Further to Monday’s packed and animated Roundtable event held in the Houses of Parliament Doug Nicholls, Chair of Chooseyouth, has written as follows:
Just a big thank you to all those who were able to attend the Chooseyouth event in Parliament on Monday. Thanks also to those who were with us in spirit but unable to attend.
We are going to have to be focused and organised over the coming year to win. We will send out some briefings to assist with campaigning.
Ta to Sue Atkins for the montage
In the meantime here are the action points we suggested at the meeting that would really help.
1. Declare your individual and or organisational support for Chooseyouth if you have not already done so by writing simply to Kerry Jenkins at kerry.jenkins@unitetheunion.org. It doesn’t cost anything and your name will simply be listed as a supporter.
2. As soon as you can write to your MP whoever they are and ask them if they support a statutory Youth Service. Let Chooseyouth know what they say.
3 In May write to your MP and ask them if they will be supporting the Ten Minute Bill on the Youth Service.
4 Immediately write to Angela Raynor MP requesting that the Youth Service be made statutory and put within the National Education Service that Labour is proposing.
5 Get ready to lobby your MP again and get busy on Social Media when the Ten Minute Rule Bill is put on June 6th by Lloyd Russell Moyle MP.
6 Write immediately to Cat Smith MP who is consulting on the implementation of a statutory youth service, saying you support a statutory youth service and giving any reasons why and what it might look like.
All of this will make a difference at this critical time.
Over three months, the Roadshow will visit our nations and regions to meet with and speak to members and supporters who want to help shape the future of education policy.
The Roadshow will build on the work we have done so far and the final principles will underpin the NES for generations to come.
To get involved, you can attend a Roadshow event in person, or you can submit your thoughts online via the Labour Policy Forum.
The diary of Roadshow events has yet to be announced. What are your views on prioritising a contribution to this process?
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An immediate opportunity is provided by ChooseYouth to discuss the situation further.
CREATING A STATUTORY YOUTH SERVICE – ROUND TABLE EVENT
Mon 23 April 2018 16:00 – 18:00 at the Palace of Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA
Following the successful parliamentary event earlier this year, we are pleased to announce a roundtable discussion on the importance of youth services and creation of a statutory youth service.
Youth services are an essential part of a lifelong learning and civil society and act as the bedrock to many young peoples lives. Over recent years we’ve seen youth service provision decline across the country with parts going completely without.
ChooseYouth which represents over 30 voluntary youth sector organisations has long championed a universal, open access statutory youth service and now in partnership with MP’s in parliament we plan to introduce a bill to create such a service.
This roundtable event in parliament will act as the beginning of that legislative process, bringing together key stakeholders to give their input, not only on the current state of youth services but how best we can advance the cause of a statutory service.
‘In the last 100 years, there have been two defining education acts – Butler’s in 1944 and Baker’s in 1988. They represent two distinct chapters in England’s educational story. The first witnessed new schools, colleges and curriculum innovation, especially in the arts, as well as new youth and career services. Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberalism underpinned Baker’s 1988 reform bill, which meant a prescribed national curriculum and tougher accountability, along with diversity in school provision and autonomy’.
The piece prompted the following response from Tom Wylie, a former Chief Executive of the National Youth Agency.
‘Tim Brighouse makes a compelling case for a new settlement for education in England. Two particular further features should be addressed. First, it should be based on evidence, not politicians’ whims and prejudices. Second, it should reflect the fact that adolescents spend much of their time outside the classroom, and thus urgent attention needs to be paid to rebuilding the role of educational youth work for their leisure time.’
Thanks to the Rotherham Advertiser
More specifically and highlighting the need for a practice, which can build relationships over time, free from short-term targets as well as posing issues around youth work and casework, Naomi Thompson, drawing on her own experience, argues that ‘Slashing youth worker budgets close a key route out for groomed girls.’
