Tag: In Defence of Youth Work

FROM THE IN DEFENCE OF YOUTH WORK ARCHIVE – Lenny Sellars on THE GREAT YOUTHWORK© HEIST

On By Tony TaylorIn History, Politics, Youth WorkLeave a comment

I’ve copied this from the In Defence of Youth Work website, which I still maintain. It may be of interest to some.

Months ago I promised that I would begin retrieving posts from what we dubbed the IDYW archive. It is belated but hopefully, this is a start.

The challenging piece, ‘The Great Youth Work Heist’ appeared on the IDYW website in January 2010. I had come across the author Lenny Sellars on a youth work forum hosted to its credit at that time by the magazine, ‘Children and Young People Now’, a commitment to debate long past. However, I knew Lenny only by his pseudonym, ‘God’s Lonely Youth Worker’. We bumped into one another in the bar at the November 2009 Federation of Detached Youth Work conference held in a miserably wet Wigan. My recollection is that we were a mite uncertain about one another, our opening exchanges somewhat stilted. We did discover though a common bond from outside youth work, namely the pits, appropriate seeing we were sat at the centre of the once vital Lancashire coalfield. We were both from mining families. Lenny had worked down the pit and out of it during the historic NUM Strike of 1984/85. My dad was the last Taylor to go underground but I had been a committed activist in Leicestershire and Derbyshire during the dispute. Stories swapped we warmed to one another.

Lenny became very involved for some years in the IDYW Campaign. For example, he led a discussion on ‘Where Are We Up To?’ and ‘Where Are We Going?’ at a December 2012 Seminar in Manchester. I reported.

The opening contribution to the first session around the Campaign’s sense of identity and purpose was led by the self-styled ‘raggedy-arsed’ Lenny Sellars from Grimethorpe, home of arguably the greatest colliery brass band formed in the revolutionary year of 1917. His forthright challenge might be summed up as follows:

  • Has our commitment to defending democratic youth work been compromised by our involvement in the wider campaign to defend jobs and services in their increasing plurality?
  • Are the omens for the development of IDYW good or bad?
  • With the demise of New Labour, our initial foe, who or what is today’s nemesis?
  • Is IDYW failing to widen its support because it is viewed as too political and/or too intellectual?

Lenny kept true to this line of questioning and in the end felt that IDYW had lost its way. We parted company on the best of terms. We were poorer for his absence from our ranks.

The following has lost none of its necessary provocations.

THE GREAT YOUTHWORK© HEIST

So… I attended the Federation for Detached Youth Work Conference at Wigan in November last year and I must declare that I became increasingly charged throughout the weekend with a delightful positivity and felt an unusual level of intense inspiration from the radiant enthusiasm and passion of the guest speakers and other attendees. And then Tom Wylie spoke. He charged youth work purists with being hopeless romantics and scoffed at the thought that there was any value in the convivial relationship between youth worker and young person. My positivity plummeted and my hope wilted with every word that fell from his lips. There seemed to be a cruel irony in that a conference with the theme “Positive About The Street” should end with such a negative tone. Nonetheless, I took a lot from the conference and have managed to recoup some positivity by exorcising all those nagging despondencies by writing them down on a sheet of paper (or three) and sharing them with some poor recipient who probably doesn’t deserve the burden. It’s a lengthy diatribe and the first page of overcast reflection was written about 6 months ago so I’m actually recycling despair.

Lenny up a hill if not a mountain

I get the feeling that I’ve been climbing a mountain for fifteen years only to find that the architects of social policy have built another mountain on top, twice as big and twice as steep. Metaphorically the mountain represents the daily grind of wading, chest-high through the formalised social control that is currently trading under the title of youth work©. I’ve got my own vision of the summit and the clarity is startling. But that’s just a vision. The reality is a jumbled mess of strategic clichés.

