There are also ongoing debates in their forums, the most recent you can find here. There is also discussion on the Critically Chatting blog, and some previous discussion on here around this time last year. So its a pretty long ongoing debate and as I’ve said previously the biggest surprise for me is that its even a debate at all. The idea that people who choose to work with young people in informal settings and get paid for doing so, but do not and even will not work weekends is absurd.

Picking out some of the points raised from the CYP Now survey (paraphrased):

• “Working at weekends will affect our personal/family lives”
• “We do not have the funding to provide activities at weekends”
• “Other projects during the week would have to close because of limited resources”
• “It’s not ‘real’ youth work its just babysitting/soft policing”
• “young people are all drunk at weekends so we can’t work with them/it’s not safe for staff to deal with drunk young people”
• “Young people only want disco’s/sports/somewhere to hang around at weekends and that’s not youth work”

Working at weekends will affect our personal/family lives

Of course this has some truth but it’s also the case for countless other people who work in the NHS, retail and catering, let alone those who work away for periods of time such as in the armed forces. Also what is actually being asked of youth workers – to spend whole weekends away from their homes or to spend a couple of hours running a club or project? I spent many weekends away from my children working on residentials but I got that time back during the week – bottom line, a selfish and weak argument.

“We do not have the funding to provide activities at weekends”

I’m not aware of any funder I’ve ever applied to stipulating that projects they funded had to be during the week or at weekends. The closest there would have been to such a requirement is that you need to make provision when and where it’s needed – so why is magic weekend money needed? what’s wrong with the funding already available to run services?!

“Other projects during the week would have to close because of limited resources”

As per previous answer and er….. obviously! Isn’t this why managers are paid more money – to manage the resources available and ensure they’re available as most needed?

“It’s not real youth work its just babysitting/soft policing”

Crap! – Crap and an argument that’s quickly become tiresome. The reality of youth work is everyone has a different idea of why youth workers do what they do – some parents see it as babysitting for older children, some people see it as something to keep kids off the street (and if they didn’t a great deal of youth projects wouldn’t exist so bear that in mind when getting on high horses about not being a babysitter), the fact is none of that matters – what matters is how youth workers use the time available to them to work with young people. Others see it as provision to keep young people off the streets, youth workers use that time to do some good purposeful work with young people – what’s the problem?

“young people are all drunk at weekends so we can’t work with them/it’s not safe for staff to deal with drunk young people”

This is ludicrous – a profession supposedly dedicated to challenging stereotypes and prejudices comes right out with its own. The only thing this argument illustrates is that those using it have had a very limited experience of trying to work with young people. Yes it may be the core group you usually work with go out on Fridays and get drunk – what about all the other young people who you don’t usually work with? have they even been asked whether they’d like something to do at weekends? (I very much doubt it)

“Young people only want disco’s/sports/somewhere to hang around at weekends and that’s not youth work”

No it’s not youth work. Lets face it you studied for 3 years for a degree – you’re far too qualified and educated to be seen running disco’s and kickabouts on Saturdays. Or maybe that education didn’t give you the imagination and creativity to see how to adapt those activities enjoy doing in such a way that it provides opportunities for their personal development?

Overall these are weak arguments, they’re also arguments I don’t think should be happening. This evening my local cricket club will provide coaching for 70 – 80 local young people, many of these will also play on Sunday morning – all supported by volunteers. That’s people who are not paid but still give up their weekends.

Of course sport isn’t “youth work” is it? Well no, it’s not – but if ever asked to recommend if a young person joins a youth club or a sports club I’d recommend the sports club every time and in my opinion the debate should now move away from youth work and move towards how funding can instead be made available to support sports, arts and other local projects to develop their provision at weekends, afterall young people seem to actually like those things!

PS if you think I’m being harsh and youth workers have a raw deal take a look at this comparison:

Youth Worker: Starting Salary £18,807  “Holiday allowances are generous – a minimum of six weeks a year. Hours are flexible.” “Working hours vary, with occasional weekend and evening duties”

Adult Nurse: Starting Salary £19,166  “Working hours in hospitals typically include regular unsocial hours.”

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My main reason though is that I believe society should work in such a way that it values children and young people as they are – children and young people, not ‘adults of the future’, and certainly not by making them adults sooner by way of justifying them having opinions that matter. Their opinions should matter anyway.