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Ta to the morningstaronline.com
Continuing the Government’s fondness for short-term public relation interventions Home Secretary Amber Rudd has launched a Serious Violence strategy, which includes a new £11m Early Intervention Youth Fund to support community projects that help steer young people away from crime.
I make no apology for copying again some of Seema Chandwani’s twittering thoughts posted ahead of today’s London City Hall Summit called by Sadiq Khan. Not at all abstract but responses grounded in the reality of day-to-day circumstances they express bluntly and eloquently the argument for a process-led, young people centred youth work, which has time on its side.
Ta to worldreligionnews.com
This event cannot be an opportunity to blame each other for the shambles we find ourselves in, it’s the fault and responsibility of all regardless of party. This event needs to be honest & not pass the buck to absolve responsibility. We’ve no time to watch headline table tennis.
In London (and throughout the UK) young people, campaigners and Trade Unions warned Local Authorities/Council Leaders of the dangers in cutting Youth Services. In Feb 2011 Haringey was informed of consequences and pursued a 75% cut months prior to the riots.
Tomorrow @SadiqKhan must ask serious questions about why local authorities and council leaders ignored warnings, intel,and young people when they decided to slash Youth Services. Blaming govt cuts can only go so far when money is found for logo changes, propaganda mags etc.
The Mayors £45m Youth Fund @SadiqKhan has tweeted about is piecemeal, it allows organisations with the best bid writing abilities to be the most successful. It keeps us in gimmick mode. Youth work isn’t sexy nor prescribed – it follows and grows with the young person.
Any youth project applying for 3-year funding that is able to tell you 36-40 mths before the end of the project what the outputs will be is a fantasy. They’ll seek the young people to fit the outcome and the most marginalised will be seen as too much effort to meet the targets.
Youth workers need to be able to work with young people without the pressure of arbitrary targets that some young people cannot achieve. A Youth Worker needs to know they can stay on a journey with young people that could take months or years.
A real effort needs to be made by politicians, especially Cllrs at what Youth Work is. If it doesn’t make sense to you, accept this is your problem and not the service/staff and force yourself to learn rather than adapt the service to meet something you can understand.
This notion of ‘targeted’ support is absolute bullshit. No young person feels they can engage on equal terms with projects called ‘Troubled Families’. It’s degrading, it commences with judgement and it disempowers. Would you engage with things like that?
Youth work works because it attracts young people into activities that make them feel good, maybe that one thing they get praised for in education. It’s delivered in a space they feel comfortable and should have ownership of. They engage with trained adults in an equal way.
When things go wrong at home, on the street or at school. They have that one space, where they go that makes them feel good. They have relationships with adults that over time they’ve trusted with smaller things. They can now go to them with the big things.
If you think young people just get referred to a professional and trust is instantly there you’re insane! They don’t want another adult telling them (or threatening them) what to do. They want the freedom and ability to explore feelings, risks, consequences to make a decision.
So tomorrow @SadiqKhan must be clear that putting police on the street is a temporary measure. Investing in young people, properly through unrestricted youth work (not gimmick funding grants) is a political responsibility. Youth work ain’t a hobby, it’s a tough profession.
Ahead of trying to pull together a host of stories and articles arising from and coinciding with the tragic events of these last weeks, Seema Chandwani has agreed to me pasting into a whole her passionate and powerful Twitter thread of April 6, which has gone viral.
THREAD: I’ve been relatively silent about the murder of 17 year old Tanesha Melbourne-Blake, sometimes you just have to shut up and listen.
I first met Tanesha 3 years ago during the fight to ‘Save Haringey Youth Services’. A fight her and many of her peers fought with passion.
I’ve rewatched some of those campaign videos. The words are haunting. Those young people knew what could/would happen should cuts to services continue.
Watching Tanesha’s face in those videos, little did she realise the lives she was campaigning to save, would include her own.
I’m not in anyway saying if the youth services cuts didn’t happen she’d be alive.
But the issues raised by young people in such campaigns need to be heard – cutting of services creates an environment where young people feel compelled to speak out about their lives.