There’s an enthusiastic buzz in the conference rooms about a new youth initiative. It sits well on the handouts and the power-point presentation is dynamic. The power suits love it. They are impressed. Eagerly they display their new buzz-words and acronyms like kids display the labels on their designer clothes. I look forward to the meeting in 2 months’ time when we hear the feedback that despite the fact that they displayed the posters, posted the leaflets, spent £200 on a buffet, £80 on renting a room and £100 on hiring a scratch DJ… no one turned up. I could tell them now but that would seem arrogant, negative and curmudgeonly.

So I’m looking up at the mountain. The lofty peaks of middle-class strategy; the precarious ridges of output driven work; the sheer-face obstacles of tedious bureaucracy; the harsh climate of prescribed funding…. and I think, why can’t someone just give me the money and the resources to continue delivering the effective, front-line, needs-led work that I’ve been practising for the last 17 years?

Does it sound treacherous to declare my contempt for the Every Child Matters agenda and everything it stands for? I have to be careful about this. I feel as though I’m offending the deeply religious principle of some deeply religious disciples.

Something’s got to give. I’ve been at odds with the system for the past 15 years. In fact, we now seem to be walking in opposite directions. I’ve tried to push against it but it’s too big. I’ve even tried to ignore it but it owns the tools that I need to do my work. The system also seems to have become much more aggressive over the years. It wears an imperious sneer as it keeps wasting vast amounts of money on initiatives that defy logic and this is where I am defeated because I have one of those heads that refuses to engage with the illogical. So it isn’t that I won’t play it’s more that I can’t play.

I think one of the main problems we now have in reclaiming effective youth work© is that it has been (and still is as I type) travelling in the wrong direction at 100 mph. And to be honest, there’s little left to reclaim. The bureaucracy fears innovation because innovation is unpredictable. Face-to-face youth workers seem to be judged on their ability to gather information and on how much bullshit you can fit on a monitoring sheet. youth work© is aspiring to the same dizzy heights of the Social Services – losing connection with the world outside whilst wallowing in the esoteric ambience of Über-professionalism.

It’s a pretty simple diagram. The more you get involved with the strategic levels the further away you move from the reality of your purpose. The closer to front-line delivery you work, the more ridiculous the strategic aims look.

My own experience has shown me that pre-determined outcomes imposed on youth work© have created a culture of disingenuous motivation, which has also promoted the inevitable course of dishonesty. My heart sinks when I begin to imagine the percentage of accreditations which have been frantically forged by the pressurised youth worker with a target to meet. When you introduce a formal target into an informal methodology you’re bound to create a tension and you will also generate a fear of the consequences of failing to meet these targets. And it is under these conflicting conditions that youth workers start feeding the system with irrelevant and often imaginary outputs.

Prescribed outputs frequently require systems and procedures which have a detrimental effect on the values of youth work©. Youth work© is based on specific values and if you strip away those values in pursuance of achieving outputs then you should not describe it as youth work©. I have lots of personal examples of how this imposed cosmetic formality and tokenistic accreditation has frustrated the youth work© process and jeopardised the effective relationship we build with young people.

History has demonstrated that effective outputs will always occur as a result of organic youth work© processes. So who is really at fault here? Is it youth workers’ inability to define the value of youth work© or is it the inability of the bean-counter to understand it? Why persecute the youth worker for not being able to translate something organic and unpredictable into business language. We sow a seed in a young person’s head and it stands to reason that sometimes the youth worker may not even be around when the seed eventually blooms – a real and meaningful output which will be lost and unrecorded and unquantifiable but will still have a significant impact. It isn’t always possible to predict the outcome of genuine youth work© and it isn’t always possible to measure the true impact because some of the most valuable outcomes don’t always manifest for many years.

Youth work© will always be vulnerable and exposed to the people who seek to bureaucratise it and once youth work© is bureaucratised it becomes something else. And so the very thing that makes it effective will also, in the end, destroy it. There is no room for informality in a social structure dominated by bureaucracy. We satisfy the needs of the systems of bureaucracy rather than addressing the needs of young people. Servants of bureaucracy rather than a practitioner of this cherished craft.

