rescuing youth work

contents: introduction | markets | alienation | rescuing youth work | the way forward |

Some years ago I wrote a book called Creators not Consumers (1980, 1982). It was basically a call for youth workers to explore and embrace their identity as educators. I was also trying to encourage workers to think about the ways in which private troubles are often wrapped up with public issues; and to commit themselves to working with young people to organizing things themselves. It seemed at the time that too much youth work treated young people as customers or consumers of a service. A lot of workers were focused on provision of activities and an attractive social environment. They didn’t seem to understand see themselves as teachers or educators – helping people realize the learning in everyday life. Nor did they work to involve young people in their clubs and groups. Unfortunately, in the twenty or so intervening years things have gone from bad to worse. Developments in policy and practice have effectively strengthened the focus on young people as consumers. Unfortunately, in many situations they are increasingly being treated like commodities – objects to be acted upon. Today I want to chart a little of what has gone wrong – and suggest some ways forward.

 

Branding, markets and the making of commodities

We are all familiar with the rise of the brand. Nike, Levi, Coca Cola and other major companies spend huge sums of money in promoting and sustaining their image. They have tried to establish their particular brand as an integral part of the way people understand, or wish to see, themselves. As we know, this has had a particular impact on children and young people (and education). There is a lot of pressure 'to get them young', to embed their recognition of, and aspirations to, particular brands as part of 'normal' development; to make those brands part of their identity. 

We have seen these attempts to promote brands reach deep into different areas of our lives. This has included using the school as an advertising medium. The attraction is obvious - schools represent a captive market. Through the use of teaching packs, sponsored videos, advertisements on school computer screen savers and the like, large companies are able to bring their brand directly into the classroom. In so doing they are looking to gain legitimacy (after all the use of their materials etc. has been 'approved' by the school) as well as the raising general brand awareness. The shortfall of funding for key aspects of schooling such as computing, sport and recreational and eating facilities: fast-food, athletic gear and computing companies have stepped in.

Alongside the rise of branding (and not unexpectedly) we have seen attempts to open up areas of activity that were traditionally mutual or social to commercial or corporate intervention. Schooling is now viewed as offering lucrative market opportunities. Henry Giroux (2000: 85), for example, reports that in the United States the for-profit education market represented around $600 billion in revenue for corporate interests. Over 1000 state schools have been contracted out to private companies (Monbiot 2001: 336). In Britain education management, 'looks like it is about to become big business' (op. cit.). Educational Action Zones (beginning in 1998) have had significant corporate involvement. The Lambeth Zone is run by Shell, for example, not the local education authority. In Southwark, the education service has been contracted out to Atkins, and Kings Manor School, Guildford became the first state school to have its administration has been handed to a private company in  1999.

In the 1980s and early 1990s this movement was partly carried forward by the rise of managerialism in many 'western' education systems. Those in authority were encouraged and trained to see themselves as managers, and to reframe the problems of education as exercises in delivering the right outcomes. The language and disposition of management also quickly moved into the classroom via initiatives such as the UK national curriculum.

There was also a wholesale strengthening of the market in many systems. Schools had to compete for students in order to sustain and extend their funding. This, in turn, meant that they have had to market their activities and to develop their own 'brands'. They had to sell 'the learning experience' and the particular qualities of their institution. To do this complex processes had to be reduced to easily identified packages; philosophies to sound bites; and students and their parents become 'consumers'. 

In the United Kingdom the creation of the market entailed significant national government involvement. By the end of the twentieth century the UK had moved from having one of the most decentralized schooling systems in the world to one of the most tightly controlled and state regulated (Alexander 2000: 122).

The result was a drive towards to the achievement of specified outcomes and the adoption of standardized teaching models. The emphasis was less on community and equity, and rather more on individual advancement and the need to satisfy investors and influential consumers. Education had come to resemble a private, rather than public, good.

Learning has increasingly been seen as a commodity or as investment, rather than as a way of exploring what might make for the good life or human flourishing. Teachers' and youth workers’ ability to ask critical questions about the world in which live has been deeply compromised. The market ideologies we have assimilated (along with others in these societies), the direction of the curricula we are increasingly required to 'deliver', and the readiness of the colleges, schools and agencies in which we operate to embrace corporate sponsorship and intervention have combined to degrade our work to such an extent as to question whether what we are engaged in can be rightfully be called education (MacIntrye 2002).


