I’d worked hard with the “ASBO” group.  They’d been identified by the Anti-Social Behaviour Team as being at risk of becoming entangled within the criminal justice system.  I liked them.  They were quite an elusive little group but they had an interesting collective character. 

God, did they think they were hard.  Proper little tough-nuts who were afraid of no one or no thing but terrified of showing any trace of vulnerability.  I had to use a lot of reverse psychology to get them to believe they wanted me more than I wanted them.  I would dangle carrots but never directly in their direction.  I would never, ever outstay my welcome when I met them on the streets and would always leave them wanting more. 

By the time we had arranged their first activity, we had established a sound relationship.  I enrolled them onto a go-karting programme - a fantastic tool for engaging young people who didn’t readily participate in structured activities.  The go-karting project was kind of social development by stealth.  The activity demanded teamwork.  Listening to instruction would be crucial to their success and they all wanted to succeed in thrashing the other team. 

For me personally, there was a simple sense of achievement from getting the group just to attend the sessions for the 8 weeks we ran the programme.  Simply “being there” was beneficial to their development.  Everything else was a big fat juicy bonus - the language and behaviour modification, the acquisition of new skills and experience and the – uh, I hate to even type the words – accredited outcomes.  A great success!  The next step would be a weekend residential activity.   I wanted to take the group to a distraction-free environment and engage them in some “voice & influence” work.  (God I hate that term!  “Voice & Influence” is just youth work isn’t it?)  This would give me the opportunity to get the issues and the needs of these (more marginalised) young people and present them through the appropriate channels to potentially have some impact on future local initiatives. 

The residential was a fantastic experience and the whole group buzzed about it for months after.  So everything was going well, it seemed.  And it actually came with a fairy-tale ending.  I referred the group to a drama project which they attended for several weeks with good reports from the drama tutor about their development.  So we had now taken the process through its cycle from anti-social street-nuisance to mainstream, structured activity. I was happy. 

Who wouldn’t be? Well, the youth service wasn’t happy at all.  They quite liked the fact that we had accredited a first aid module during the go-karting activity but were very displeased that we hadn’t accredited the residential activity.  They also refused to recognise the value of the information we gathered from the residential activity because it wasn’t a “structured” youth forum. A “structured” youth forum is one where young people meet around a table the same time every week and discuss whatever issue the youth service deem to be appropriate. 

Finally, they didn’t like my group.  Our local area officer called into my office one afternoon and announced quite victoriously that she had banned each and every one of them from the drama project.  She had unexpectedly dropped into the youth club where the drama sessions were being held and had witnessed two of the boys from the group simulating sex and then heard others using foul language. 

There was a long, uncomfortable silence while I waited for her to explain the reasons for banning the group but apparently that was it.  She described them as vile animals with no right to be given the opportunity of using valuable resources.  My first reaction was to log on to the jobseekers website, my second was to say something quite unflattering but I opted for the safest option which was to do and say nothing at all. 

The memories of 4 months hard work flashed before my eyes like that of a drowning man.  Drowning, it would seem in a sea despondency. And there we have a clear example of the great moral impasse.   

I would experience it again a couple of months later with a group I had adopted from the behaviour unit at the local secondary school.  “Give me your worst 8 pupils” I had said.  Within seconds they thrust 8 pupils into my office.  “Take them.  Do as you wish with them.  We care very little what you do with them as long as you just take them”, said the school - in so many words.  

We used to meet once a week on a purely informal basis just getting to know each other.  It was tough going.  The group really were very naughty.  We had some early issues of racist attitudes and language so I thought (as all youth workers should) we could do some kind of anti-racism work with them.  Tall order but I was looking forward to the challenge. 

So, three or four weeks into the project I welcomed my group one afternoon at the beginning of the session and asked two of the resident youth workers to keep an eye on my group for 5 minutes while I took the attendance sheets to the SENCO office.  When I returned the whole group were gone.  In the space of 5 minutes, one of the youth workers had ejected the whole group because one of the members had made a racist comment and the others had laughed. 

So they were excluded from the youth centre indefinitely and reported to the school on an official “racist incident” form and then excluded from school for the rest of the week.  I was very confused.  I was under some optimistic assumption that we targeted young people with issues to engage them in some form of informal social education.  Shouldn’t we be prioritising young people with racist attitudes instead of driving them further underground where we can’t reach them at all?  When I investigated the issue further, it was apparent that one of the youth workers had panicked when they heard the comment because another youth worker was present.  Racism seems to be such a scary subject for youth workers - but that’s a whole new can of worms.  The great moral impasse.  Why are we setting such rigid, idealistic benchmarks when so many of our target group are struggling to get on the first rung of the ladder?  Aren’t we more intelligent than that?     

