Critical Issues in Youth Work Management

Jon Ord, Jon Ord

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136588549
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

This valuable textbook communicates the complexities and controversies at the heart of youth work management, exploring key issues in a critical fashion. Written by a team of experienced youth work lecturers, the chapters cover topics such as planning, evaluation and supervision, whilst acknowledging the changing structures of integrated services and the impact of public service reform.

Divided into three sections, it covers:

• Historical and theoretical context
• Critical practice issues, including leadership, policy constraints, planning and accountability
• Managing in different settings, for instance integrated services and the voluntary sector.

Aimed at both youth work students studying for their professional qualification, as well as practicing managers, Critical Issues in Youth Work Management encourages critical thinking about what management in youth work is and what it can be. It includes reflective questions and further reading, and case studies are integrated throughout.

Part I

The context of youth work
management

1 From advice to management

The arrival of youth workers' accountability

Bernard Davies

Over the past fifty years the title of those with organizational oversight of youth work has mutated from ‘organizer’ and ‘advisor’ to ‘officer’ and ‘manager’. This, however, has represented much more than a change of name. When the state ‘service of youth’ was created in 1939 the role's main priorities were support and advice for field practitioners operating with considerable discretion and autonomy. By the later 1990s, Blairite New Public Management (NPM) had increasingly required the role to exercise top-down direction and control of ‘delivery’ focused on tightly defined value-for-money social objectives. This chapter traces how these changes have also brought a fundamental cultural shift in how youth work practice is conceived and carried out.

When good intentions were enough …

Although this is not a piece about a lost golden age, it starts with a youth worker practising throughout the ‘swinging’ sixties and into the 1970s. He'd been brought up on a then still-emerging version of professionalism which implicitly said: ‘As long as your values and goals are right, then all will be well’. Implicit, too, was the message: ‘And because you articulate your intentions as young people-focused and about their needs, you don't need to explain how far you are actually achieving them’. ‘Outcomes’, insofar as these were ever considered, would, it was assumed, take care of themselves, leaving accountability, at best, an intuitive and unarticulated process.

In caricatured form, the youth worker here was me. Nor apparently was what I recall just a figment of my failing memory. In 1988 Jeffs and Smith talked of youth work's occupational culture as imbued with:

a deep-seated resistance to ‘being told what to do’. Something of the frontier spirit remains, with the lone cowboy or cowgirl … simply going where the trail takes them.

(1988: 236)

While acknowledging that this could lead to ‘a rich diversity of practice’, they concluded that youth work was ‘still perceived as offering the opportunity to maximise freedom and minimalise accountability’ (Jeffs and Smith, 1988: 236). Moreover, this resistance to being accountable for what the practice was achieving did not just apply to policy-makers' and funders' expectations. Little systematic attention was given to checking ‘impact’ on the purported beneficiaries of the work – young people and their communities. For this absence of mind, youth work and its practitioners were eventually to pay a high price.

The youth officer as organizer, advisor and administrator

If this was how workers were then operating, how did ‘management’ manage them? How far did tackling the dominant youth worker approach to the work appear in managers' job descriptions (where these existed) or in their understanding of the role?

Even before a state ‘Service of Youth’ was created in 1939 (see below), national voluntary organizations were increasingly employing ‘field officers’ and ‘specialist advisers' to help plan and improve local youth club provision and train leaders (see Henriques, 1934: 232; 1951: viii). This did not, however, involve directly ‘managing’ clubs (all of which were independent) or their staff (who were anyway overwhelmingly voluntary). Primarily the job was advisory and administrative.

Moreover, bureaucratic notions of ‘management’ sat uncomfortably with the assumptions, deeply rooted in organizations so overwhelmingly reliant on volunteers, that ‘youth leadership’ was a vocation (see Jeffs, 2006) and that those who took on the role could therefore be trusted to carry it out without close scrutiny. Formalized accountability procedures were thus irrelevant – even demeaning. Indeed, often the problem was that workers, including the small number of full-time paid workers, did whatever was needed to fulfil their vocational ‘mission’, no matter how many hours this took. Such over-commitment did not of course guarantee quality. It did, though, make it harder for a ‘youth advisor’ or even a club management committee to hold a worker openly accountable or even to recognize this was needed.

