Queer Politics and the contribution of Youth Work – remembering Clause 28

by Tony Taylor

Fifty years on from the decriminalisation of homosexuality the papers today are carrying a range of articles covering its significance – see, for instance, Queer politics has been a force for change; celebrate how far we’ve come by Jeanette Winterson. Within her piece, she remembers the infamous Clause 28.

In 1988 the Thatcher regime passed into law clause 28 of the Local Government Act, making it an offence to “promote” homosexuality in schools. Nobody really knew what this meant, with its malign claims of “pretend” family relationships; all teachers knew was that they couldn’t be positive about any sexual identity other than straight. For me, also 28 at the time, it felt like legalised hatred.

clause 28

Led by lesbian youth workers, in particular, many of us refused to abide by this deeply prejudiced legislation. Ironically, I’ve just been trawling the Youth & Policy archive, now online in its entirety, and there you can find evidence of this resistance in two articles from the time –  Mike Heathfield’s ‘The Youth Work response to lesbian and gay youth’ in Youth and Policy 23, Winter 1987/88  and Peter Kent-Baguley’s fierce polemic,’One Too Many’ in Youth & Policy 24, Spring 1988.

This is a bit rushed. Other folk of the time might have links to other materials.

But for a living example of where the struggle is up to in 2017 and the strides made, see, for example,  the Proud Trust – home of LGBT+ youth

proud trust

Which way for the arts in youth work? Frances Howard explores

by Tony Taylor

 

Given the constant pressure for youth work to prove itself, I’ve often found myself thinking, ‘never mind youth work, how do you ever prove that the arts in schools are worth doing?’  Faith in the oft hidden benefits of the creative process is required, hence, given their instrumental view of the human condition, the neoliberals’ disregard for music education in schools or their hostility to the humanities in Higher Education. In this light, the latest piece in the revamped Youth and Policy by Frances Howard is revealing.

arts award

Drawing on findings from an ethnographic study of three youth projects, which used the young people’s Arts Award, her article, ‘The arts in youth work: A spectrum of instrumentality?’, explores the tension between the instrumental and the expressive in our practice.

She begins:

The current emphasis on structured activities, achievable measurable outputs and providing value for money for both youth and arts projects are situating them in risky terrain. Public-funding and evidence-based policy-making since New Labour have meant that arts and youth work programmes have become increasingly instrumentalised. The arts are frequently referred to in youth work as a ‘tool’, vehicle, medium or means, however we should be highly critical of any relationship between cause and effect that may ignore the often unaccountable complexities within young people’s lives.

She concludes:

We need to be more critical about informal and arts education’s claims of impact and consider that an emphasis on achievable measurable outputs and value for money can endanger the sustainability and future funding of both youth and arts projects. It is important that we interrogate key assumptions about the arts and young people as a ‘social project’ and that we consider how to influence future policy, so that it begins to value more human factors in its measurements. But, how can the academic field influence these measurements and weave new pathways towards demonstrating the value of young people’s journeys rather than outcomes? It might be that engaging with the expressive arts is an ideal way of doing just this.

As ever it would be smashing to get some responses to this analysis, especially from workers, for whom the arts are an integral part of their practice.

 

Celebrating Youth & Policy 4 – Positive for Youth: Is policy meeting practice? Pat Kielty explores.

by Tony Taylor

Y&P

In the last of the first four pieces on the revamped Y&P website, with a new youth policy evidently in the offing, Pat Kielty subjects the past Coalition’s ‘Positive for Youth’ rhetoric to critical scrutiny.

posfor youth

Beginning:

As we await the release of a new youth policy, this article considers Positive for Youth and explores how political rhetoric relates to practice. This is done by considering three key policy concepts; respect, empowerment and belonging. These notions are complex, contested and clearly not restricted to the field of youth work. As such, a complete analysis is beyond the scope of the piece but there will be a commitment to view them from the paradigm of youth work and young people.

All quotes within this article are taken directly from current youth policy or from young people. Focus group research was conducted with members of the Thurrock Youth Cabinet (TYC) and Riverside Youth Club (RYC) in Tilbury. Research participants were asked to consider the identified notions in the context of their lives and the youth work provision they attend.