I loved your report and I couldn't tell you how many bells you rang.

I've just gone through a restructure in the name of IYSS (Integrated Youth Support Service) and I question whether we will continue to struggle with issues as you have outlined. Different services, different agendas, different ways and beliefs of working, lumped together under 4 little letters, IYSS. Surely most people that work in this business do so for the desire to be part of the development of young people. The question is, how do we really integrate services how do we really join in one common goal. Each service is an island and it's only by the personality of an individual that integration happens but this is so small scale.

 We, as workers FOR young people have to find the way. We have to believe we can do it for the benefit of young people, our services and the industry as a whole.

Thanks for typing that! I really enjoyed reading it. It does strike so many similar chords with my personal experiences of working with the "dissaffected" young people. For me personally i often wonder why some people actually started working with young people.

Good way to release some steam Gods lonely youthworker? Are there no ways to vent how you feel to your organisation?

 Hi

Thanks. Your article shows how despite the rhetoric about respecting and 'supporting' young people the drift of policy and practice is the opposite.

It's interesting how you describe how one youth worker felt they had to report the 'incident', which, incidentally sounds like high spirits,  basically out of fear. There seems to be this huge and real fear around about stepping out of the permitted orthodoxies. Everyone is in fear of being accused of something.

It reminds me of meeting with a local authority worker and some young people in a hired computer classroom to teach an IT course. One of the potential students started playing with a mouse and that was it. The course took place in a pokey little office with no proper equipment - and was not a success.

What to do?

Difficult. Remember that the chief function of local authorities is to do nothing with lots of taxpayer's money thereby stifling real community initiatives - and set up your own project?

 +

Reading your article again it makes me so angry. You obviously were doing a good job. It really is heartbreaking that some (at this point I'm self-censoring) ... could stop you.

Keep it up what ever you are doing God's Lonely Youth Worker.

Apple Andy:

Are there no ways to vent how you feel to your organisation?

Hi Andy

I've worked for 2 local authorities in my 16 years as a youth worker.  The first "Youth Service" post was actually my first youth work job.  I was there for a little over 2 years and I left because I grew to feel embarrassed about the way they worked with young people.  It was a bit like extended role play, where you were supposed to play the part of what the youth service expected a youth worker to be like - something resembling a children's tv presenter.  My second experience of working for the "dark side" was several years later.  It was an externally funded post but managed by the Youth Service.  I had hoped that a different authority may present me with a different experience of youth service culture.  It turned out to be exactly the same.  Totally ineffective with the groups it should have been targetting and extremely active with the more functional kids.

Anyway, the point is that I found both organisation extremely hostle towards criticism within the ranks.  Their primary role is to facilitate the strategic aims of someone wearing a suit somewhere in Whitehall and not to innovate.  Building a project around local needs is seen as heresy or dissent.  You build a project around prescribed strategy and then you hope young people will engage with it.    So, no you cannot vent your frustration with statutory youth services.  It is totally unacceptable.   

Justin Wyllie:

...set up your own project?

Hi Justin

I did set up my own project and it enjoyed successful outcomes for the 7 years that it ran.  The problem was the constant stress of finding the next batch of funding.  This got more and more difficult as we entered the era of the ECM dynasty and funding became more prescribed and specialised. 

They were very frustrating years.  We worked with priority target groups (because no one else was) and exceeded all expected outputs... but funding became more difficult to access.  Funding started to present the kind of outputs and expectations that would actively prevent the effective engagement of our target groups. 

The last year of my project was funded through some Connexions NEET funding.  I think if I were to nominate the pinnacle of my disenchantment with the youth work establishment then my brief relationship with the Connexions Circus would be it.  I think whoever wasted the money on this service should be prosecuted and incarcerated.  The very culture of this organisation worked against the engagement of marginalised young people.  Their ethos was illogical and irrelevant and their elevated attitude offensive.  When they offered me a second year of funding I declined.  I’d already lost two - very busy –community-based youth clubs, our DJ school and 2 effective members of staff.  I wasn’t prepared to lose my integrity.

 Hi

Yes. I could regale you and this column with tales of incompetence and cover-up by local authorities.  Just one example: I got employed on a casual basis by my local youth centre to help run a project for which they had just received funding. The manager went sick. The new manager did not know about my employment or about the funding which had been gained as there had been no handover. She was unwilling to contact the funder and admit this (presumably in case the incompetence came to light). I made one call and was told I had been discussed at a meeting - but haven't heard since. This was my third attempt to work there - other attempts included working as a volunteer and giving up when I showed up for a session and the place was closed as the staff member was ill and no attempt had been made to let me know.

