Workforce reform and the introduction of a new

‘generic worker’

In Government’s five year strategy for education published last

year reference was made to the notion of ‘educare’:

Particularly in the earliest years, children learn through play

and exploration, and making an artificial distinction between
education and childcare is unhelpful. Our aim is, wherever
possible, to bring together nursery education and childcare
into a single integrated offer for pre-school children –
‘educare’ (Ch.2, para. 15)

This theme reappeared in a different guise in the recently

published Children’s Workforce Strategy (DfES 2005a) as the
new teacher’ or ‘social pedagogue’. The document asserts that
the term social pedagogue’ ‘applies to a broad range of services
such as child care, early years, youth work/residential care and
play settings. It applies to the overall support for children’s
development and focuses on the child as a whole person,
bringing together education, social care and health’ ibid.: 50).
It further suggests that the emphasis of this professional
model is on

… learning, care and upbringing being inseparable,

interconnected parts of life. The child is seen as a social being,
connected to others and at the same time with his or her own
distinctive experiences and knowledge. The social pedagogue
works closely with individuals and groups to enable them to
develop their potential as social beings.

Significantly all this has been underplayed in Youth Matters.

The current ministerial team appear to have decided to step
back from pushing this element of the agenda at this point.
The green paper proposals are seen as having direct
implications for the workforce in two areas:
 potential changes when funding and responsibility for
Connexions work passes from Connexions Partnerships to
Local Authorities; and
 changes to both roles and practices through the development
of an integrated youth support service. (HM Government
2005 [Youth Matters], para 270)

With regard to the second, the green paper states that ‘an
integrated service will inevitably mean changes for many of
the workforce currently located in Connexions, Youth Services
or in targeted support programmes, whether they are
employed by Connexions Partnerships, Local Authorities, the
voluntary and community sector or private providers’ (ibid.:
para 273). In an important paragraph workforce reform
emerges:

Local partners will need to agree the right balance between

targeted and universal support and make clear the distinctive
roles for each of the professions and services engaging with
and supporting young people. We believe that, in the future,
the focus should be on skills and competencies needed to
deliver services for young people rather than on organisational
and employment structures that have led to a proliferation of
new, specific roles in response to individual initiatives. This
means employers will need to look afresh at the mix of skills in
their workforce compared to the local analysis of what young
people need. Creating a better fit between these elements
should enable frontline professionals and practitioners to use
their time more effectively. (ibid.: para 274)

Some commentators have sought relief in the paper’s

statement that ‘Within this remodelling we anticipate a new
and a reinvigorated role for youth workers’ – but later
comments in Youth Matters indicate a desire to build on
existing skills and ‘developing them to meet new
challenges’ (ibid., para 277). The paper continues:

We need to bring the skills of the workforce closer to the needs

of teenagers and remove the barriers that can frustrate
workers in the current system. We are committed to
developing more coherent, attractive career pathways for
everyone working with children and young people. These
pathways will be based on a new single qualifications
framework for the children’s workforce, underpinned by a
common core of skills and knowledge, as set out in the
Children’s Workforce Strategy.

If this line holds then there will considerable overlap with

elements of the youth worker role currently envisaged within
the Lifelong Learning Sector Skills Council and the new Sector
Skills Council for children’s services. This council, the strategy
document announced, ‘will lead in the development of a
common core of skills, knowledge and competence for all who
work with children, young people and families, and a
complementary set of qualifications’ (DfES 2004a, Ch. 2., para
41).

The role of voluntary and community organizations

Youth Matters asserts that provision is strongest where ‘we

take the best from the public sector, the private sector and the
voluntary sector’ (HM Government 2005 [Youth Matters]:
para 92). It continues, ‘We want to see children’s trusts at the
heart of these developments, orchestrating a mixed economy
of services and opportunities for young people’. This is an
interesting form of words – it places children’s trusts, as the
commissioner of  services, at the centre of provision. Yet when
we look at youth work – the vast bulk of provision receives
little or no government money and has little inclination or
need to attend to government policy in terms of aims and
activities. Children’s trusts will be marginal to their existence.
While it is possible to introduce something like a framework
for the vetting of workers with children and young people
within voluntary organizations and community groups (e.g.
DfES 2005c), it is really not possible at this moment to direct
them in any meaningful way. Attempting to do so undermines
civic society and would alienate significant political forces.
The usual route of influence taken by recent governments has
been through offering some form of resource or funding
incentive if organizations follow their policy. However, the
amount of money on offer overall is small. As a recent
National Audit Office Report states: ‘Although the sector is a
prominent provider in some areas of public services, it
nonetheless accounts for only around 0.5 per cent of central
government expenditure’ (2005: 1).  Those agencies and
groups that accept significant state funding (and the
conditions involved) have increasingly become incorporated
into state apparatus.