During and after the 1914-18 war a small number of local authorities had offered funding to the voluntary youth sector (Jeffs, 1979: 13). However, the most significant shift came in 1939 with the release of Circular 1486, ‘The Service of Youth’ (Board of Education, 1939), with annual grants which ‘made it possible for field officers to be appointed to expand and develop their work’ (Evans, 1965: 23). These ‘servants’ of the voluntary organizations also increasingly found themselves working alongside local education authority youth officers whose numbers grew significantly (ibid.). With some of the new LEA youth organizers coming directly from the voluntary sector, many of its assumptions and approaches were carried over into statutory services (Percival, 1951: 169), including a light-touch support and advisory style in their approach to club workers. Writing in 1943 for ‘those who have responded to the call of Circular 1486’, Desirée Edward-Rees – herself a West Riding of Yorkshire youth officer – noted that:

Most Education Authorities now employ organisers, or officers, to administer the work of their Central Youth Committee and to advise their local youth councils.

(1943: 118)

Emerging as it did out of a war against ruthless totalitarian regimes, the new Youth Service had to contend with ‘a very real and genuine fear of anything modelled on the continental Youth Movements’ (Macalister Brew, 1943: 25). One of the early challenges for this new breed of youth officer was to deal with the perception of them as state officials. State papers themselves displayed considerable sensitivity to this, with the second major war-time Circular on the Service of Youth (1516) proclaiming that ‘any attempt at a State-controlled uniformity or regimentation would be both stupid and perilous …’ The function of the state it saw as ‘to supplement the resources of existing national organizations without impairing their independence …’ (Board of Education, 1940, cited in Davies, 1999: 20).

Macalister Brew, though warmly welcoming the appearance of the new youth officer posts, nonetheless echoed these concerns, regretting that they were labelled ‘youth organizer’ as this was ‘so reminiscent of Nazism and Fascism’ (1943: 34). For Gordon Ette, Youth Officer for Wolverhampton and treasurer of the National Conference of Youth Service Officers founded in 1940 (Roberts, 1944: 56), the worry was more pragmatic – that: ‘The danger inherent in the new set-up is that the service will be cluttered with an increasing army of organizers who want to centralize everything’ (Ette, 1949: 118). As late as 1960, two officers of the National Association of Youth Leaders and Organizers (NAYLO) were still referring to the danger of ‘a state-run youth movement’ (Times Education Supplement, 1960). Circular 1516 made this more explicit, and the mirror image of these anxieties was a sensitivity about relations with the still highly influential voluntary youth organizations – the local and regional embodiments of the Scouts and Guides, the various Brigades, boys, girls and mixed clubs' associations and what would now be termed ‘faith-based’ organizations. Circular 1486 was unambiguous that in the new local youth committees:

The individual traditions and special experience of youth possessed by the voluntary organizations will be joined by the prestige and resources of the local education authority.

(Board of Education, 1939: para. 8)

Ette thus emphasized that ‘a wisely planned local youth service’ will recognize these organizations’ distinctive features (1939: 120). For Macalister Brew this meant that the youth officer's first task was ‘to help and encourage all the voluntary organizations to fit into the (local authority) plan’ (1943: 25, 38). The new youth officers' core tasks thus remained much as they had been for their voluntary organization predecessors: organizing to provide, but not directly manage, practical and financial resources and support those working face-to-face with young people. Over the following decade little apparently changed. By 1954 Peter Keunstler, in again highlighting ‘the important role played by youth officers and others’, did choose to stress ‘a happy relationship between the authorities and youth workers generally’ (1954: 43). On the other hand, Macalister Brew's chapter on management, helpers' and members' committees in her influential book Youth and Youth Groups made no mention of the new breed of statutory youth officers (1957: 184–99).

The Albemarle Report, published in 1960, gave strong endorsement to these posts: after noting that ‘there are still authorities … who have no Youth Service officer or equivalent post’, it concluded: ‘We find it hard to see how such an authority can properly carry out its obligations under the [Education] Act’. However, it continued to bracket organizers and officers with both voluntary bodies and local education authorities, whilst still describing the latter as responsible for ‘the proper servicing of youth groups in the area’ through for example ‘information and advice’; for assessing youth groups' need for premises and equipment; and for organizing ‘common services’, particularly training (Ministry of Education, 1960: 84–85).