This centre has several staff, full and part-time and marvellous facilities - pool room, kitchen, multimedia computer suite, DJ facilities, darkroom and more. All they manage to run are after school clubs like Dance for which students pay £5.00 a session. I think these are just private classes - cetainly it isn't youth work.

They let out rooms to bands to practice but there is no youth work done with them.

There is a bus which goes round the estates - when it is working and staffed - sponsored by a local shopping arcade as  a PR effort. It is sparsely attended but this is all they seem to think important. Apart from this there is no youth work done at all. I've met one committed youth worker there but it seems on the whole that there is a lack of will at management level to do anything. There is an estate just up the road crying out for attention. Apart from the weekly visit by the bus (when it's working and staffed) with its playstation there is no effort to do anything for them.

When the youth service does do anything it is pitiful how much they boast about it for years to come - so few between are the actual projects.

What you say about the youth service being run to satisfy men in suits is sadly true. So long as they can produce figures to pass up the chain they are satisfied. One local voluntary youth project claims (I don't know for sure it is true) that the youth service even added in his member count to their returns.

One of the problems of all this is that it creates a bottle-neck. For example after being disenchanted with the youth service at the youth centre I mention above I wrote to the local town council to ask if they might be interested in funding some work. They replied about all the good work already being done at the local centre - why didn't I join with them? The problem is that so long as the managers can come up with a report which makes it look like something is being done their higher ups and councillors will just believe it.

And ECM. I am currently doing some voluntary work with social services and each meeting with my young person has to result in an ECM form being completed. This is the bureaucratisation of human relations. It is quite simply horrible.

I've tried teaching for the Community Education department and much the same kind of experience there with pointless forms which destroy the autonomy and spontaneity of the person delivering the service by making them into an agent of someone' elses values rather than a trusted transmitter of their own (though it was better run than education or the youth service).

 I've tried teaching for the PRUIS service - more incompetence and spectacular cover-up skills. They made the students take an accredited course to try to win glory from the higher ups and then bungled the administration of the exam. (Which would be quite funny if they hadn't messed the students about). After I left I walked past the facility where classes were run one day and saw what looked like students left hanging around outside waiting for someone to show up and teach them. Being a disengaged young person waiting for the local authority to do anything for you must be like waiting for Godot. 

Like you I've turned hither and hither. I don't know what to do.

It is also correct as you say that voluntary groups to get funding are increasingly having to become implementers of ECM, learning logs and all the other artificies of the dead hand of the state.I don't know how much we should understand the new 'safeguarding' provisions as an attack on the voluntary sector. Certainly some people will be discouraged from working as volunteers.

The result of all this is that gifted people who are really commited to working with young people will not work in the system . More 'disaffected' young people...But of course the state does not give too hoots about this. It can always put them on ISSP or into child jails which are lucrative industries run by multinational corporations.

I'm interested in looking back at working class schools which existed before compulsory education was introduced in 1871 . They were funded by parents locally. Of couse though this has been killed off because income tax for the public eduation  is compulsory and so people have no money left for this kind of initiative.

The sad thing about this is that one of the points (i thought) about youth work - voluntary and local authority run - is that it linked young people into society. But if young people can only be linked in if a) they all act like teacher's favourite pupil all the time  b) their workers are expected to act as stooges for New Labour's one party state attempt and c) 80% of the projects are run by bungling bureaucrats who couldn't care less so long as they can make it look good on paper, that seems to make it all impossible

The triumph of the state it seems.

all the best

Justin

Justin Wyllie:

And ECM. I am currently doing some voluntary work with social services and each meeting with my young person has to result in an ECM form being completed. This is the bureaucratisation of human relations. It is quite simply horrible.

It’s hilarious isn’t it?  You work with a group of kids who say “We’re bored sh!tless round here cos there’s  nob all to do and the local youthie just wants to make us talk about safe-sex and make us fill-in portfolios for certificates in making buns”.  Where do you fit that into the 5 outcomes then?

Justin Wyllie:

One local voluntary youth project claims (I don't know for sure it is true) that the youth service even added in his member count to their returns.