As a result voluntary and community organizations tend to

form a sort of residual category in government thinking. A nod
has to be made in their direction – but taking them and the
role they play in democratic societies seriously would involve
fundamental shifts, for example, allowing local groups
freedom to decide how best to work and what to do when they
receive state funding; recognizing that building social capital is
a slow process;  and moving away from targets and outcomes.
The ‘commissioning’ model proposed in Youth Matters is
completely inappropriate if the aim is to strengthen civic
society. These are shifts that the new Labour project has
difficulty accommodating.

One of the largely unspoken assumptions in, and

consequences of, Youth Matters is that the voluntary and
community sector, alongside the commercial sector, will be
the main providers of ‘safe and enjoyable places in which to
spend time’. Little or nothing is said about how these places
are to be ‘orchestrated’ by children’s trusts – and pressures on
the provision of purposeful activity and on work with targeted
individuals and groups will mean that money does not flow in
this direction.

Youth Matters/the Green Paper for youth – some issues

While there are some positive aspects to Youth Matters, at this

point we want to focus on five, key, areas of critique that can
be made of the analysis and proposals in Youth Matters, the
Green Paper for Youth. Taken together they reveal the paper at
this point as fundamentally flawed and deeply problematic.

Youth Matters: young people treated as consumers and

potential workers – not citizens

In the leaks and discussions prior to the finalizing of Youth

Matters numerous references were made to the need to
involve young people in decision-making. There was a
proposal, for example, to establish local grant schemes that
would allow young people to apply for money to improve a
space to meet their needs. However, as with much of the
previous practice with regard to Connexions
and Transforming Youth Work (DfEE 2001, DfES 2002) a
good deal of participation talked about is in the service of
better improving ‘delivery’ rather than in the cultivation of
political and civic society. Furthermore, young people (or
rather in Youth Matters’ terms ‘teenagers’) are put in the role
of consumers of ‘positive activities’. They shop around with
their opportunity card and buy what they want. There is an
interesting reference back in all this. The term ‘teenager’ broke
through into public debates in Britain around concerns about
the spending power of young people (see Abrams 1959). That
same spending power is not a worry for the government, but
rather a means of allocating resources. Youth Matters claims
that the government wants ‘more young people to take part in
these activities by empowering them to shape what is on offer’
(HM Government 2005 [Youth Matters]d, chapter 3 –
summary). However the way that this will happen is largely
through the activities they consume. This orientation
undermines any concern some of the authors may have had
with fostering social capital and civic society. It is
consumption and activity that matter – not association.

There couldn’t be a starker contrast with the emphasis upon

association, democratic participation and the whole person in
the classic government statement of youth work – The
Albemarle Report (MoE 1960). It began by endorsing John
Maud’s earlier statement of purpose:

To offer individual young people in their leisure time

opportunities of various kinds, complementary to those of
home, formal education and work, to discover and develop
their personal resources of body, mind and spirit and thus the
better equip themselves to live the life of mature, creative and
responsible members of a free society. (Ministry of Education
1960: 36)

To achieve this the Albemarle Committee then laid a special

emphasis on association, training and challenge as aims. ‘To
encourage young people to come together into groups of their
own choosing is the fundamental task of the Service’, they
argued (1960: 52). All this is too untidy and unpredictable for
the authors of Youth Matters. What is more it misses the point
for them. At root they are not interested in young people as
participants in social and political processes, not interested in
them as spiritual beings; not interested in fostering a free
society. Part of the problem here is the framework provided
by Every Child Matters (DfES 2003) and the Connexions
strategy and the way these chime with new Labour concerns.
The five Every Child Matters’ outcomes – wanting children
and young people to be healthy, stay safe, enjoy and achieve,
make a positive contribution and achieve economic well-being
– constitute a rather limited vision of what makes for human
happiness. They also tend to get reduced to the second and
fifth of these. Safety (as much for the system as the child and
young person) and economic growth and competitiveness
provide much of the framework for policy debates.