Concluding:

This article aims to give some critical consideration to a selection of values contained within youth policy. It was suggested earlier, there is a discourse in Positive for Youth around the young person undergoing individual transformation. As such, they are to become ‘empowered’, to develop and receive ‘respect’ and obtain a ‘sense of belonging’. The fundamental concern here is the lack of attention given to these complex notions. Policy does also not take account of the wider political and social factors, the environment of the young person and the understated role of association.

From a practical perspective, I would support the view that respect, empowerment and belonging do have relevance to youth work. However, I believe these need careful deliberation, exploration and application both from the worker and the young person. Claims without dialogue and rhetoric based on assumption need to be avoided. Freire (1972) states that dialogue involves respect. It should not involve one person acting on another, but rather people working with each other. Youth policy appears to place a number of requests on young people, but perhaps policy makers should reflect on a simple but powerful message:

They should listen to us more. (Member RYC)

Voice of Youth co-op looking for volunteers

by Tony Taylor

Message from Tania de St Croix

Hello friends,
We need some new volunteers for our fantastic youth workers’ co-op in Hackney, London. We are writing to you because we think you might be interested yourself or know somebody who might be interested – if so, please see below, forward this email to anyone who might be interested, and put up the attached PDF or Word poster version if you have anywhere to put it. Ideally we would love to hear back before mid-August as we would like to organise a volunteer induction session before the autumn.
Thanks so much!

voy-logo

S.O.S. Voice of Youth!!!
Volunteers needed for youth work co-op in Hackney

Be part of something amazing!
No bosses, great mutually supportive team including local young people – experience genuine co-operative working!
We are looking for experienced youth workers who want to support our way of working…
… and for people who want to gain experience in open-access youth work!

Voice of Youth is a special organisation. We do things differently: we work cooperatively, our work is rooted in young people’s needs and wishes, and we avoid funding that involves meeting targets or defining young people as problems. We were set up in 2011 by local young people and youth workers. We are a committed group of volunteers, we have around 30 fantastic young people aged 8-18 taking part each week, and funding for a project using creative activities to get young people talking about social issues. But we need more volunteers to help us stay open!

Interested? You would need to be available all or most Wednesday evenings, 5:30-9:30 pm, term-time from Autumn 2017. Our work relies on trusting relationships with young people and within the staff team, so we ask you to commit to 6 to 12 months if at all possible. Have a look at our website to find out more about us: http://www.voice-of-youth.org

Still interested? Send us an email and we’ll have an informal chat and tell you more! Please contact tania1.voy@gmail.com or any VOY volunteers or youth workers you know, preferably by mid-August ‘17.

Who can be a VOY volunteer? Anyone aged 16+. We aim to reflect the community we work in, and we particularly welcome Black and Minority Ethnic applicants, local young people, and EVERYONE of ANY background who is keen to work with young people on their terms, valuing their views and perspectives. All volunteers need a DBS (criminal record) check – an unrelated criminal record is no problem, but please discuss this with us in advance. Travel expenses available, please ask for details.

Line Manager orders vulnerable, young people to be well and good in Slough

by Tony Taylor

Ever since the emergence of IDYW we’ve been arguing that targeted intervention into young people’s lives, involving referred caseloads and prescribed targets, is the antithesis of a process-led, person-centred youth work. I’ve written a number of pieces making this point at length. Why did I bother? Leave aside its illiteracy the following advert, posted on July 13, says it all.

 

slough

Ta to telegraph.co.uk

 

Targeted Youth Worker
Salary/Rate£24,000 – £27,000/annum /Agency Goldteam Recruitment Ltd 
Job title: Target Youth Worker /Location: Slough Salary: up to £13.63 per hour

The employer is a Local Authority/Borough Council who are going through massive projects within various specifically within Health and Wellbeing, which makes this an exciting time to join. Projects are developed to meet objectives set by the Council’s objectives.

The employer is seeking some one to join their Wellbeing and Social Care departments to work with vunerable young adults from the age of 11 to 19 year olds to proactivily encourage, motivate, and inspire them to achieve objectives set by the line manager.