What I value most in the relationships we create through effective Youth work © is the bridge that it builds between marginalisation and the mainstream. The bridge we create is the value of our work. A young person steps on this bridge as soon as you contact them and they walk its span when you engage them in activities and it is this “distance travelled” that I cherish.

You need compassion, empathy, realism, and a good degree of common sense to truly understand the value of real youth work©. I can’t give the bureaucrats any of these qualities and therefore I can’t help them to understand how they are contributing to the demolition of an essential social provision. I think you need to digest and internalise the values of youth work© to actually understand its true worth.

What is the way forward? Well, having travelled this path of disenchantment for about 10 years I have something of a vague bearing.

And so, to the notion of creating a parallel youth service which engages with real young people with real issues leaving the more functional kids to the existing youth service. They can wallow in accreditations and create school councils for every day of the week. I wish.

Youth work© still exists in little pockets scattered around in places where the influence of national strategy can’t corrupt it. I believe the thing to do is to defend the spirit and the name of youth work© by vigorously asserting our heritage. I regularly ask youth workers not to use the term youth work© when they are discussing practice which clearly isn’t youth work©. Not much in the great scheme of things I know but it does help me to preserve the integrity of my profession. I also know many dedicated youth workers who feel the need to override bureaucracy by delivering meaningful youth work© covertly – outside and beyond the remit of their prescribed targets. However, I believe that “youth work© by stealth” just allows the system to take the credit for the work delivered which ends up fuelling its performance indicators. You can’t expose the wrongs by hiding the rights. Documenting examples and statements of disenchantment is essential. If the current path of youth strategy is lined with false and tokenistic outcomes then its malignant structures will be strengthened.

I know in my heart that the proposed services will fail to have a sufficient impact on the young people who need the most support. But this is irrelevant to the bureaucrat. As long as services can feed the bureaucratic machinery with the right buzzwords and numbers that “add up” then the machinery will run smoothly. The machinery is concerned with breadth and not depth and it has no empathy with the disaffected and no sympathy with the front-line worker.

What to do? I seriously don’t believe there is any mileage in trying to stop the machinery. We cannot defend Youth Work© in a language that the machinery understands. Youth Work© has been condemned as being too ethereal for the harsh reality of our current social administrative structure and the scope for delivering effective Youth Work© is diminishing.

In real terms, if we are pushed into systems of social control then we must stand up and be counted and speak out and say “I will do this because it is a directive from my employer but I will not call it youth work© and I will not recognise myself as being a youth worker.” I would never call myself a counsellor before, during or after a one-to-one discussion with a young person.

It isn’t easy to be oppositional in this culture of new managerialism. The bravest in this campaign will be the local authority youth workers who are trapped within a system that suppresses and prohibits the freedom and creativity to travel their true paths. But I suggest that instead of trying to chip away at the immovable force of what youth work© has become, we actually support this doomed vessel along its journey towards the iceberg. By all means criticise and expose it but don’t attempt to stop it. It will eventually crash and sink.

Lenny Sellars
[God’s Lonely Youth Worker]

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Thinking about the Past, Present and Future of IDYW

On By Tony TaylorIn Children and Young People, Education, History, neoliberalism, Politics, Youth Work3 Comments

For the sake of some sort of continuity I’m publishing here my final post from the In Defence of Youth Work website. It contains themes emanating from the authoritarian imposition of the COVID measures, which I will continue to take up in one way or another on this blog.

Below you will find the lead contribution I made to the final IDYW Steering Group meeting held on Friday, October 8th in Manchester. As it was the train of my thought was often, necessarily and fruitfully interrupted by the musings and memories of those present. These interventions made for a challenging yet always supportive critical, collective conversation. Unfortunately I can’t do justice to that process. Hence you are getting no more than my opening and closing remarks. The substance of my offering was an effort to trace major events and significant themes in the life of IDYW since 2009. These are to be found, now archived on this site.

