As youth workers struggle with their target-driven agendas, they can take heart from the gathering backlash against the New Labour project for public services - and the high-profile names it is attracting.

Read: Break the shackles of New Labour's policy.

It will come as no surprise that I endorse Bernard's succinct summing up of the contradictions now faced by youth workers and their management. What is now more interesting than further analysis from such as myself is the continuing and overwhelming silence of those within youth work still wedded to the target culture. Who is willing from within the ranks of the Youth Work bureaucracy to step forward and defend the selling of its soul to the ideology of the market? Tony Taylor

The ideology of the market is rife throughout our work!

When I was a student in the thrid year our lecturers caused a lot of heart ache for some because they went on strike for more money and refused to mark our work. As none of them are on the poverty line, is that essentially selfish? What about the current discussions about how community and youth workers want better pay, but at the same time are unwilling to take on the target driven responsibility of other professionals?

People are "still wedded to target culture", I would suggest, because it pays better.

If there was a job offering £5000 a year less, with less chance of career progression would you take it, if it meant beauracracy was at a minimum?

Equally I would wonder if there is also some glamour around some elements of target driven work. You see it on these boards all the time, sneaky little 'my young people are more deprived and tick more boxes than your young people', and 'ohh that may work with your young people, but mine are soooo disaffected that would never work'.

Not only are their no targets to reach, but their are is little to brag about when working with middle class children who are doing quite well in school.

I know I am being cynical about the cyncism rife in our profession - but does no one ever step back and think sometimes we have completely lost sight of what we are trying to do, we should quit our jobs, move into the communities we serve and die there in a 19th century settlement stylee?

Liking your style Tony - bring it on ;-)

Personally I think I'm sat comfortably somewhere in the middle, and I by no means intend that as a compromise. I'm in favour of standards, I can see benefits of having targets, although I prefer measuring progress as a method rather than benchmarking. I'm not in favour of accreditation where it has no genuine value or where it hasn't been earned, but I do believe young people should gain recognition for achievements beyond academia.

It would be nice to hear opposing views though so that it could begin to form a debate - good luck trying.....

As you can see from my post above - I am very against the current style of youth work and all it stands for - not jsut the target driven bits that get in our way! ('Very against' is too strong - but I think there is a better way where money is not involved).

 But for the sake of playing devil's advocate for mas I can give some fairly sound reasons why target driven work is not all bad:

1) It ensure accountability and standards. Too often informal education has not happened in our youth clubs. Youth workers are taking public money but simply becoming entertainers, or even jsut caretakers, because informal educaiton is an art form that takes practice and it is HARD WORK!!!

2) Unscrupulous youth workers may deliberately exclude the harder-to-deal-with young people and concentrate on those who have fewer issues for the sake of an easy life. Ticking boxes about working with particular issues ensures money is being spent on those who need it most.

3) We have moved beyond a place where professionals are trusted, so why should we trust youth workers? Social workers, doctors, teachers... none are allowed to work as they see fit and all have to give an account for how productive their time has been.

4) It is a quick and easy way to see where we need to improve our sevice and how. It may be that evaluation used to happen informally, and improvements were made, but this is a much more efficient system.

I'll stop now, I'm starting to convince myself!

 Peter

I don't think either of us is convinced.

1. Accountability and Standards

Whilst we might use different words I think we agree about the tough challenge posed in trying to be an artful youth worker. It is why in our Letter, In Defence of Youth Work, we talk about 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.

But I don't think the introduction of targets and predictable outcomes has improved accountability and standards, except in the most trivial quantitative sense. Certainly more statistics can be used to mask practice. Funnily enough I think the more or less accepted idea that in the past we lacked accountability, doesn't fit exactly with my experience. In the early 70' the old-fashioned youth club for which I was responsible saw me having to face a management committee comprised of all the ward councillors [and they almost always came] local primary and secondary heads, social and careers workers, representatives of the voluntary sector from scouts to the rugby league coach etc.. Together with young people I had to explain  and be questioned about what we'd been up to across a monthly meeting lasting a couple of hours. In addition I did all the usual monthly returns and qualitative reports to my management.Was this quite as pathetic as is painted by the new managerial breed, laptop and powerpoint in hand. As for standards improving, we're going to have to define what standards mean.

2. From my conversations with a diversity of workers in the last fortnight I' m not sure about 'unscrupulous', but many youth workers, feeling intimidated and ground down are ticking boxes left, right and centre. The consequent evidence about whatever is pretty dodgy.

