Socially Just, Radical Alternatives for Education and Youth Work Practice

Re-Imagining Ways of Working with Young People

Charlie Cooper, Sinéad Gormally, Gill Hughes, Charlie Cooper, Sinéad Gormally, Gill Hughes, Charlie Cooper, Sinéad Gormally, Gill Hughes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137393593
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Challenging dominant discourses in neoliberal marketized societies about working with disconnected young people, this book argues that alternative, radical approaches to formal and informal education are necessary to challenge repressive practices, and to help build a more equal, socially-just society.

1

The Case for Re-Imagining Ways of Working with Young People in Education and Youth Work

Charlie Cooper, Sinéad Gormally and Gill Hughes

Setting the context of austerity England

The key aim of this book is to address what the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD 2013) described as a youth ‘crisis’, which played out in the media in the aftermath of violent disturbances in parts of England in August 2011. This ‘event’ – the ‘riots’ – offers an opportunity to use divergent lenses to critique the hegemonic discourse presented for consumption. The ‘riots’ could be read as insurrection, challenging the mainstream media and political discourse of ‘moral panic’ (Cohen 2002, Cooper 2012) and allowing for a different gaze to unsettle the seemingly self-evident: not least, the recognition that those engaged in the events were not exclusively young or of one gender, ethnicity or class, as populist constructions were challenged (Guardian/LSE 2011).

A critical concern that emerged in mainstream political and policy discourse following the 2011 disturbances was that many of those who participated in the unrest had been failed by the school system, and left uneducated, jobless and without hope and opportunity (Cooper 2012). The answer to this was elucidated by the final report of the Riots Communities and Victims Panel (RCVP 2012), which stated that it wanted schools to address this problem by doing more to build young people’s strength of ‘character’ and ‘resilience’, and their ‘employability’. This analysis pathologizes young people, suggesting they are in deficit, to be ‘fixed’ (Benard 2004). Building individual resilience can present young people as the problem, which will only be solved by engaging in interventions or developing competencies. The general conception is that young people need to change to adapt to the world, rather than the world needing to adapt to young people and their lived experience. This book seeks to address the latter, to recognize the need for a seismic systemic shift, or at the very least, acknowledgement that a re-imagining of practice is needed to redress approaches built on such discourses of ‘lack’.

Even when acknowledging disengagement from education as a central theme, the lens remains one of blame, as explored in the Coalition government’s strategy on Social Justice: Transforming Lives (HM Government 2012). This strategy joins policies aimed at addressing ‘troubled families’, David Cameron’s response to the ‘riots’, and ‘anti-social behaviour’, Tony Blair’s offering in the former Labour government, as measures consistent with the underclass thesis of Charles Murray (1996) underpinning populist punitive thinking on the welfare system, which confers judgement on those who are perceived to enjoy large sums of money at the expense of hard-working taxpayers. This thinking is exemplified by Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith’s interview with the Sunday Times in 2012 in which he warned benefit claimants that ‘This is not an easy life any more, chum. I think you’re a slacker’ (cited in Toynbee and Walker 2015: 28). This then developed into the pervasive binary discourse of ‘striver versus shirker’. Such lenses of judgement underscore further the ‘hyperactivism’ (Dunleavy and O’Leary 1987) of policy and the interventions that cascade into schools from numerous Secretaries of State for Education, who expend mass energy in thinking up new ways of taking education back to its traditional elitist curricula (BBC News 2010) whilst, at the same time, developing new ways to regulate young people’s behaviour and values (Waiton 2001).

What makes this volume distinctive, and gives it its particular significance, is its content, scope, organization and educational features. Whilst there have been various books addressing elements covered here – for instance, on critical pedagogy, social pedagogy, critical race theory, feminist pedagogy, radical youth work, inclusive education and so forth – the scope of this book is unique as it draws on all of these themes to offer a reframing of how we think about working with young people. Each chapter will explore a different area of concern and will end with suggested alternative ontological practices which seek to engage creatively. These messages of hope will be synthesized in the final chapter to demonstrate different ways of working which have been re-imagined. This amalgamation will address issues of inequality and strive towards an approach infused with social justice when working with young people, identifying practices which offer hope instead of resignation and which go some way towards preventing what Bauman (2004) observed as ‘wasted lives’.