A group discussion at our fifth national conference in Birmingham

Thinking About the Past, Present and Future of IDYW.

Opening Remarks

I’m anxious about this bit of an opening presentation, which might well seem ridiculous. I long ago gave up paid work, selling my soul to the State with all its attendant tensions. Why the disquiet!? The principal reason for my apprehension is that I’ve scoured back through all the IDYW website posts since March 2009. I stopped counting at 1500 plus. What riches, what a turmoil of contradictions, hope and despair and what a plurality of offerings. I was bemused. How could I possibly do justice to this fascinating potpourri? My confusion was not eased in finding myself listening to the videos of the first National Conference in February 2010 – Janet Batsleer welcoming us to an ‘unauthorised space’, Kev Jones introducing my rant, Tania de St Croix warning about surveillance and Bernard Davies making the youth work case. Thoughts and sentiments that would not be out of place today. In thinking about the inaugural Conference I remembered also meeting Sue Atkins on the Didsbury campus in the dark the night before. We had something to sort out. I remember not what. It might well have been 20 years since we’d last crossed paths. A tear in our eyes it was as if we’d never been apart.

So forgive me if my recollection of IDYW’s history is riddled with absences. If there isn’t a book there is certainly an MA, even, a PhD to be found in the IDYW archives. Although on second thoughts a PhD collecting dust on a shelf would hardly move us forward.

So why did IDYW emerge in late 2008 on the back of the Open Letter I penned. It ventured:

Thirty years ago Youth Work aspired to a special relationship with young people. It wanted to meet young women and men on their terms. It claimed to be ‘on their side’. Three decades later Youth Work is close to abandoning this distinctive commitment. Today it accepts the State’s terms. It sides with the State’s agenda. Perhaps we exaggerate, but a profound change has taken place.

The shift has not happened overnight. Back in the 1980’s the Thatcherite effort via the Manpower Services Commission to shift the focus of Youth Work from social education to social and life skills was resisted. In the early 90’s the attempt to impose a national curriculum on the diverse elements of the Youth Service ground to a halt. However, with the accession of New Labour, the drive to impose an instrumental framework on Youth Work gathered increased momentum. With Blair and Brown at the helm youth workers and managers have been coerced and cajoled into embracing the very antithesis of the Youth Work process: predictable and prescribed outcomes. Possessing no vision of a world beyond the present New Labour has been obsessed with the micro-management of problematic, often demonised youth. Yearning for a generation stamped with the State’s seal of approval the government has transformed Youth Work into an agency of behavioural modification. It wishes to confine to the scrapbook of history the idea that Youth Work is volatile and voluntary, creative and collective – an association and conversation without guarantees.

Of course, the idea of the Letter did not spring out of the blue. It was not at all my individual creation. The inspiration for challenging the neo-liberal consensus goes back for me to the late 1960s. I want to argue that IDYW was but a particular expression of a post-war liberal/social democratic belief that education ought to be child/young person-centred, process-led, holistic and questioning in its desire. IDYW was born too out of a frustration that this humanistic perspective had struggled to dent a behavioural tradition focused on social control and conformity. In my own experience back in the late 1970s, Roy Ratcliffe and I were disciplined for supporting the autonomous voice of an embryo Youth Council. We wrote about this setback and the lack of support from fellow professionals in a piece to be found within the Inner London Education Authority’s ‘Schooling & Culture’, entitled ‘Stuttering Steps in Political Education’. As the Youth Service Training Officer in Wigan, I fought a bitter battle with Youth Service officers and workers to rewrite a part-time youth worker training course that sought to introduce Carl Rogers to Karl Marx, to question liberal taken-for-granteds by way of socialist and feminist understandings. Over in the newly created Community and Youth Workers Union, the Women’s Caucus emerging from the social movements turned the organisation upside down, Stimulated by the sisters Roy and I (in perhaps the best thing I’ve ever done) drafted a member-led and democratic constitution which directly challenged in practice both hierarchy and bureaucracy. Yet despite the radicalisation of full-time training courses, behaviourism was reasserting itself by the late 1980s as the servant of neo-liberal ideology. Indeed some former advocates of a radical grass-roots agenda were to the fore in advocating the managerial imposition of its tenets.