 

Alienation

There has been a lot of talk about the extent to which different groups are alienated from education and the world of work. In much of what has been proposed by the government the problem has been presented as an issue of attitude and skill on the part of young people. They have not been properly socialized; they lack numeracy or literacy skills and so on. What is missing is attention to the real problem: the nature of the society in which we live.

We live in a society where worth is increasingly measured in what we possess rather than the people we are.

We live in a society where we put short term gain over long term welfare and sustainability.

We live in a society where people spend less and less time with neighbours, in communal activity and in political and civic engagement. The result is that people trust each other less; and our public spaces have become less safe.

In a very real sense we are engaged in furthering what Erich Fromm described as alienation:

Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions. (Fromm 1957: 67)

It is a form that looks to 'having' rather than 'being' (Fromm 1976).  Our identity is wrapped up with the things we own. Consumption has become a leisure event.

The problem, as we have seen is that these forces inform schooling and youth work.  We alienate young people by ‘delivering’ predefined material to them; by failing to engage them in meaningful dialogue, and by taking on many of the forms that oppress them. The result of this incursion by commerce, and the widespread seeping of managerialism, market-thinking and consumerism into the orientation of educators is a basic inability within many schooling systems and agencies of informal education to address critically questions around globalization, branding and consumption.

We have become part of the problem. If we look at the way youth work has changed over the last few years – partly under the influence of policymakers corrupted by business thinking and the ideology of the market, but also through our own failure to understand and stay true to the character of what we are engaged in.  Here I want to highlight five things.


 

A failure to address the whole person

We have adopted a number of the narrow concerns and ways of working that have so alienated young people from schooling. In particular youth workers and youth agencies have allowed their work to be defined by a deeply instrumental and material orientation.

• A significant amount of youth work activity is increasingly devoted to trying to get back young people back into the schooling system. And what is the overt rationale for this? They need schooling if they are to work and to contribute to economic growth. And what does this schooling involve? Testing, going through a set curriculum, and being treated as a commodity. We should only be engaged in this if we are actively seeking to change schooling.

• We now tend look to concrete outcomes rather than process, achieving things rather than being. We also spend quite a lot of time showing how we have met the outcomes expected of us. Not unexpectedly this involves us in the sorts of widespread misrepresentation and cheating that have been revealed in connection with SATs testing in schools. Most importantly it sells young people short. We are now encouraged to look to moulding behaviour to meet targets rather than asking what might be good for this young person.

The concern with concrete outcomes, and the focus on skilling and competence that has run through a great deal of policy and practice shifts over the last few years is narrow and demeaning. Little attention has been paid to the political context in which this occurs, to the emotions involved, or to spirituality. Indeed, one of the fascinating and telling features of the English government paper Transforming Youth Work is the total absence of any discussion of the place of spiritual and religious experience.


 

Surveillance and control

There has been a long concern with behaviour deemed anti-social or deviant within youth work. As Tony Jeffs has pointed out, this function has granted ‘an enduring raison d’etre for intervention on the grounds that managing anti-social behaviour simultaneously serves the interests of both young people and the “community”’ (2001: 155). Recent English Government papers such as Transforming Youth Work have continued in this tradition: ‘We want to develop young people who add value to their social surroundings rather than subtracting through anti - social behaviour’ (DfEE 2001: 13). However, a very strong concern with surveillance and control runs through the broad strategy for youth that has appeared across the UK - whether this be concerned with schooling, behaviour in public places, or entry into employment.

Some of the more obvious examples of increased surveillance include encouraging the use of sophisticated close circuit television systems in shopping malls, attempts at curfews, and the use of welfare workers such as personal advisers within the Connexions Service in England to monitor and record the activities of individuals. Within England there is to be a comprehensive database maintained by the Connexions Service. It has the potential of combining different data streams via elements like the YouthCard (a smartcard that has the potential to be a national identity card in England for young people), monitoring by personal advisers and others, and even medical records. Interestingly it is only in the last few months that the civil liberties implications have finally come into the political arena. Parents groups, children’s rights groups and some opposition MPs have begun calling upon the government to put limits on the amount of intrusive information gathered from young people, and how it is to be shared with other agencies (at the moment there is no need for parental permission, for example). There are also further questions arising about the limited nature of the training that personal advisers get, and their competence to make sensitive and informed decisions about the material they are handling.