The contributors to this book concur with the argument that a significant number of young people in the UK have been failed by the school system (despite its early interventions of meritocracy and egalitarianism in the post-war period) and a broad range of other social policy intrusions aimed at ‘youth’ over the past three decades – intrusions that can be conceptualized as the ‘criminalisation of social policy’ (Rodger 2008). Any progress made under the Keynesian-welfare consensus of the immediate post-war years has been in a process of reversal since the onset of neo-liberal policies from the 1980s – policies which have overseen the shift from government (that is, the collective management of the social welfare of the population by the state) to practices which Ball articulates from the Foucauldian notion of governmentality (where the state seeks to incentivize individuals to take responsibility for their own ontological well-being). Ball observes:

The move from the welfare state to the neo-liberal state involves a redistribution of responsibilities and the emergence of new forms of government – self-government.

(Ball 2013: 130)

The impact of this shift on British culture and society is profound. The idea of ‘citizenship’ has changed and is now less to do with T.H. Marshall’s (1950) notion of social, political and economic rights – albeit in themselves flawed in respect of ‘race’ and gender – and more about individual obligations to take appropriate steps to manage their own behaviour and well-being. ‘This is a “remoralisation” of our relation to the state and to ourselves’ (Ball 2013: 132) – a reconceptualization of what citizenship (and being human) means. Instead of civil rights:

Insecurity is the basis for both responsibility and enterprise. We must take responsibility for our own needs and for our well-being … and for dealing with risk and uncertainty and organizing protection from them, we can no longer rely on the state…We are made fearful and therefore active… Precarity is a fundamental condition of neo-liberal society. Our emotions are linked to the economy through our anxieties and our concomitant self-management…and the state becomes the site of minimal provision and last resort… Depoliticization acts in parallel to this, sometimes rendering collective conditions of experience into personal problems, sometimes displacing political and economic decisions into individual failings and responsibilities.

(Ball 2013: 134 – emphases in original)

There is a wealth of evidence that young people’s emotional well-being in the UK has declined under neo-liberalism (see Cooper 2010) – particularly as a result of the abandonment of Keynesian economic policies (leading to rising youth unemployment), cuts in Beveridgean-styled welfare entitlements, and reduced investment in subsidized housing, health care and education. The neo-liberal project Margaret Thatcher commenced in 1979 has almost been completed by the Conservative-led Coalition government under David Cameron. The post-2008 banking crisis, which is estimated to have cost the UK government ‘around £120 billion, or 8 per cent of its GDP, [by] rescuing its banks’ (Tett 2009: 288), saw Cameron seize the crisis:

… to realise his ideological ends. By exaggerating the parlous state of national finances he was able to pursue his longstanding ambition to diminish the public realm. Margaret Thatcher privatised state-run industries; Cameron’s ambition was no less than to abolish the postwar welfare state itself. The Office of Budget Responsibility … announced Cameron’s victory – by 2018, it forecast, we would have a state the size it was in the 1930s.

(Toynbee and Walker 2015: 27)

This development is consistent with Naomi Klein’s notion of ‘shock doctrine’ and her research exposing the way neo-liberal globalization came to dominate the world order through its exploitation of public uncertainty in the aftermath of crises (Klein 2007). Generating a crisis at the heart of the state sector in the UK was, Toynbee and Walker argue, a premeditated intent of Cameron’s Coalition government:

The administrative disarray the Tories caused in one [government] department after another had a purpose. ‘In our vocabulary chaotic is a good thing’, Nick Boles, who went on to become planning minister, told the Institute for Government in 2010. What we are doing to the public sector is ‘creative destruction’, said Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude.

(Toynbee and Walker 2015: 28)

This legitimated Cameron’s plans to lower public debt as a proportion of GDP to 30 per cent, the lowest ration for 300 years. Over the first four years of the Coalition, public sector employment fell from 21.6 per cent of the UK workforce to 17.6 per cent – the lowest percentage for 40 years (Toynbee and Walker 2015).

