Wales’s First National Youth Strategy
Dr John Rose
Introduction
The Youth Service in Wales in 2008 is a substantial organisation employing 600 full-time workers more than 5,000 part-time workers supported by 20,000 volunteers. Its workforce is highly qualified with around 75% of both its full-time time and part time workers holding at least the minimum qualification. It operates in more than 3,700 community based clubs and projects via:
- 22 local authority Youth Services;
- Major voluntary youth organisations (eg, Scouts, Urdd, Duke of Edinburgh);
- Local voluntary (or third sector) youth organisations.
The Youth Service delivers a wide range of programmes to around 200,000 young people annually. These programmes are directed at what can be described as the passions of young people and include music, sport, art, craft and theatre, association with friends, technology and a range of outdoor activities. The work of the Youth Service is supported by a budget of almost £80 million a year.
Welsh Assembly Government policy for young people promotes the concept of social integration with an emphasis on paid work and the education/training qualifications necessary to gain access to the labour market. Those young people outside of this framework are often stigmatised and the emphasis for those working with them is prioritised as a social inclusion agenda to bring all young people into the education, employment or training framework.
To further the inclusion agenda Jane Davidson the then Welsh Assembly Minister for Education Lifelong Learning and Skills announced in May 2006 the development of a National Youth Service Strategy which would set out:
- A vision for youth work in Wales and its impact on the policy agendas of the Welsh Assembly government:
- The staff, structure and resources required by the Youth Service in Wales to meet the needs of the vision:
- An action plan to enable youth work to make an effective contribution to Extending Entitlement, the Welsh Assembly Government flagship policy for the delivery of services to young people.
The strategy launched in March 2007 described the Youth Service as an organisation underpinned by a small number of clearly defined characteristics. These are:
- the voluntary involvement by young people who have chosen to engage in the process
- being age specific focused on 11-25 year olds
- having a non-formal education approach
- being driven by a young-people-first approach
- having open access provision
The strategy also identified the Youth Service as an organisation with a positive view of young people which provided a unique learning environment built on the quality of the relationship between young people and the trained and skilled worker. The outcomes for young people through their involvement with the programmes offered by the Youth Service were identified within three broad themes:
1. Active participation, including:
- enjoyment and achievement,
- improved health, fitness and well being
- acquiring new and enhancing existing practical skills
- learning to manage risks
2. Wider Skills Development, including:
- learning to learn
- team building
- communication
- problem solving
- decision making
3. enhanced emotional competence including:
- Increased levels of confidence and self motivation
- Improved self-awareness, motivation and self worth
- Maintaining the ability to develop and sustain relationships in a wide range of settings
- Empathy with and consideration for others.
The National Youth Service strategy recognises that evaluating the impact of youth work on young people as a result of their involvement in Youth Service programmes is complex and involves the use of a wide range of methods. These will include those capable of measuring personal achievement which will mainly depend on young people developing the skills of reflection and self assessment of their involvement in a wide range of experiences and opportunities. The methods will also include those developed within or adapted by the Youth Service such as specific achievement awards of the sort offered by the Scouts and Guides or those used by the Duke of Edinburgh Award. Other methods will be concerned to measure skills development through the achievement of standards set by governing bodies responsible, for example, for sport, outdoor activities, senior member training and first aid.
Formal accreditation and qualifications which are recognised by the Credit and Qualifications Framework for Wales were also identified as important outcomes for some young people. These types of qualifications delivered within a non-formal education and learning framework provide access to employment and further and higher education.
The ambitions of the National Youth Service strategy provide a number of challenges. First, it needs to increase its budget from the current £36 a year for each of the 11-25 year olds in Wales. Second, it needs to locate its activities more centrally in the strategic thinking of the Welsh Assembly Government by ensuring it is included in appropriate policy documents. Both of these will only be achieved by providing reliable and valid evidence of the worth of the Youth Service judged against how effectively it links the outcomes of its work to the social and economic agenda of the Welsh Assembly Government.
A third and crucial challenge for the Youth Service in making this link will be to avoid focusing on quantifiable outcomes of the sort obtained through formal education qualifications. This, it can be argued, is a position that it has gradually been persuaded to adopt by a government who appear to only value a formal education approach.
Youth workers need to fully understand and use the non-formal education approach which uses the developing ability of young people to interpret – with the support when necessary of the youth worker – the value of their experiences themselves.
However, the predominantly non-formal approach of the Youth Service challenges the overall effectiveness of formal education in isolation – including its methods of measuring success – by offering a broader perspective of the values of non-formal learning as a complementary method to formal learning systems. Formal learning systems, non-formal educators claim, offer certain types of arrangements which may not suit the needs of all learners, implying that the formal context offers some, but not all, an opportunity for learning. To overcome this, they suggest systems should be developed in the opinion of Illich to:
“provide the learner with new links to the world instead of continuing to funnel all educational programmes through the teacher.”
Effective Youth Service programmes achieve this through the use of participative and empowering methods, with the fundamental principle of its work with individuals and groups arising from mutual agreement between practitioners and young people. This basis of negotiation and contract serves as the foundation for a particular style of learning driven by a belief that:
“knowledge is assumed to be actively constructed by the learner, not passively received from the environment; and second, learning is an interactive process of interpretation, integration and transformation of one’s experiential world.”
(Pratt 1993:17)
The importance of changing attitudes to learning – both in style, location and measurement of outcomes – is increasingly linked, both from an individual and a government perspective, to the need to ensure a competitive ability in an economy increasingly affected by enhanced globalisation, driven by a knowledge economy. Within this environment embedded assumptions regarding society’s traditional economic and social model are being challenged in a fundamental way, including such notions as:
- Education prepares for a job, that
- This job could last a lifetime, and that
- Life itself is largely divided into a period of education followed by a long period of work, and a period of retirement
If this model is no longer appropriate, consideration needs to be given to the role of education and training within a reorganised working environment characterised by less certain employment patterns that make the concept of a lifelong career less possible. Individual life plans will need to be considered and will have to contain a combination of working and non-working time, improved management of leisure and a greater personal responsibility for the acquisition of both knowledge and skills appropriate for a changing society. Included within these descriptions would be attributes such as decision making, problem solving, and communication skills which could be used in both working and non-working situations. There are strong arguments to suggest that formal education in isolation does not provide the development of these characteristics in depth for young people.
Within this context non-formal education approaches need to be re-evaluated within a government strategy for education. It is a key responsibility of the Youth Service in Wales to both persuade the government of its role and make an effective contribution to a changing economic and social environment. Unless it is capable of doing so many young people in Wales will remain excluded and the social and economic agenda of the Assembly government will not be fully realised.