Well apparently not in Parliament where 100 Cub Scouts were prevented from holding a protest in the House of Commons on the grounds they’re not allowed to vote. To be fair there are MP’s fighting the case for young people to be heard and it’s put best in this quote from Martin Salter MP:

The Reading West MP, who organised Mr Bercow’s campaign to be Speaker, said: “Once again the House of Commons has shown what a deeply conservative and out of touch institution it is capable of being.

“On the one hand we have an excellent Parliamentary Education Unit which actively encourages the engagement of schools and young people.

“However, yet another arm of this arcane bureaucracy appears to be doing all it can to slam the door in the face of the young people from the Scouting movement who simply want to press their case with their Members of Parliament.”

BBC News website

It’s good to see the case being fought for children and young peoples views to be heard, personally I hope to see much more of that and maybe a little less focus on just those aged 16+

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Although the content of our Break the Cycle advert is hard hitting, we want people to recognise that for some children this is a harsh reality and that without suitable and earlier intervention this cycle will keep repeating itself.

We thought you might be interested to know we are now rerunning the ad and would like to gauge your reaction to some of the information we are releasing with it.

The real costs of child custody:
If the Government invested in these troubled children much earlier it could cut youth crime and save the taxpayer millions.

I won’t repeat my thoughts as they haven’t changed since they originally ran the ad, here’s some comments via facebook though expressing thoughts from others.

The other request is for a promotion of a book by John Muncie ‘Youth and Crime”. I haven’t read it so can’t really comment but apparently in it “Muncie suggests that to understand youth crime, we must understand the adult obsession with youth behaviour. The book looks at a number of visual case-studies, looking at the media’s portrayal of young people. It notes the impact articles have made, such as red top headlines like “scourge of feral youngsters.””

There’s a slideshow to go with the book launch with some interesting stats on slide 15

Its difficult to make the link between the ‘obsession with youth behaviour’ from those few slides so I guess you need to read the book to discover how that argument works.

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Full details on their website

and below is their promo film explaining what its all about. Entries can be submitted until the 15th August so plenty of time to get something together with young people you’re working with if they don’t already have something (could make a nice summer project).

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“It is my ambition to create a Britain in which there is a clear expectation that all young people will undertake some service to their community, and where community service will become a normal part of growing up.

That would mean young people being expected to contribute at least 50 hours of community service by the the age of 19. This will build on the platform provided by citizenship classes in schools.”

There was talk of something like this months before Gordon Brown became Prime Minister and I expressed my thoughts some months back that volunteering is not volunteering when done for reward or compulsion.

Presumably whoever it is thats advising the Government on these things feels the current volunteering schemes are failing if they now feel the need to have to force young people to “volunteer”. He doesn’t actually call it volunteering now, instead its ‘community service’ (that thing we normally associate with criminals).

I’m not sure what to make of the idea – obviously I’m in favour of encouraging young people to volunteer in their local communities and have been doing so for over 10 years now, but why its felt there’s a need to enforce this upon young people rather than support and encourage them to do so freely ie. genuine volunteering I don’t understand – other than that its for political motive rather than a genuine interest in supporting young poeple to thrive in society, which rightly or wrongly is how it comes across.

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We sent over some funding towards children’s school fees last month. In addition to paying school fees:

• Shoes, schoolbags, exercise books, rulers and pens have been purchased for children attending school
• Volunteers have been running workshops in schools to raise awareness about HIV under the name of YOAAM (YoMo Against Aids in Malawi)
• A new volunteer has joined the project
• Some plastic sheeting was purchased to repair the leaking roof of an orphan girl
• Food has been purchased for orphan children

In the photos you can see one of the YOAAM workshops which in Kondwani’s words involved:

“advising young people to have tested their blood so that they can know their status….. doing drama, poems and singing more about the deadly disease AIDS……[with] different prizes given to students who done very well”

It may comes as a shock to see the conditions of the school given that these are the lucky young people who are actually able to attend school. In the other pictures you can see a young girl who’s currently unable to attend school as she’s caring for a baby. The roof of her house had been leaking and Kondwani purchased some plastic sheeting to have this fixed (looks like a giant bin liner under the thatch).

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“if I’m quite frank I don’t think Hear By Rights is an appropriate measure, Young people in school cant mark their own tests, so why should adults, Myself and my team of young advisors actually carried out a evaluation report on our local high school around community cohesion and what we found was where OFSTED the independent body found them to be outstanding for their work with Building Schools For The Future, we found them to be poor”

Which got me thinking wouldn’t it be interesting if OFSTED inspections had to include an inspection by a young person? I gather current inspections should include the inspector seeking to gather the viewpoints of children/young people but it looks very much that the emphasis is on professionals inspecting professionals.

