It’s taken a couple of years, but our book This is Youth Work : Stories from Practice is about to be launched on Monday, October 17. This is our Press Release.

YOUTH WORK STORIES

‘It was a sanctuary’. Hardly the description of a youth club that most adults would recognise but the one chosen by a young man thinking back to a particularly stressful period of his life. For another young man, the youth club ‘wasn’t just to do with the police and keeping out of trouble. It was everything – family problems, pregnancies, school issues, friends problems and a lot more …’. Two young women came away from their youth work residential, however, with something rather different: ‘we learnt how you would cope in different situations. And (that) sometimes the way you cope can affect others…’

These comments come from This is Youth Work, a collection of twelve ‘stories from practice’ launched in Parliament on 17^th October. They have been brought together by the In Defence of Youth Work campaign, a network of practitioners and supporters committed to emancipatory and democratic forms of a practice going back at least 150 years. Most distinctively defined by young people’s freedom to be involved or not, IDYW highlights youth work’s informal and experiential approaches, the lead it takes from the interests and concerns of the young people who actually attend and a focus not on their deficiencies as ‘NEETs’ or offenders but on their potential to move, personally and collectively, beyond these starting points.

Published jointly by Unison and Unite/the Community and Youth Workers Union, This is Youth Work started out as an attempt to counter the highly-targeted and statistics-driven approaches imposed on youth work by New Labour. It aimed to provide a qualitative, more nuanced and often therefore contradictory view of youth work, its impacts and how it achieves these. However, since the project was conceived two years ago the extent to which young people are bearing the brunt of the wider economic crisis has become increasingly clear, with a million of them predicted soon to be without jobs. At the same time, as a Commons Select Committee confirmed in June, local authority Youth Services are being cut by between 20% and 100%. This is Youth Work now therefore seeks also to hammer home the value of what is being lost and why professional youth workers and open access youth service facilities are needed more than ever.

Vividly brought to life by Jethro Brice’s striking illustrations and strongly reinforced by a DVD film of Geordie young people talking about what they’re taking away from their youth work encounters, the stories in the book provide powerful testimony of the varied, holistic and yet at times unexpected ways in which youth workers reach out to, support and inspire young people. Many inevitably illustrate youth workers doing what they do most often – work with and through young people’s peer group relationships and networks. Such as the one which tracks the three-year involvement of a team of detached workers with a group of young women whose reputation with estate residents is rock bottom but who not only stop thinking of themselves as scum but go on to represent other young people on the local youth forum and, in two cases, become youth workers themselves. Another account describes the work done with a group of Black young people facing daily police harassment and another the efforts of workers over many months to break through the resistance of a group of skinheads using a city-centre drop-in until they are able to challenge its members deeply bigoted attitudes to anyone seen as ‘other’.

A number of the stories also reveal how, out of these group relationships, intensive work can develop with individuals who would be unlikely to look for or accept formalised ‘early intervention’ from an integrated youth support service. The young man who saw his club as a sanctuary was quite explicit about this: ‘’I simply didn’t trust them… I had chosen to live in my own secretive world, outside all official surveillance, data recording and information-sharing’.

Other stories drive home how youth work can provide such elusive access to personal help in ways a young person can accept. One tells of the worker who, in the middle of a busy youth club evening, ‘counsels’ a young woman entirely through an exchange of written notes. Only many years later, when the two happen to meet by chance in the street, does the young woman acknowledge that it was this ‘conversation’ which persuaded her not self-harm. Another story captures a moment between a worker and a young man as they talk, leaning on the club coffee bar counter. The worker’s entirely off-the-cuff parting comment – that perhaps the young man who was regretting leaving school might seek out his nearest careers office – sets him on a completely new career path that ends up with him getting a PhD.

From these accounts, the book draws out features of the practice which illustrate why this is such a distinctive way of working with young people. One of the most telling is the use of what one of the story writers calls ‘a process that could not be scripted in advance’. This is particularly sharply illustrated by the worker who, in the local park with her children, picks up from the gait of one young man that he’s carrying a knife. From this casual and off-duty observation, on an estate which has already lost two young men to knifings, a complex film-making project develops which draws in a large group of young people, female as well as male.

Paradoxically, what this and other equally ‘on the wing’ responses reveal, too, is that, far from depending on what one worker disparagingly called ‘blagging it’, such improvisational skills are underpinned by forethought and planning and a consistent delivery on promises made. They also call for an openness on the part of workers to blurring professional and personal boundaries, particularly as a tactic for winning young people’s trust. Workers thus on occasions respond ‘as a mother’; or they share with young people some of their own more painful or risky adolescent experiences; or they find themselves taking a call from a distressed young woman in the middle of a Boxing Day meal.

As one of these workers concluded, because youth work is ‘not just a job’, those involved simply need always to be prepared to ‘go the extra mile’.

Bernard Davies [ on behalf of the Steering Group]

October 2011

THIS IS YOUTH WORK : STORIES FROM PRACTICE pdf version

In a week or so the web site will be refreshed so the the book and an accompanying video will be found on a dedicated page. Comments and criticisms as ever welcomed.