In the light of Tim Loughton’s claim that the Coalition is considering seriously the creation of a coherent youth policy, Children and Young People Now is proposing to submit to him a Youth Manifesto based on contributions from the field. Despite our reservations about the Coalition’s integrity and the notion that CYPN will be able to compress our suggestions into a succinct two page summary [!], we have offered the following thoughts:

In the end we are sending a simple and straightforward message to CYPN as it looks to drawing together a Youth Manifesto. Our contention is that an open-ended and voluntary youth work practice ought to be integral to any serious youth policy. Our In Defence of Youth Work Campaign was launched in March 2009. It remains a grass-roots response to the efforts of successive governments in the neo-liberal era to introduce the norms and values of the market into our work. Attempts have been made to impose the very antithesis of the Youth Work process: predictable and prescribed outcomes. A range of policies have pushed us ever nearer to becoming little more than an agency of behavioural modification. Under the Coalition it is not only the character, but the very existence of universal and accessible Youth Work that is at stake.

Against this backcloth we reaffirm our belief in a democratic and emancipatory Youth Work, whose cornerstones are:

• The sanctity of the voluntary principle; the freedom for young people to enter into and withdraw from Youth Work as they so wish.

• A commitment to conversations with young people which start from their concerns and within which both youth worker and young person are educated and out of which opportunities for new learning and experience can be created.

• The importance of association, of fostering supportive relationships, of encouraging the development of autonomous groups and ‘the sharing of a common life’.

• A commitment to valuing and attending to the here-and-now of young people’s experience rather than just focusing on ‘transitions’.

• An insistence upon a democratic practice, within which every effort is made to ensure that young people play the fullest part in making decisions about anything affecting them.

• The continuing necessity of recognising that young people are not a homogeneous group and that issues of class, gender, race, sexuality and disability remain central.

• The essential significance of the youth worker themselves, whose outlook, integrity and autonomy is at the heart of fashioning a serious yet humorous, improvisatory yet rehearsed educational practice with young people.

Of course there are other forms of work with young people. As we write the assault on open and voluntarily negotiated educational work with young people is accelerating the already major shift to all manner of targeted interventions. These programmes may well be necessary, but they do not constitute youth work. And the claim, that they are youth work, clouds rather than shines light on the dilemmas of how best to support young people in the present circumstances. At best such developments need to be named for what they are: youth social work, youth welfare work, youth diversionary work, youth surveillance work and so on, all of which share an imposed agenda and relationship. Obviously a coherent state policy will consider the relevance and appropriateness of a diversity of approaches to the needs of young people. We remain convinced that in the struggle to nurture democracy the youth work we define and defend has a significant contribution to make. Its present demise says much about today’s creeping authoritarianism and its profound lack of an optimistic vision of the future.