The candidate will need to be:

A car driver

Has experience of working with young people in a targeted way, would have a caseload of vulnerable 11 to 19 year olds.

Preferred qualification would be JNC in Youth work or Social work qualification.

Please forward your CV

Thanks to Justin Wyllie for the link and for the following comment.

‘Objectives set by the line-manager? Objectives, which the ‘targeted youth worker’ will ‘inspire’? It is Stalinist – down to the completely obvious temptation to forge the ‘results’. In fact – worse than ‘Stalinist’ – because there targets related to physical output – here they are messing with peoples’ heads. (It also shows a total ignorance of how people work – that is – if you want people to ‘get well’ you have to work with them collaboratively. And this is the ‘Well Being and Social Care’ department.’

Celebrating Youth & Policy 3 – Bernard Davies on ‘youth volunteering – the new panacea’

by Tony Taylor

 

Y&P

There are few people better placed to put today’s interpretations of  volunteering and social action under the microscope than Bernard Davies, author of a trilogy of ‘Histories of the Youth Service in England.’ Drawing on his extensive historical research Bernard seeks to interrogate policy and practice in an arena, which has come to be seen as simply ‘a good thing’.

Youth volunteering: the new panacea?

 

20170317-_DSC1324

Bernard in discussion with Jon Ord- Ta to Justin Wyllie for the image

 

He begins:

Governments of all parties have long been keen to get young people to volunteer – that is, to give some of their time freely to a worthy cause or activity. Papers and reports going back at least fifty years have been urging them to offer themselves for what was at the time often called ‘community service’. One of these, from the Youth Service Development Council entitled Service by Youth and dated December 1965, prompted me even then to ask: So – is this another attempt to tame the young? (Davies, 1967).

At one point he poses these questions:

How far, for example, are young people engaging on a genuinely voluntary basis – that is, outside adult authority pressures – given that one survey has suggested that in 2015 nearly 75 percent of the participants found their way into volunteering via their school or college? (Offord, 2015b; 2016b).
How far are the programmes’ educational interventions building from and on the interests and concerns brought to them by the young people who are actually participating?
How far are the programmes starting from the process-focused presumption that, in their own right, relationship-building and interpersonal responsiveness – young person to young person and young person to adult – require at least as much dedicated attention as task- and programme-completion?

I hope Bernard’s piece gets the attention and response it deserves, not least from those, for whom youth volunteering is without contradiction.

 

 

Celebrating Youth & Policy 2 – Tania de St Croix bidding goodbye to NCS?

by Tony Taylor

Y&P

The second of our pieces from the new-look Y&P sees Tania de St Croix continuing her incisive and provocative analyses of Cameron’s vanity project, once called by Tim Loughton in a phrase of utter ignorance ‘the fastest growing social movement in Europe’, namely, the National Citizen Service. Tania gave a version of this argument to our recent IDYW seminars in Manchester and London. Certainly, its sense of the contradictions within NCS will feed into a discussion paper we are preparing, which will seek to explore future scenarios for youth work in a turbulent political climate.

Time to say goodbye to the National Citizen Service?

 

DeStCroixT-Cropped-146x159

Tania de St Croix

 

 

Tania writes:

Until recent political events, the practice of re-imagining youth work – thinking in a utopian way about what youth work could, or should, become – may have been a creatively rich exercise, yet it sometimes felt futile, at least beyond the very local scale. In the light of the recent general election campaign and results, and without over-romanticising the possibilities for electoral politics, it is now not only reasonable but even urgent for practitioners, activists and researchers to think seriously and practically about what kind of youth work policy and practice we would like to see, and how we might get from here to there.

She asserts:

In this context, reviewing the NCS may not appear to be the most pressing priority for the field. However, a re-imagined youth policy that does not question the basis of NCS would be both problematic and contradictory. Just as local authority youth services were, quite rightly, the target of robust criticism by progressives in the past (for example, for being overly bureaucratic, too ready to see young people as ‘problems’ to be ‘fixed’, insufficiently self-critical, and too quick to conform to the policy priorities of the day), today the NCS receives the bulk of government money and support for youth work. As such, it must be subjected to critical scrutiny.