To say the least, this analysis is sweeping. I’ve always tended to be that way inclined. Yet, as an example of the shift, when I went in 1990 as the Wigan Chief Youth Officer to a Confederation of Heads of Youth Services national conference with perhaps 100 managers in attendance I sat in a corner over a drink with at most half a dozen fellow travellers. The majority embraced prescribed outcomes and the accumulation of data as the only way to save the Youth Service and Youth Work.

As it is I fled the scene at the end of the 1990s because of Marilyn, my wife’s serious illness. However, I was not quite finished. With Malcolm Ball, Steve Waterhouse (tragically both no longer with us) Deb Ball, Tim Price and Steve Monaghan we formed the minuscule Critically Chatting Collective, continuing to question what was going on through a website and tiny gatherings. For example, I remember back in 2005 Bernard Davies addressing a central London meeting of no more than six people – hardly an indication of mass support for our meanderings. Be that as it may, this continuation of a critical perspective was essential to my subsequent scribbling of the Open Letter which was rejected by the National Youth Agency’s organ, ‘Young People Now’ as being too heavy for its readership. I declined the offer to rewrite.

Thus we circulated the Letter at the 2009 Youth & Policy History Conference in Durham, knowing that Y & P itself stood for an open and serious appraisal of the State’s relationship with young people. I have failed to track down the place where the signatories are housed, well over 700 as I remember. In short, the Open Letter opposed the behavioural and instrumental, the imposition of rules, norms and outcomes upon practice. As I argued, “we described a clash between the process of ‘becoming a person, individually, socially and politically aware’, which held good for ourselves and young people and neoliberalism’s desire to manufacture self-centred conformism and unquestioning obedience to the status quo amongst both ourselves and young people”.

All of which preamble leads to a specific engagement with the history of IDYW itself. As I have more than hinted there is a book to be written. I will have to content myself with a limited number of memories.

At this point in my contribution to the meeting, I began to explore all that we had done across the life of IDYW. In this context to do so here would come across as a list with little in the way of explanation and exploration. Hence, for now, I can only ask the reader to interrogate for themselves the IDYW archive. For my part I am committed monthly, if not more frequently, to post afresh gems from the archive and hope you might keep your eye on their appearance. Amongst the themes I touched upon were:

The Annual Conferences
The Regional Seminars
The range of questioning articles and books produced by IDYW activists
Our unstinting support for wider initiatives, exemplified by our involvement in Choose Youth and ‘Is the Tide Turning’
Our input into the European Youth Work debate

Concluding Remarks

Given I’m somewhat retired from the fray I don’t want to overstay my return to a discussion about IDYW’s future or indeed claim that my finger is on the pulse. My piece on ‘Resistance in a Climate of Anxiety’ conveys still much of my perspective.

Firstly, IDYW was born out of a spirit of resistance to and dissension from the mainstream behavioural narrative besetting our relations with young people.

Secondly, therefore, my question is whether IDYW remains a critical voice, given that the formalisation of the informal within Youth Work has continued apace? Or has it been slowly sanitised, swallowed up safely into the mainstream as symbolised by a Facebook page dominated by exchanges and requests far removed from the philosophy and politics of the Open Letter?

Finally, in my opinion, neither Youth Work nor IDYW itself can sidestep facing the implications for both young people and society as a whole of the consciously created COVID pandemic. As best I can see the profession meekly and unquestioningly complied with a flagrantly undemocratic, disgracefully unethical, utterly one-sided governmental response to a virus which, if placed in context, has been far from the 21st-century Great Plague predicted by that methodological absurdity, the Science, its cynical experts and obedient stenographers. We witnessed the overnight abandonment of a holistic, measured, informed Public Health Policy and the character assassination of those brave souls, who pointed this out.