What if instead inspections included a ‘young inspector’ (possibly from a nearby school/youth centre) ‘inspecting’ the young people too? (and adults of course) The aim being to shift the emphasis towards including that young people are an important aspect in the learning/youth work process too. I would imagine the benefits of this wouldn’t just apply to the inspections as those young people involved could return to their own schools/clubs and report back on the things they’ve seen that worked or not and suggest how they could be adapted in their own establishment.

I can’t think of any argument against doing this other than that perhaps OFSTED feel they already cover the young persons perspective adequately. As an aside on the OFSTED site theres an online survey that under 19’s can use to feedback on the OFSTED process (its crap! – is there any benefit to asking “we do this good thing – do you think its good?!”).

If you’re familiar with OFSTED inspections it would be interesting to hear thoughts.

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Essentially the campaign looks at developments in the youth work sector over the past thirty years and questions the movement away from what Tony describes as the ‘cornerstones of youth work’. If you’re in agreement with the campaign you can ’sign up’ to indicate your support and there’s a growing list of people already signed up that you can view here.

As yet I haven’t signed up, partly because I’m not a practising youth worker, but mostly because I think my own position is somewhere in between. From the work we’ve done with youth groups across different areas of the UK something that has always stood out is the lack of consistency in the services and style available to young people. So while I agree very much with the need for locally driven approaches I also see the need to try to ensure that young people are able to access good quality youth provision wherever they are, and although I think the balance may currently be wrong I think there is a place for an outcomes based approach to working with young people and towards these things the sharing of information can be useful.

Regardless its good to see the web being used to promote the campaign and hopefully it will help towards building online youth work networks.

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The Real World: Usually part of a sentence like “In the real world we do this”, “or [person] has no idea what its like in the real world”. What the real world actually looks like I’m not sure but it doesn’t seem to involve very many people with wealth or interesting theories. Now given the choice of living in the real world with miserable moaning people, or the unreal one where all the people with lots of money and crazy ideas live which do you prefer?

Say it to my face: Usually said by somebody very loud and usually before you really know them. They like it to be known that “if you’ve got something about me to say, say it to my face”. Which of course is really a measure aimed at preventing you from saying anything about them either in front of or behind their face. My experience of telling people who say this what I think about them to their face is they usually cry.

Blue Sky Thinking: I laughed when I first heard somebody say this (they looked bemused). I thought it was a term made up by comedians having a go at marketing and business types. Then in walked a new boss at my old place of work and we had meetings about ‘blue sky thinking’. I still hear it from time to time (I still smirk).

Empowerment: I thought this had gone away for a bit but it still pops up regularly. “We are going to empower the young people” – really? What ‘power’ is it that you’re transferring over to them? If I could choose a ‘power’ it would be invisibility, then I could hide my face when people speak this kind of crap!

and here’s a précis of the full list featuring the more common ones I’ve heard in youth work circles (and if I’m guilty of ever using them in brackets):

• Advocate
• Best Practice (guilty & recently!)
• Bottom-Up (only in the pub)
• Capacity (regularly)
• Capacity building (only reluctantly because I worked for a “capacity building” charity!)
• Challenge (more usually ‘challenging’)
• Champion
• Cohesiveness
• Collaboration (regularly)
• Community engagement
• Empowerment (never – out of principle!)
• Engagement
• Good practice
• Indicators
• Joined up
• Localities
• Multi-agency
• Outcomes (regularly)
• Output (only when required by funders!)
• Participatory (regularly)
• Partnership working (tended to avoid it especially as it rarely seems to work!)
• Partnerships
• Pathfinder
• Practitioners (constantly)
• Priority
• Quick win
• Service users
• Social exclusion (occasionally, usually to hit a funders interests)
• Sustainable (regularly)
• Sustainable communities
• Thinking outside of the box (I’d usually snigger at this much the same as “blue sky thinking” – its usually said by people who are best left inside their ‘box’)
• Third sector (regularly I’m sure)
• Toolkit (once for a bid and I swiftly changed it to ‘resources’ because everyone knows ‘toolkits’ don’t get used)
• Top-down

The full list is here

Funny that I’d originally drafted a post having a dig at crap terminology and then when one is announced it turns out I use quite a few myself! Mostly of course its cultural and driven by the things funders want to hear you say and so is difficult to avoid, but it does make you think that if even the simple terms are potentially gibberish to those not involved with local authorities and their work how confusing it must be to understand what some people are talking about.

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