Since 1961, Britain has had a national youth citizens’ service. It operates 365 days a year and participation in it is voluntary. For every £1 invested in it, at least £8 worth of voluntary activity is generated. The service organises around 500,000 committed adult volunteers to support it, 40,000 trained youth support workers and more than 7,000 qualified youth workers. Their endeavours generate hundreds of millions of hours of voluntary youth involvement every year.
This service is a partnership between the voluntary sector and local authorities. It is the one service working with young people that Ofsted has said is consistently improving. Funding agencies concur that youth workers’ relationship-building work designed to provide youngsters with personal and social education is highly cost effective.
Without this service, there would be no British Youth Parliament. There would be no national infrastructure of young people’s centres. There would be no supportive contact work on our streets. Without this service, there would be no really successful anti-gang work. It is responsible for initiatives such as youth councils that build self-esteem and pride among those who have never previously experienced these things.
The youth service has built tens of thousands of social action groups. It has given a civic voice to numerous young people. It has involved thousands in creative community projects. It has helped to heal divided communities. This long-established national service developed a system of international exchange as part of the reconciliation of post-war Europe. Youth workers are often the only organisers of international travel beyond the confines of local housing estates. Hundreds of youth workers are currently overseas or on residential trips with groups of young people who have been fundraising to expand their horizons over the summer months.
All young people should be given the opportunity to engage fully in society. Helping them to do this is a professional skill taught on practice-based courses which attract those with years of dedicated voluntary work behind them, but who also recognise that young people deserve to have trained practitioners working with them.
These professionals educate in an informal manner. While they work with young people in their leisure time, youth work is not a leisure activity. At heart, through group development and individual attention, youth work creates a sense of worth and purpose, community and creativity, and an ethical sense of involvement in a complex world. Youth work connects, challenges and changes. To do this requires the building of long-term relationships through a publicly-funded, sustained service.
There is a role for temporary recreational and diversionary activities in the summer months. But the problem with the recent Government announcement of summer citizenship placements is that they are intended to replace permanent provision. The amount spent on the pilots is equivalent to the cuts in the youth service of five local authorities with which I am currently dealing. Overall this year, these five local authorities are having to cut £200 million from social services desperately needed by young people.
Short-term government gimmicks tend not to live long in the memory. Yet everyone who has been involved in the youth service remembers its impact. It is available for all young people to use as they see fit. It offers an infrastructure of support that can take a young person on a journey from active youth centre member, to volunteer youth worker, to paid part-time worker, to full-time professional.
Now all this is up for demolition. Recently, I have been working with Conservative and Liberal Democrat councillors who have given a lifetime of voluntary commitment to the youth service and on local youth management committees and who now see these structures being broken up, put out to tender and cut to pieces by the coalition.
What is so damaging is not the intention to give small groups of young people something to do in the summer, but the pulling apart of services that have actually been doing that for years. In many hard-pressed communities, where a creative summer break would relieve problems and create chances for community cohesion, the traditional sources of funding for summer activities have been removed.
The accomplishments of youth work since 1961 are under threat. No one should be conned that cost-ineffective, short-term, fragmented, often amateurishly-led summer schemes are a substitute for a universal public service run by and for young people – as our national youth service currently is.