In particular, youth workers and education professionals as a whole ought to examine on what unevidenced grounds they cooperated with the closing down and stifling of children and young people’s provision and ask themselves to what extent they were complicit in the transmission of the fearmongering propaganda disseminated by the behavioural psychologists and their ‘nudge, nudge’ advertising arm? For what it’s worth, even if this emergency dies down and the covid zealots retreat, I don’t think it’s possible to proceed as if not much has gone on, to accept their New Normal.

The logo of our friends at the now defunct National Coalition for Independent Action

Above all, a supposed democratic and emancipatory youth work is now put to the test in terms of its own integrity. Is it possible to abandon the pursuit of truth and critical reflection with hardly a whimper, then as the dust settles, claim to be its principled advocates? I ask this with some pessimism as more than ever in the light of the pandemic I believe that the struggle to defend and extend the power of the people against the technocratic authoritarianism of the ruling class and its supporters on both the Left and Right is now the overwhelming political struggle of our time. Indeed it is a struggle, which transcends simplistic political categories. It is a struggle, within and without youth work, which demands a renewed critical dialogue across a veritable diversity of voices. IDYW in its time sought to do so but fell short. Crucially we never developed a vibrant, living network of local and regional IDYW support groups. It falls upon a younger generation in particular to revive the spirit of its intent.

IN DEFENCE OF YOUTH WORK CLOSES ITS BOOKS IN SADNESS BUT WITH MUCH PRIDE

On By Tony TaylorIn Children and Young People, Education, History, Politics, Youth WorkLeave a comment

Some readers of this blog will know that I penned the Open Letter, which initiated the Defence of Youth Work campaign in early 2009. For a decade I coordinated the campaign and maintained its website. It took up a big chunk of my life but I was privileged that it did so. By a twist of fate, I had the time and space to do so. I stepped down from my leading role in 2019 but no one was able to fill the gap. No one had the time and space. I cannot escape from the fact that my withdrawal in part sapped the energy and slowed the momentum of the campaign. As it was the restrictions on social existence imposed in the name of COVID brought things almost to a standstill. Thus on Friday, October 7 the Steering Group agreed to bring IDYW’s life to a close. Below is the Steering Group’s statement, first published on the IDYW website. More thoughts to follow.

The original IDYW logo

IN DEFENCE OF YOUTH WORK CLOSES ITS BOOKS IN SADNESS BUT WITH MUCH PRIDE

At our very first national conference in 2009, Janet Batsleer welcomed us to an ‘unauthorised space’. Her eloquent words ring down through the years.

In Defence of Youth Work as a campaign and critical forum is no more. At an Open Steering Group meeting held in Manchester on Friday, October 7th, amidst smiles, frowns and tears, it was agreed that IDYW had run its course, having lost its impetus and energy. In exploring why this was so and where we were up to, it became plain we had much of which to be proud. The evidence for this assertion is to be found on this website with its 1500+ posts recording our collective activity since our appearance in early 2009. We are committed to preserving the website as a historical archive and as a testament to the impact of our small ‘unauthorised’ and independent group, ‘punching above its weight’, upon the national and indeed international youth work scene.

One of Jethro Bryce’s striking illustrations from our book, ”This is Youth Work’

Whilst IDYW will cease to be an organised presence in the youth work arena, it is vital to recognise that its existence was always of its time. It was no more and no less than a particular expression over the last thirteen years of a centuries-old struggle for a truly democratic and ‘popular’ education. Without questioning, democratically inclined citizens, young and old, there can be no democracy. In this context, the humanist philosophy and practice of a secular and religious disposition that inspired IDYW’s resistance to the behavioural and instrumental neoliberal agenda remain a universal treasury of hope. The ideas live on. In the face of an increasingly technocratic and authoritarian capitalism, we hope that our endeavour will be taken up afresh and reimagined by a new wave of workers and activists. We hope too that the archive of our efforts will provide a moment or two of inspiration.