Albemarle did, however, advocate that the youth officer move beyond purely ‘administrative’ functions so that ‘his primary task’ came to be seen as that of ‘field-worker’. It also implied that the role should shift towards managing staff as this might be understood today – that for example the youth officer ‘must know his youth groups and be able to assess their achievement and to help them improve it’. It also insisted that ‘the supervision and guidance of leaders … is his responsibility' (Ministry of Education, 1960: 85).

A decade later, the Fairbairn-Milson report (DES, 1969: 120), while noting that ‘the status of the Youth Officer (or equivalent) varies widely’, sought mainly to bend the role to its own often conflicting priorities. To underpin the Fairbairn sub-committee's aim of locating youth work with younger age groups within schools, it reaffirmed their historic function by suggesting that youth officers act as advisers in social education alongside other school advisers (1969: 123). By contrast, to support the Milson subcommittee's preoccupation with community development approaches for the 16-pluses, it recommended their work be linked to – even perhaps be merged into – that of the new town corporations' ‘social relations officers’ (1969: 126).

For other commentators, staff accountability still did not merit any explicit consideration. Though Davies and Gibson (1967: 148–49) emphasized the ‘sanctions’ on youth work practice which emanate from ‘society’ (which could include ‘sponsors’) and from young people, their section on ‘management’ (1967: 197–201) made no reference to accountability. The definition of their role by the youth officers' own professional body (then termed: National Association of Youth Service Officers) still emphasized ‘close liaison’ with the voluntary organizations and an ability ‘to advise on all matters effecting the Youth Service including the forms of aid available through the LEA' (Leicester and Farndale, 1967: 224).

Four years later John Leigh did acknowledge that some youth officers were by then making ‘an enormous number of “decisions” in the sense of interpretations of aims’ and that these ‘to a large extent affect the practice of the service’ (1971: 28–29). Nonetheless, for him the role's priorities continued to be:

the siting of clubs and their staffing and equipment, the kinds of in-service and part-time worker training which are appropriate and the various supporting services to be made available to the youth clubs.

(Ibid.)

The youth officer as supervisor

This conception of the youth officer's role as primarily ‘advisory’ persisted in places into the 1980s, for example as late as 1987–88 Sheffield Youth Service's principal officer was still a member of the education department's advisory team. However, by the late 1960s the rapid increase in the number of newly qualified workers (from the 700 Albemarle identified in the late 1950s to 1,550 by 1968; Davies, 1999: 64–65) brought new expectations of the youth officer's role, central to which was ‘supervision’, especially for newly appointed staff, as had been advocated by the Albemarle Report.

Even so, in calling as early as 1962 for ‘the supervision of the new recruit’, the principal of the National College for the Training of Youth Leaders, Edward Sidebottom, was still insisting that this:

is not just a question of administrative control: it involves the provision of good counsel and sometimes simply … a ‘sounding board’ for the leader.

(Sidebottom, 1962)

Although this was seen as ‘not just a question of administrative control’ it perhaps indicated a shift in thinking. The following year Sidebottom again advocated ‘proper supervisory help’ to enable ‘rapid progression in the work of the new leader’, suggesting there was ‘a strong case for running some short courses in supervisory methods and for the publication of some helpful literature’ (Sidebottom, 1963). By the end of the decade, both had been achieved. In 1967 Joan Tash gave a detailed account of a two-year project for training youth workers in the skills of supervision – where ‘supervision’ meant discussions between a youth worker and ‘another person who had no authority over him [sic.]’ (1967: 9). Nonetheless, with the report demonstrating how such ‘non-managerial’ supervision could help workers perform to their potential and develop professionally, its approach was seen, too, as relevant to what became known as ‘managerial supervision’.

Meanwhile, in 1966, the Department of Education and Science (DES) sponsored the first of two courses for 60 Youth Service Officers. The second in 1968–69, attended by 45 men and 12 women, 39 of whom were from the statutory sector (Gibson, 1970: 8), revealed a growing concern about managerial supervision, with one whole section of the syllabus aiming: ‘to help Youth Officers to practise a supervisory function that will encourage the growth and development of the staff whom they lead’ (Gibson, 1970: 19). Although the evidence only emerged later, there had clearly been a need for such training. As a report, published in 1972 on the work of the National College between 1961 and 1970, noted: ‘the need for supervision, particularly during the first year of full-time work, has been recognised for some time. The proble...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The context of youth work management
• Part II Critical issues in the practice of youth work management
• Part III The settings of youth work management
• Index