 

Relationship

By heading for ways of organizing the work like outcome, curriculum and issue, we have been in great danger of overlooking what lies at the heart of youth work. In particular, we are in great danger of losing the idea of relationship. Youth workers both work through relationship – and seek to foster relationship. What is more this relationship is voluntary. Young people have, traditionally, been able to freely enter into relationships with youth workers and to end those relationships when they want. This has fundamental implications for the way in which workers operate and the opportunities open to them. It can encourage workers to think and work in rather more dialogical ways (op. cit.). It also means that workers either have to develop programmes that attract young people to an agency, or they have to go to the settings where they are. 'Building relationships' has been central both to the rhetoric and practice of much youth work.

Recognizing this we need to attend to what our relationships entail. They involve a strong degree of equality and mutuality. As they develop our relationships with young people can involve fundamental emotions - and often part our task is help create a safe place, a sanctuary if you like, where strong feelings can be expressed and approached.


 

Individualization

Association - joining together in companionship or to undertake some task, and the educative power of playing one's part in a group or association (Doyle and Smith 1999: 44) - has been a defining feature of youth work for a century or more. The group has been central to the way we understand youth work. It has been seen as a way of maintaining or extending democratic society; as a means of organizing (whether that is a football team, a trip or an intervention into the political system); and as a form of socialization.

This interest in group and association was, perhaps, most strongly articulated in the Albemarle Report (HMSO 1960). That Report famously declared that the primary aims of the youth service should be association, training and challenge (ibid.: 36 - 41 and 52 - 64).

To encourage young people to come together into groups of their own choosing is the fundamental task of the Service... (W)e want to call attention to:

a) an opportunity for commitment....

b) an opportunity for counsel....

c) an opportunity for self-determination. (1960 52-54).

However, of late the notion has come under considerable threat as more individualized and professionalized appreciations of the work have come to dominate the agenda.

Workers and policymakers have lost faith in the notion of the club. We place less of an emphasis on working with groups so that they are satisfying to their members. Less and less has been written about working with groups in informal settings (and more and more about formal groups). There has been a movement away from association towards more therapeutic or ameliorative concerns – and, in particular, case management.

For example, the most visible understandings of young people's participation within the English Connexions strategy are not linked to notions of self-government, but rather as consumers. Within the priorities set out in Transforming Youth Work (DfEE 2001) talk of participation in political and communal life is narrowed to the involvement of young people within the Connexions Service and providing feedback on other systems. Within government policies there has been a growing focus upon targeting interventions at named individuals - we can see this in some of the activities of youth workers within the new community schools, of learning mentors within the Safer Cities Initiative in England and of personal advisers within the Connexions Service. Essentially a form of case management is seen as the dominant way of working. People are identified who are in need of intervention so that they may take up education, training or work. Individual action programmes are devised and implemented. Programmes are then assessed on whether these named individuals return to learning or enter work (in which for the most part people are alienated from the fruits of their labours). They are less and less assessed on any contribution made to the quality of civic life, personal flourishing or social relationships that arise out of the process.


 

Bureaucratization and the loss of calling

Last, our adoption of so-called ‘professionalism” has actually led to an embracing of a bureaucratic orientation. It has meant that what is correct has come to dominate thinking and practice rather than what is right. We have increasingly submitted to procedures that place our safety first, rather than what is good for the people involved. At one level the reasons for this are obvious. Issues around safety in minibuses and on trips and activities; concerns around child protection and so on have led to the imposition or adoption of rules and procedures that cannot take account of the particular circumstances, and which undermine key aspects of youth work (e.g. around spontaneity and informality).

Within current New Labour policy initiatives we can see a further push towards bureaucratization in the shape of ‘joined-up’ thinking. It has been argued that the duplication of, and lack of coordination between, agencies and services has been a significant factor in the lack of effectiveness of work with young people who fall out of the schooling system.  Significantly, we lack hard evidence that ‘joined-up services’ work in this context. It may well be that many partnerships between agencies have not been well planned and ‘suffer from bureaucratic and funding straightjackets which seem to prevent suitable and sensitive partnerships and “joined-up” solutions’ (Coles 2000: 17), but there is some evidence that the Connexions strategy in England, for example, will exacerbate this. It has its own bureaucratic and funding straightjackets.

Underpinning these moves is a deeper shift - and this links to broader changes in society. Put crudely, we have moved in many areas of the work from a situation where youth workers often felt called to the work (and they were in an important sense part of a social movement), to one in which many youth workers view what they do as simply a job (within a bureaucratic institution). I say ‘in many areas of the work’, because what we have also seen is something of a countervailing movement. In England today, for example, more full-time youth workers and youth ministers are employed by churches than youth workers within the so called ‘statutory sector’. There has been an extra-ordinary explosion in numbers – and the vast bulk of what appears from policy makers and national agencies such as the NYA signally fail to address this development.