Gathering our collective thoughts

For now, we will take a deep breath, tinged with sadness, bursting with pride. In the coming months, from time to time, we will highlight anew memories worth remembering. Tony Taylor at tonymtaylor@gmail.com has agreed to be a Keeper of the Records, to use an old-fashioned title, and will welcome approaches from students, academics, researchers and practitioners seeking to explore our ‘books’.

Hopefully concentrating on a speaker’s provocative insights!

A Pragmatic Postscript

Over the years our Facebook page has taken on a life of its own. At this moment it boasts 6,800 members. It has become the go-to place for sharing information and ideas about youth work in general. In many ways, the page has lost touch with its original purpose of encouraging debate focused on IDYW’s cornerstones. Nevertheless, it is clearly an important resource and a marketplace for youth workers and projects. Respecting this our moderators will continue to keep watch on its contents and are considering ways of perhaps filtering the daily waterfall of varied material.

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES LA LUTTA CONTINUA Ο Αγώνας Συνεχίζεται

Resistance in a Climate of Anxiety and Precarity

On By Tony TaylorIn neoliberalism, Politics, Youth and Community Work, Youth Work2 Comments

A few weeks ago I was ready to make a contribution on the theme of resistance to an In Defence of Youth Work Zoom seminar. However an electricity cut in our village scuppered that idea. In the end I’ve messed around with my notes and produced for what it’s worth the following piece. As it happens I’m withdrawing from the IDYW Steering Group to sit on the backbenches. For nigh on 12 years I’ve prioritised playing a part in the life of IDYW but have grown evermore uncomfortable about pontificating about youth work in the UK from kilometres away. Nevertheless I intend to continue with this Chatting Critically blog and hope in the coming months, even years to feature interviews with characters, famous, infamous and unknown from within the world of youth and community work. As they say, watch this space.

If you’re interested I can recommend reading the three challenging contributions at the Zoom seminar, which were not derailed by thunder and lightning.

Resistance, rebellion, revolution! – Sue Atkins

Our fears and resistance to working collaboratively – Ruth Richardson

Youth workers’ every day marvels… when does persistence become resistance? – Janet Batsleer

Resistance in a Climate of Anxiety and Precarity

“The future will challenge our understanding of what it means to be human, from both a biological and a social standpoint” [Klaus Schwab FIR p35]

In Defence of Youth Work [IDYW] was born in resistance. Its emergence in early 2009 was an explicit two fingers to the neoliberal assault on social-democratic, open access and open-ended youth work. This was a form of youth work we defined as ‘volatile and voluntary, creative and collective- an association and conversation without guarantees’. Scoffing at our idealism neoliberalism demanded that youth work be the imposition of structured, time-limited interventions led by prescribed and predictable outcomes. We described a clash between our sense of ‘becoming a person, individually, socially and politically aware’, which held good for ourselves and young people and neoliberalism’s desire to manufacture self-centred conformism and obedience to the status quo amongst both ourselves and young people.


We contrasted our commitment to unfolding relationships and conversations, to intimate and collective democracy with the short-term, calculated, supposedly measurable interventions recommended by the powerful Impact lobby. We defended our crucial understanding of young people as heterogeneous, born into a matrix of class, gender, race, sexuality, disability and faith, against the neoliberal revival of the abstract young person denied their diversity. In short, we opposed the depoliticisation of practice.

We have been swimming against the tide over the last decade. Even if, in a naive moment prior to the last General Election we wondered whether the tide might even be turning. The orchestrated humiliation of Jeremy Corbyn dispelled that dream. Nevertheless, we have been a prickly thorn in the side of Youth Work’s self-proclaimed leadership. Indeed it has been admitted in private that from time to time we have disturbed the collaborative pragmatism of such as the NYA and UK Youth, not that they would ever admit this in public.