3. You're absolutely right to say the other professions are being beaten up too, but has it really been productive? My mum's just been in hospital for 2 months. A consistent dilemma has been the sight of nurses unable to nurse because of the excess of bureaucratic targets demanded of them.

4.As for the market culture leading to improved, efficient services, I can only say pull the other one. Their system is in meltdown.

Peter, don't do 'devil's advocacy', your heart is not in it!

Best wishes

ok, but I tried my best!

However I think your answer to 2. is a politicians answer! i.e. you changed the question! I asked if some youth workers could be unscrupulous and you answered with youth workers feeling fed up of ticking boxes!

I would be interested in your thoughts on my other post however - do you feel that youth/community work has become to 'easy', in the sense that most (not all!) people do it as a job not a vocation?

Maybe this is simply an unconfortable end of a slippery slope that started when workers fought for their own rights harder than those they were working for?

 Peter

Fair cop on my effort to be a politician. Yes I have worked with a few unscrupulous workers, but my point isn't that workers are fed up with ticking boxes, but rather that many  feel intimidated into the tick box culture.

As for vocation and calling I've probably shied away from this way of putting it - probably a knee-jerk antagonism to its religious undertones. Have you seen Tony Jeffs' piece on the Infed site, which analses the sidelining of vocation and calling. It contains passages such as:

The notion that becoming a social worker, teacher, community or youth worker axiomatically entails financial sacrifice, a selfless willingness to serve others, a lifetime commitment to demanding values and possess a high measure of education and 'intellect' is no longer taken as a given. Certainly neither managers nor academics teaching on courses predicating entry into such professions today even hint that this might be the case. Yet once they did. Similar examples can be produced for every welfare occupation, for now this one relating to social work will suffice. In it Towle (1945: 119) unambiguously informed potential recruits they must be the sort of person with

the capacity to live beyond absorption in self and who are inclined towards creative activity …. Workers choose this field of activity because of their readiness to live beyond themselves, their liking and concern for people as individuals, and their impulse to participate in and to contribute to the life of the community.

Rather now colleges and employers accentuate the benefits accruing to the individual from joining the 'profession' and the ease of entry.

See  http://www.infed.org/talkingpoint/retreat_from_calling_and_vocation.htm

As I think about it I feel that in my generation there were those of us, who entered the work wearing a social and political conscience on our sleeve. First and foremost being a youth worker was about a hoped-for political journey with young people, a contribution to the wider good. To our credit most of us were libertarian followers of process so we had no inclination to indoctrinate. But we did have a calling, if you like.

But there were plenty of pragmatic youth workers at that time too. I mustn't romanticise. And to respond to your question it has always been easier to pursue an agenda of social control. And it might well be easier than ever today when the agenda of conformity is spelt out so plainly.

Forgive me, but I'm still thinking about whether a struggle for better wages and conditions has played a part in the abandonment of vocation.

Hope this makes a bit of sense.

Tony,

I understand why you may not like those terms (dare I say them again?) - as I myself am happily working for a church where my faith is a very important motivator I find them very rewarding words! But thank you for posting that article, I have read it and found it helpful.

I would hate to put words in your mouth, but it seems we would agree (and also agree with Mr Jeffs) that having a robust and coherent ideological value base is required if we want to take ourselves out of the 'greedy' and 'selfish' market orientated conditions - Jeffs uses Christian and socialist values, I presume as examples rather than an exhaustive list.

And I love his thrid point in the 'counter culture' section - that workers would grow to embody their craft. Our smoking cessation worker at the children's centre on whose steering group I sit smokes by the front door before the session. How is that right?!?!?!

The problem is, of course, that if we impose personal standards on workers - as Jeffs suggests - people would become fearful that we were heading back to an overly judgemental Victorian era. Yet I believe the pendulum has swung too far. Quartz wrote a book ('Branded') about consumer culture, and in it she shows how extremely hazardous forms of living are justified by society because people are too scared of looking 'judgemental', or not being 'tolerant' enough. Her example is obesity amongst children. Do we want to reduce their, or their parents, self esteem? No. But should it be socially acceptible for young children to pile on life threatening amounts of weight?

But Tony Jeffs has managed to verbalise my arguement very well. We do need people with a sense of calling - who have an ideology that drives them which they believe will make the conditions for those they work with better, to the extent they are willing to make large financial, familial and time-related sacrifices.

Finally, from your continued musings in your last paragraph- Jeffs would seem to think that we have this in reverse. Actually a retreat from vocation has caused us to be preoccupied with improving our own conditions rather than those we work for.