The recent emphasis in government reports and policies on surveillance and control, case management, and on individualized ways of working run counter to what we have come to understand as youth work. As we have seen there has been a shift from voluntary participation to more coercive forms; from association to individualized activity; from education to case management (and not even casework); and from informal to bureaucratic relationships. 

Unfortunately, in many respects we have brought this upon ourselves.


 

Rescuing youth work

What is the way forward?


 

Knowing youth work

First, we need to look again at actually what youth work is. In our history it is plain to see that while there have been different forms of youth work rather than a single youth work with commonly agreed characteristics (Smith 1988: 51). That said, it is possible to identify some key dimensions that have been present to differing degrees in the central discourses of practice since the early 1900s (Doyle and Smith forthcoming). Youth work involves:

Focusing on young people. Groups of people will often define themselves as ‘young’ or ‘old’ and organize around that - and we need to respond accordingly. We have to work with the ways in which people make sense of the world. In this they may well being taking on the categorization of others, for example, through their participation in systems such as schools where they are managed according to age. As workers we have a responsibility to problematize this. 

Emphasizing voluntary participation and relationship. The voluntary principle, as Tony Jeffs (2001: 156) has commented, has distinguished youth work from most other services provided for this age group. Young people have, traditionally, been able to freely enter into relationships with workers and to end those relationships when they want. This has fundamental implications for the way in which workers operate and the opportunities open to them. It can encourage workers to think and work in rather more dialogical ways (op. cit.). It also means that workers either have to develop programmes that attract young people to an agency, or they have to go to the settings where they are. As we have seen,  'building relationships' has been central both to the rhetoric and practice of much youth work. By paying attention to the nature of the relationship between educators and learners, it is argued, we can work in ways more appropriate to people's needs (Smith 2001b). 

Committing to association. Association - joining together in companionship or to undertake some task, and the educative power of playing one's part in a group or association (Doyle and Smith 1999: 44) - has been a defining feature of youth work since its early days.

Being friendly and informal, and acting with integrity. Youth work has come to be characterized by a belief that workers should not only be approachable and friendly; but also that they should have faith in people; and be trying, themselves, to live good lives. In other words, the person or character of the worker is of fundamental importance. As Basil Henriques put it (1933: 60): ‘However much self-government in the club may be emphasized, the success of the club depends upon the personality and ingenuity of the leader’. The head of the club, he continued, must ‘get to know and to understand really well every individual member. He must have it felt that he is their friend and servant’ (ibid.: 61). It follows from this that the settings workers help to build should be convivial, the relationships they form honest and characterized by ‘give and take’; and the programmes they are involved in, flexible. 'A youth leader must try not to be too concerned about results’, Brew wrote, ‘and at all costs not to be over-anxious' (ibid.: 183).In short, youth work is driven by conversation and an evolving idea of what might make for the well-being and growth.

Being concerned with the education and, more broadly, the welfare of young people. Historically, youth work did not develop simply ‘keep people off the streets’, or to provide amusement. A lot of the early clubs grew out of Sunday schools and ragged schools – and much provision has retained an educative orientation. Training courses and programmes, classes, discussions, libraries and various opportunities to expand and deepen experience have been an essential element of the work since its beginnings.  This interest in learning – often of the most informal kind – was augmented by a concern for the general welfare of young people. We can find many examples of clubs providing a range of services including health care, wash and bathrooms, clothing stores, and income support. With developments and changes in state support mechanisms, and the identification of other needs, the pattern of welfare provision has shifted – but has remained a significant element of youth work.

It is through these five elements that we can begin to make sense of the dominant discourses of youth work in the twentieth century and can view youth work as a form of informal education (Smith 1988). However, what is of particular significance for us now, is that the scale of change with regard to these dimensions is such that we face a defining moment in the history of youth work in Britain.


 

Knowing and being ourselves

Second, we need to make a leap of faith. We need to be at home with ourselves as educators – and embrace some simple truths.. Here I need only repeat three points made by Parker J. Palmer:

• Education cannot be reduced to technique. It flows from the identity and integrity of the educator.