The impact of austerity on young people in the UK

Young people in particular have been impacted by the recent Coalition government cuts. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures on young people aged 16–24 who were not in education, employment or training in November 2014 numbered 954,000 (13.1 per cent of that age range) (see ONS 2014). The impact on young people in 2014 is captured in a joint Joseph Rowntree Foundation/New Policy Institute Report (JRF/NPI 2014), showing a dramatic change in who is most at risk of poverty in the UK compared to ten years ago,¹ with a big rise in the proportion of adults under 25 living in poverty alongside a fall among the over 75s. Poverty itself is not just a symptom of unemployment but reflects, too, changes in the labour market. In the last ten years, there has been a vast increase in insecure work: zero-hours contracts; part-time work; and low-paid self-employment. Therefore, getting young people into work does not necessarily mean that they climb out of poverty. Two-thirds of people who moved from unemployment into work in 2014 are paid below the Living Wage. Only a fifth of low-paid employees had left low-paid work completely ten years later – meaning there are few longer-term prospects for rising out of poverty wages. Around 1.4 m work contracts are not guaranteeing a minimum number of hours and over half are in the lower-paying food, accommodation, retail and administration sectors. Incomes are also lower on average than a decade ago; the worst off have seen the biggest falls – around 10 per cent lower than a decade ago. Average wages for men working full time have dropped (in real terms) from £13.90 to £12.90 per hour between 2008 and 2013. For women, wages fell from £10.80 to £10.30 per hour in the same period. For the lowest paid quarter of men, hourly pay fell by 70 p per hour; for women, by 40 p per hour. As for Jobseeker’s Allowance claimants, the report showed that these were now more likely to be sanctioned for not attending the Work Programme than to get a job through it. At the same time, children living below the poverty line were still facing severe educational disadvantage. In some English local authorities, three-quarters of children eligible for free school meals (a measure of poverty) do not get five ‘good’ GCSEs – a situation partly aggravated by deteriorating housing experiences caused by insufficient investment in social housing (JRF/NPI 2014).

Responding to the report, Julia Unwin, Chief Executive of the JRF, argued that:

A comprehensive strategy is needed to tackle poverty in the UK. It must tackle the root causes of poverty, such as low pay and the high cost of essentials. This research in particular demonstrates that affordable housing has to be part of the answer to tackling poverty: all main political parties need to focus now on providing more decent, affordable homes for people on low incomes.

(Unwin 2014, online)

Such structural issues not only impact young people and their communities, but also those who attempt to alleviate the harmful consequences through the public, voluntary and community sector.

Cascading constraint in service provision – Limiting care

At the same time as more and more young people, families and communities face immiseration in the UK, carers, teachers, community and youth workers and other welfare practitioners face increasing limitations on their ability to deliver services that care effectively for those in need. This is largely as a consequence of neo-liberal social policy restructuring that has increased the marketization of welfare professions – leading to a demoralizing erosion of resources, a reduced capacity to voice opinions and a lack of confidence to express dissent. For example, as we have argued elsewhere (Hughes et al. 2014) following Abramovitz and Zelnick’s (2010) assertion of a crisis of ‘double jeopardy’ in welfare organizing, neo-liberalism has led to the mirroring of youth workers’ experiences with those of the young people they seek to assist (albeit from different perspectives), in that recipients of caring services are increasingly deprived of the basic resources for survival, whilst the providers themselves are increasingly denied the autonomy needed to care effectively (Hughes et al. 2014). Under neo-liberalism, ‘Collective professional values are displaced by commercial values, and professionals are dispossessed of their expertise and judgement’ (Ball 2013: 135). Welfare organizing becomes increasingly marketized, and profit-making overrides notions of social justice and caring. Those practitioners incapable (or unwilling) to adapt to the demands of a reformed, entrepreneurial welfare system are seen as underperformers. As Ball posits:

This is another manifestation of ‘dividing practices’, which work to identify, valorize and reward the successful and productive – the ‘affiliated’ (Miller & Rose, 2008, p.98), and to target for exile or for reform those who fail to re-make themselves in ‘the image of the market’ (Gillies, 2011, p.215).

(Ball 2013: 140)

Justification for these developments is underpinned by neo-liberal discourse and discursive practices – ‘techniques of power’ that validate ways of thinking abo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• 1. The Case for Re-Imagining Ways of Working with Young People in Education and Youth Work
• 2. Challenging the Order of Things: Independent Working-Class Education as a Model for Contemporary Praxis
• 3. Critical Pedagogy in Higher Education
• 4. Emancipatory Praxis: A Social-Justice Approach to Equality Work
• 5. Social Justice and Social Pedagogy
• 6. Alternative Provision Free Schools: Educational Fireworks or Sparks of Optimism for Excluded Young People?
• 7. In Pursuit of a Common Values Base for Working with Young People in Formal, Informal and Social Learning
• 8. Feminist Agendas in Informal Education
• 9. ‘Race’, Ethnicity and Young People
• 10. Inclusive and Accessible Citizenry: Making Spaces for Working with Young People with (Dis)abilities
• 11. ‘Imagining Otherwise’ or Tinkering with the System?
• 12. Re-Imagining Ways of Working with Young People in Education and Youth Work
• Index