Young people in areas like Tottenham are very capable of articulating their own wants and needs, but they asked me to campaign *with* them because they needed a ‘political advocate’ as this fight was in their words ‘unequal’ – they felt unable to ‘compete’ alone.
I didn’t understand it at first, but soon did.
I won’t go into details, the campaign (both 2011 & 3 years ago) are well documented.
But I’ll make my first point; we fail as adults when we see young people fighting for help services as the problem.
I’ve watched the response over the past few days and there are times I’ve been frustrated.
If you’re a Politician or politico, currently engaged in this issue of youth violence, ask yourself why?
Why are you getting involved?
You don’t need to respond but if are genuinely interested in helping young people in this fight you have to accept this is their fight, not yours.
This isn’t about your stats, your policy, your budget or even your child.
This is about young people’s current everyday life.
If you are speaking about young people’s daily life, actually understand it first.
They are surviving, navigating through a world mainstream society haven’t dared make a TV series out of yet. It’s nothing like you think you know about, even if you once smoked weed when you were 15.
There are now politicians and policy donks up and down the country holding events/meetings to show they’re doing something.
Less than 1/10 will be inviting any young people to hear what they have to say.
A lot of pics will be taken.
Of the few that will engage young people they’ll go to speak to a school council or local church group or something similar.
Young people are not a homogeneous group. Tarquin in Hertfordshire doesn’t speak for Trevor in Wood Green.
Engaging young people facing this battle is difficult, made more difficult as almost every embryonic cord connecting them to society has been cut.
The young people in survival mode don’t know you, some don’t even believe they need to know you.
But don’t find a substitute!
‘Community Leaders’ don’t exist, they are a political fabrication designed in the 80s to create a hierarchy amongst the working class.
Stop meeting with them.
If you want to ask people how you can help, ask those directly who need the help.
Ask your ‘community leaders’ to give you direct access to those people, if they cannot, then the only thing they lead is you, up the garden path.
There is only one way to solve this problem and that is long-term inclusion.
This means understanding there has always been a criminal underworld – Dickens wrote about it centuries ago. If Oliver Twist was born in 1998, he’d have a YouTube account
Marginalised people exist because the system of marginalisation exists.
This is not a new problem. It existed when I was a teen. My and my little sister can remember the names of our friends murdered in 1990s.
Why we keep acting like this is a new thing is almost insane!
It’s always been about economics, opportunities and belonging, always.
You are competing with an industry that can promise young people a life you have failed to give.
It’s not just money, it’s a sense of worth, purpose, belonging and achievement.
Maslow is basic GCSE level psychology. Young people need investment.
It’s not a short term fix. It’s not a 4 week Twitter campaign. It’s not a week summer project – it’s a complete 0-19 long term investment. Including investment in people working with young people
And it’s a lot cheaper than these knee jerk reactionary initiatives.
Until you can get a child to tell an organised crime ring they’re not interested – you’ll have this problem.
Criminals need a workforce and our society is providing them with an unlimited supply of young people to choose from.
This article poses more than a few questions with regard to youth work’s growing infatuation with a skewed and individualised notion of mental health, well-being and indeed happiness – see the reference to NCS.
Jennie Bristow argues that government plans for ‘Mental Health First Aid’ risk pathologising ordinary childhood while doing little for those with more serious difficulties.
For a brief moment, I thought this was an April Fools’ story.
The government is considering the introduction of a ‘military ethos’ in schools across the UK to help children from deprived backgrounds. Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson has commissioned MP Robert Goodwill to review the benefits of an education inspired by the ‘values and disciplines’ of the Armed Forces.
Across the oceans, our friends at Youth Affairs Network Queensland [YANQ] have published the findings of a 2017 Youth Sector survey. The following brief excerpt is likely to ring a bell or two.
Survey responses repeatedly identified that services are under-funded and under-resourced
to meet the level of service demand (both in terms of intensity of service provision and numerical demand). Funding agreements are overly prescriptive and restrictive, dictating short-term, output-focused service delivery models. As such, services are hamstrung from achieving their full potential to be innovative and respond effectively to the real needs of young people within the context of their individual circumstances.
