument she poses uncomfortable questions.

• So if we are keen to defend youth work, what do we want to defend? It really is the simple question but it is meaningless without considering what we need to build and what we need to attack and destroy. We can have no chance of answering these questions without engaging in critical and informed debate. So the second question must be:

• How can we hope to engage in critical and informed debate if some of us continue to denigrate theory, if we do not acknowledge the value of intellectual understanding and the importance of continuous learning in what we do. So how do we challenge this tension between theory and practice? What can we do about it?

• And linked to the need to develop a disciplinary discourse for professional youth work, is the question of where we would like our field of knowledge to reside. How do we think about the core of our practice? Is it within the disciplinary domain of social work, or education or politics or community work? Or is it worth thinking of it as different from all of these and if so, can we build a unique body of theory around its core practices drawing from the related disciplines and professions without being sucked into them as second class actors?

I’m bound to say I think it is near compulsory reading for those of us involved in the campaign. And if we are serious about our commitment to self-criticism, it ought to trigger some interesting replies! Read and ponder the whole.

Jean Spence In Defence of Youth Work Leeds 2009

And, blow me down, now we have Bernard Davies pleading guilty to starting this whole commotion. Find below Bernard’s contribution, ‘What Theory-Practice divide?’, which begins:

Though very late in this debate, I do need to own up: it was me who dared to use the word ‘hegemony’ at the Newcastle ‘In Defence of Youth Work’ meeting in June. It crept in during my presentation as part of a quote I was using to support the argument that ‘market’ thinking had become so dominant under New Labour that it had been applied largely uncritically to fields of activity – especially education and welfare – where it simply did not belong.

Hegemony Revisited – Bernard Davies