• The human heart is the source of all good teaching (Palmer 1998: 3)

• Teaching [or youth work], like any other truly human activity, emerges from one's inwardness, for better for worse. .. When I do not know myself, I cannot know who my students are... When I do not know myself, I cannot know my subject. (Palmer 1998: 2)

As well as addressing these points, we need to remember, as Josephine Macalister Brew (1957: 112-113) put it, that ‘young people want to know where they are and they need the friendship of those who have confidence and faith’. It follows from this that the settings workers help to build should be convivial, the relationships they form honest and characterized by ‘give and take’; and the programmes they are involved in, flexible. 'A youth leader must try not to be too concerned about results’, Brew wrote, ‘and at all costs not to be over-anxious' (ibid.: 183).

We have to be ourselves – and strive to live life as well as we can.

Looking to the group and association- reclaiming the club

Josephine Macaliser Brew (1943), in her classic  statement of youth work, argued that the 'club' was a means by which people could freely identify with one another and gain the skills, disposition and knowledge necessary for citizenship:

The club at its best creates a society of personalities with a community sense, which is the essence of good citizenship... We are not concerned with the making of 'good club members' or 'well-organized youth groups', but with a much wider issue, the making of good citizens. This can only be done in a society where each member is important, where each one is given a chance to contribute something to the life of the group - the leader no more and no less than the member. It is for this reason that self- government is so important in club work. (Brew 1943: 12)

The use of clubs in this way was not new and had been articulated most notably within the Boys' Club tradition by Russell and Rigby (1908) and Henriques (1933), and by Pethick (1898) and Brew within the girls and mixed club movement. Brew was prepared to embrace looser organizational forms such as the 'in and out' clubs and to engage with ways of organizing which were more of young people's, rather than leaders', making. It is to this tradition that we need to appeal today. Here I want to briefly highlight three areas for exploration.

Working with ‘spontaneous’ youth groups. The Albemarle Report is usually associated with the promotion of open youth centres (‘places of association’). However, there was also a recognition in the Report of the significance of spontaneous groups, ‘which may spring up and passionately absorb the energies of their members… and then fade away as the members grow out of them’ (ibid.: 54). Writers like Peter Kuenstler (1955a; 1955b) had charted the potential, and significance, of informal groups of friends and enthusiasts for youth work in the 1950s – and it is something that we need to return to now. Such groups may come into being for a one-off activity, or for a more sustained period of time. Often they do not have a formal structure, but they have other ‘club-like’ qualities. We need to see more time given to the encouragement of such groups – both for the overt benefits they bring in the form of mutual activity, and for the way they can build social capital and add to individual feelings of well-being. Two significant elements here would be the development of funds with a simple application systems to which young people can apply if they want to organize an activity or event; and the availability of informal educators both to encourage activity, provide help with the practicalities of organization and to encourage reflection on the experience.

Organizing around enthusiasms. As Bishop and Hoggett demonstrated some 15 years ago, there is considerable potential in exploring and enhancing mutual aid in leisure. Some groups organized around particular interests such as hobbies, sports, arts and crafts will be spontaneous and short lived, but many become full associations. As such they provide a means by which people can share information and specialist products; undertake collective projects (such as exhibitions); and develop friendships and commitments (Bishop and Hoggett 1986: 33). They are also both a training ground for democratic engagement, and the means by which most of us connect with political systems. For those concerned with young people there are two obvious areas of direct development. The first is the cultivation of interest in different areas – whether it be bird watching, painting or snow-boarding. The second is working with groups of young people to organize around their enthusiasms.

Working for associational space. A further, crucial, dimension of practice must be working to open up associational spaces for young people in existing organizations and groups. This might involve, for example, working with interest and enthusiast groups so that young people are more readily attracted to them, and can find room to develop and express their interests. It will certainly entail exploring and exploiting the potential for organizing around enthusiasms and interests in schools. Associational life in UK schools has taken a considerable battering since the early 1970s. Key elements here have included a declining readiness on the part of teachers to be involved in extra-curricula activities; the grinding requirements of the national curriculum and coursework; the corporatization of schools (with the adoption of business models and frameworks); and specific measures to curtail the involvement of young people in the governance of schools. With the spread of learning mentors within schools, and a renewal of interest, in Scotland at least, in community schooling there are at least some avenues for activity. Research such as that of Putnam (2000) may well provide some motivation on the part of heads. However, real progress will not be made until policymakers can be unhooked from the crude Taylorism that has dominated educational policy for the last decade, and until teachers are given space, and gain the ability, to respond to the needs of those they are working with (Palmer 1998; Horne 2001). Last, but not least, it is important to audit existing youth provision for associational activity and potential. There remains an underlying disposition to treat people as consumers rather than creators (Smith 1981).

First published November 2002. Last update: January 31, 2005