The combination of funding criteria and competition-based tendering were seen as creating a sector culture that encourages ‘siloed’ service delivery. Organisations become inward focused and are increasingly operating independently of other services. Service delivery becomes focused on narrow, specified outcomes at the expense of addressing the inter-related needs affecting young people’s long-term outcomes. Funding criteria also effectively preference funding to large NGO’s at the expense of experienced, specialist local agencies that typically have a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of local community and youth needs.
Respondents also described the constant change imposed by the lack of funding security inherent in short-term contracts and defunding of programs. This impacts support relationships with young people and inhibits services’ capacity to offer ongoing support over time for young people with multiple complex needs. It also
fosters a sector culture plagued with uncertainty that makes it difficult for organisations to undertake long term agency-level planning and offer job security to staff.
At the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, ‘civil society’ is referenced in virtually every presentation and fireside conversation. The world, it seems, no longer consists of two sectors—public and private, state and market—there is a third: NGOs and INGOs, charities and philanthropists, human rights watchdogs, aid and development agencies and global environmental campaigns to name but a few. The ‘Third Sector’ has arrived, and Its CEOs now mingle seamlessly with those from banks, energy companies, media giants and government agencies.
The problem with this embrace of ‘civil society’ is that it bears little resemblance to what civil society actually is or means. Most of civil society is not constituted formally or headed up by a CEO. Just 40 years ago, very few not-for-profits or charities had CEOs at all: that term was associated with the corporate sector, and few community groups or charities had even contemplated mimicking the language and culture of such a different sphere. But in just four decades all this has changed, and it has changed at an extraordinarily rapid rate, with very little public discussion or scrutiny of the enormity of the organizational transformation involved and its social and political impact.
He suggests in a provocation to many of us:
The principal factor, however, in driving both the transformation of the social sector and the relatively low level of critical public debate about it has been the global rise of the managerial class and its capture of much of the not-for-profit world. In the wake of the 1960s/1970s social movements, governments invested heavily in a plethora of welfare state programs and services, and universities churned out an army of social science practitioners with an insatiable demand for things to manage.
Not-for-profits and charities were easy pickings, so voluntary associations of all kinds were transformed into instruments of service delivery, ‘community representation’ and ‘therapeutic welfare’ in the public interest. Traditional bodies such as the Red Cross, the YMCA, church missions and voluntary health societies fell like dominos to ‘management capture’ and quickly became unrecognisable to those who knew them a generation before.
As of now, the posting will appear on Tuesday as the site statistics indicate that the highest number of visits occur on this day. Why? I haven’t a clue.
An impressive, thoughtful and thorough briefing London’s Lost Youth Services 2018 [pdf] produced by Sian Berry, Green Party member of the London Assembly.
Since 2011, the cumulative amount not spent on services for young people in London is now more than £145 million.
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ta to muddymatches.co.uk
Opening Words by 42nd Street’s youth co-researchers [on what I think is an exceptional piece of work TT] We became involved in the research to learn more about youth loneliness because we are passionate about giving young people a voice – as experts in our own lives. We knew intuitively from our own experiences and those of our friends and family that youth loneliness is a really important but far from understood issue; we knew that it was a complex issue, with a whole host of causes and even wider implications on young people’s lives.
Develop new ways of thinking and talking about youth loneliness, beyond medicalised discourses of epidemics and towards more expansive understandings of youth and more inclusive ways of belonging.
Arts-based and creative methods create spaces and relationships where young people can find connection and navigate painful forms of loneliness.
Restore threatened youth work provision and fund a plurality of options so that all young people have someone who knows and accepts them for who they are.
Re-imagine interventions beyond individual funded projects and towards commons spaces and social movements to bring into being more co-operative and convivial communities.
Youth-led social action is necessary to develop the practical and political change, benefiting youth participants and their peers.
