CATALYST, a consortium comprising the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services (NCVYS), the National Youth Agency (NYA), the Social Enterprise Coalition and the Young Foundation is exploring the creation of an independent body to provide youth workers with a strong voice and set standards across the sector. Youth work training provider FPM is also supporting the concept.
Fuller report here in CYPN
Doug Nicholls – to the chagrin of the consortium – warns,
“It appears that organisations with vested interests in the privatisation of public services have taken an initiative without the support of the profession or any consultation with youth workers,” he said. “It is likely that this could well be yet another money-spinner for cash-strapped organisations. The registration of workers and setting of standards is far too important to be left to unrepresentative bodies.”
Certainly we need a searching debate about this prospect. To my mind Doug’s concern that the partners in CATALYST have all in one way or another embraced the neo-liberal agenda, some of which is expressed in the Infed diagram above, is well-placed. This is no neutral initiative. Comments and criticisms of whatever political inclination welcomed.
IN DEFENCE OF YOUTH WORK 
I share Doug’s (and Tony’s) concerns about this initiative’s roots in the neo-liberal agenda. The Social Enterprise Coalition, for example – a key member of the sponsoring consortium – though emphasising that the ‘social and/or environmental purpose (of social enterprises) is absolutely central to what they do’, nonetheless explicitly defines these as ‘businesses’ which ‘need to make a profit to compete in the market, to ensure their continued survival and to invest in their social or environmental aims’. (http://www.socialenterprise.org.uk/pages/frequently-asked-questions.html#whataresocialenterprises). An Institute of Youth Work based on such principles could therefore further undermine both the provision of public services out of taxes and as a citizen’s right and a voluntary sector operating independently as an expression of a democracy’s civic society.
What is also striking is that the initial outline for the Institute doesn’t even give a nod to the funding crises in, not to say the total dismantling of, both of these historic bases of service provision. Given this ‘absence’, together with the recent catastrophic failures of ‘the market’, youth workers surely (at the very least) need to approach the proposal with some deeply sceptical questions. For example:
• What ‘business’ (in a commercial sense) would such an Institute carry on?
• Who would be seen as its main beneficiaries, and how?
• How would it make its profits – charging what, with what levels of ‘mark-up’, to whom?
• How far would it need to ensure such a profit by driving down some standards – for example in staff pay and conditions – as if they were extraneous to its core purpose?
• Against whom would it compete; in what ways; by what methods?
• Given this emphasis on competition, how could it guarantee it wouldn’t further fragment the youth work/youth services field at a time when co-operation and joint action has never been more needed?
Other more specifically youth work-focused questions also need to be addressed:
• What for example does NCVYS have in mind when it says that it sees such an Institute as ‘serv(ing) to secure a coherent framework for a wide range of practitioners’? (‘Workforce Development Snippets’, April 2011, http://www.ncvys.org.uk/UserFiles/Workforce%20Development/apr_11_snippets.pdf).
• Are these practitioners ‘youth workers’, and if so by what definition?
• Will that definition continue to emphasise youth work as a distinctive emancipatory practice committed to young people’s voluntary engagement in open access provision and in a practice led by their interests and concerns?
• Or will the proposal ‘serve’ to further confuse this practice with other forms of ‘work with young people’ which, though important and valuable in their own right and perhaps drawing on some youth work skills, are in fundamental ways very different?
And all this before we even get to such highly contestable issues as the ‘standards for the sector’ which, according to NCVYS, such an Institute will help to set; or how any of this will help sustain and improve (rather than undermine) current institutional arrangements such as routes to training and qualification.
Bernard Davies April 2011
[…] also note that Tony Taylor of the In Defence of Youth Work campaign has picked up on this and is asking similar valid questions about the motives […]