Ha!  Sounds very familiar.  That happened recently to me.  My current post was a blank canvass when I started in January.  It’s a 2 year contract and I have no staff and very, very little funding – less than £300 per month to cover 2 communities.  The only way I could do any street-based youth work (within the guidelines of policy and good practice) was to couple-up with the Youth Services local Area Officer.   He’s a nice enough bloke and it was useful getting him to show me round and introduce me to a couple of the local rogues but after 3 or 4 sessions he had outlived his use so I made my excuses and ended the detached sessions. 

By the end of January, I decided to open up a youth club at the local community centre.  I assembled a couple of volunteers and opened the doors to a cold, dark winter evening... and in came 29 young people.  I’ll be honest and admit that it was a chaotic evening but we maintained a good vibe throughout and took our first step into what would become a great relationship with the group.  So, 40 minutes from the end of a 3 hour session the Area Officer turned up.  He hung around and chatted to some of the group (which isn’t easy when the happy hardcore is turned to maximum volume) and then left 10 minutes before the end of the session. 

I was quite surprised when he turned up at my office the following day and asked me for the signing-in sheet for the session.  I reluctantly gave him a copy out of some sense of professional co-operation.  He did this for the following 3 weeks until I got a little weary of the one-way relationship.  All “take” and no “give”.  Mind you, there was no way he could reciprocate because his youth club had been closed for the last 3 months due to a staff shortage – and is still closed now, 6 months on.  He manages to maintain his contact stats by supporting a weekly “behaviour improvement” session at school.  Is this youth work?  Where’s the voluntaryism? 

Anyways, enough of this nocturnal ranting.  I’d better see if I can beat my insomnia some other way.   

So the stories of Statutory Youth Service can go on and on. I work for the Statutory Service and would not offer an argument to anyone who has written here.

But I will say that within this service, there are a few (very few) people who battle with all that has been said. We work under these conditions trying to do 'youth work', trying to promote a good working partnership within the Voluntary sector. Yes it's hard, yes it's frustrating, yes we want to give up but unfortunatly because we believe, we really do believe then giving up our truely effective partnerships knowing that everything will fold is  really hard to do.

It will get to me, I've battled for years, I'm in constant arguments, putting forward cases, reasons, suggestions trying to get the service to realise that we start with young people and from that we can collect data and not start with data and then do youth work. It gets to me, after all these years, I know I have very little time left, and the way I feel probably out of this industry.

Knowing I tried, a relentless pursuit of remembering that the clue to youth work is in the title 'Youth' work and not 'data' work makes me proud of trying to fly the flag in a Statutory service.

 So the only advice I can offer is, there are some good workers in the statutory service, soem that still remember what the job is about. Seek them out, whilst there hands are tied to some extent, they will try all they can to make it work, often at some pains to the self.

Seek them out, Find them and give them some hope

Just me:

But I will say that within this service, there are a few (very few) people who battle with all that has been said. We work under these conditions trying to do 'youth work', trying to promote a good working partnership within the Voluntary sector. Yes it's hard, yes it's frustrating, yes we want to give up but unfortunatly because we believe, we really do believe then giving up our truely effective partnerships knowing that everything will fold is  really hard to do.

Hi Just You

You didn’t have to tell me about the credibility of Youth Service youth workers.  It is the service itself that is corrupted by misguided strategy.  I know some incredible workers all with a great passion for the more challenging end of the youth work spectrum.  It is heartbreaking seeing their potential stifled by the tight bureaucratic grip of the statutory services.  My main worry (and I think I have already mentioned this) is that good youth workers are feeling disenchantment with the service and good administrators are thriving.  I think we’re already vastly outnumbered, the next step is extinction.

In Praise of Insomnia and Hope!

On Friday at the North-West In Defence of Youth Work gathering in Preston, amidst many things, we touched briefly on the need for workers to tell their stories of practice. Drowning in the irrelevance of oft-dishonest quantitative data, we yearned for the qualitative, the uncertain tale. We mourned the lack of such anecdotal, yet analysed practice. So my thanks to gods only, Justin, Apple Andy and Just Me for being psychic and kicking of such a pertinent discussion. Hopefully others will join in - not only with the harsh truth about how conformist much youth work is, but also with examples of how they have resisted being incorporated into today's behavioural modification programmes.

 As for Justin's plea to seek out those swimming against the tide, I don't think I am being opportunistic by drawing attention yet again to the In Defence campaign, which is focused on encouraging the building of local, regional and perhaps even national networks of support. As I type these words close to a hundred workers are meeting in Newcastle to discuss the defence and development of a 'democratic and emancipatory' youth work.

Thanks for the stimulus - much appreciated.

 http:indefenceofyouthwork.wordpress.com