The Association’s FREE national, collaborative ‘Policy and Practice’ seminar programme continues to expand, and we have been delighted with the response. Registrations have topped 200 delegates (52 academics; 107 practitioners; 57 students) across the seminar programme. The aim of these seminars is to foster greater levels of collaboration between higher education institutions and practice agencies in the profiling of challenges and opportunities facing youth and community work policy and practice across the UK. Follow the link above for a full listing, or the unique links for each event found below (please note the ‘post-strike’ revised dates for Glasgow and Dumfries):
Friday 20th April (Worcester) ‘Youth and Community Work in Transition’
Given IDYW’s emphasis on both narrative and critical practice we can’t wait to get our hands on a copy. We quite fancy making the launch, but you can’t have everything………
Be not disturbed! There is no basis for the rum rumour that I have embraced neoliberalism and applied to do an MA in Entrepreneurial Philanthropy after being head-hunted for the post of CEO of an unnamed leading Youth Surveillance charity. Although I’m a trifle disappointed not to be asked. This wicked whopper is the work evidently of a mole, who overheard me start a sentence, ‘neoliberalism brought remarkable technological development’ and hallucinated on the spot, thus missing the caveat, ‘yet has widened and deepened inequality’. In addition, it seems the reporting rodent got wind of a discussion at the last IDYW Steering Group meeting, within which I talked of withdrawing from my role as Coordinator. Putting 2 and 2 together the creature came up with a formula, if not for a nerve agent one that indicated I was on the verge of betraying the cause and marketing my inner soul.
Seriously though – you would hope there’s no need for such an opening cliched clause, but nowadays, who can be sure? – there is a hint of truth in the tall tale. At our last Steering Group, we did discuss our collective capacity to keep the IDYW train on track, within which my ability to contribute was of concern. I indicated that because of, amongst other things, continuing personal pressures I was struggling to fulfil the coordinating role.
Our existence is haunted by contradictions and concerns. On a practical level, the IDYW show is kept on the road through the efforts of a small group of volunteers. Of course, this is neither a surprise nor a slight on those unable to be more involved. These remain difficult times. Workers, paid or unpaid, have little time on their hands. Whether disillusioned and weary or optimistic and energetic, it’s a stressful place to be. In this forbiddingclimate, we have failed to become the campaign group of our imagination.
On reflection, our most important contribution across our lifespan has been to provide a space, increasingly denied elsewhere, for a collective and thoughtful discussion about the state of youth work. We have sought to provide information, commentary, analysisand research to support this process. To do so is in the best tradition of a practice, which aspires to be reflective.
To cut the story short the present consequence of our effort to think things through is as follows:
– as Coordinator, from now, I will only be working one day a week on a Monday for IDYW [in terms of research, maintaining the website, commenting on FB, answering e-mails]; that there will only be one post on the IDYW website each week, ‘Sustenance for the Senses’, which will bring together links to news/information/analysis about the world of youth work and beyond.
– that, alongside this reduced commitment I’ll go at my own pace in terms of other writing I have been asked or wish to do. If anything worthwhile comes out of this usually tortuous process I’ll put it on my blog at Critically Chatting and draw attention to its appearance on the IDYW site and Facebook.
The Steering Group is to meet on Friday, June 15 in Manchester to explore whether the above experiment in reducing expectations on the Coordinator makes any sense and to draw up a strategy for keeping IDYW alive and kicking. These meetings are always open so further details regarding the venue will be posted in good time.
Our July 2016 post ended on the following note, which retains its pertinence.
Obviously, wehope that you will be both contributor [to] and reader [of the IDYW debates], actively engaged, in the light of your own energy and resources. Whatever we deem ourselves to be, we need one another in a struggle to defend not only youth work, but a belief in a holistic education from cradle to grave, a commitment to a radical praxis and the common good. In this context IDYW still has a useful role to play.
Together, we can create an education system that works for the many, not the few, and your voice matters to us. That’s why we have launched 