Yet, whilst neoliberal ideology prevails, its free-market economic model is broken. Thus I want to suggest that we are in transition to technocratic capitalism as the dominant section of the ruling class seeks to reassert its control over a fractured global society. In this scenario, spelt out in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the nation-state acts as the ruling class’s senior management enabling the imposition of its global policies. Disobedient populations “risk becoming isolated from global norms, putting these nations at risk of becoming the laggards of the new digital economy” [Schwab FIR p78].

Inevitably, if this shift comes to pass, the nature of this new regime will influence the character of youth work in all its forms.

The reference group for grasping the strategic thinking of the powerful in a period of profound social, political and economic crisis is the World Economic Forum [WEF], which in its own words is “the global platform for public-private cooperation, of partnerships between businessmen, politicians, intellectuals and other leaders of society to define, discuss and advance key issues on the global agenda.” On board amongst many are Amazon, Google, Facebook, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Chase, AstraZyneco, Pfizer, the Gates Foundation – all powerhouses on the international scene – not to mention the World Health Organisation and International Monetary Fund.

Now if I had been venturing some critical thoughts a year ago on a WEF political perspective, which embraces enthusiastically global governance, the glories of automation, artificial intelligence, neurotechnology and mass surveillance we could have held a friendly, rational, even concerned discussion – even if I came across as having just read Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’. However the pandemic has put paid to that. My speculative musings of 2019 on an insidious drift to authoritarianism are likely now to be dismissed as ‘conspiracy theory’, a weary insult which excuses the accuser from any serious scrutiny of events.

For there is no way of commenting on the WEF’s politics separate from the remarkable unity of 198 countries in following the unelected World Health Organisation’s declaration of a pandemic and the blanket adoption of the same narrative of fear by politicians and the mainstream media across the world. Against this backcloth, lest I be accused of not being concerned about both the suffering, the dying and the deceased, let’s agree the hegemonic version of events promulgated is the informed truth devoid of complication and contradiction. I will say no more therefore than that the pandemic has amplified key themes in the WEF’s vision of the future. Indeed Kurt Schwab, the founder and executive chair of this self-appointed body has welcomed warmly in the book, ‘The Great Reset’, the window of opportunity provided by the virus in accelerating the WEF’s agenda.

The pandemic will mark a turning point by accelerating this transition. It has crystallized the issue and made a return to the pre-pandemic status quo impossible.” [Schwab TGR p110]

Amongst these themes are:

  • The crucial need for the financial sector, together with the corporate, technological and pharmaceutical giants, to be the leadership of the way forward in tackling the world’s problems. “The combined market value of the leading tech companies hit record after record during the lockdowns, even rising back above levels before the outbreak started… this phenomenon is unlikely to abate any time soon, quite the opposite”. [Schwab TGR p119].
  • The necessity of transforming digitally our private and public existence, whether through shopping, via a shift to on-line education, tele-medicine or even e-sport.“In the summer of 2020, the direction of the trend seems clear: the world of education, like for so many other industries, will become partly virtual”.[Schwab TGR p116]
  • The requirement that our physical and psychological presence on earth is subject to the policing and surveillance of what we do and what we think – see also Shoshanna Zuboff’s ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’
  • The demand that we speed up becoming identifiable, immunised, traceable, card-carrying, cash-less consumers.“The current imperative to propel, no matter what, the ‘contactless economy’ and the subsequent willingness of regulators to speed it up means that there are no holds barred”[Schwab TGR p124]

This dominant fraction of the 1% is not without nous. In the name of stakeholder capitalism, its prefered definition of itself, it claims to care about poverty, injustice and the environment. Classically it seeks to co-opt for its own ends radical ideas and practice, for example, intersectionality, LGBTQ rights and youth activism. Whilst the liberal rhetoric is seductive, its programme of action is arrogant and authoritarian. It seeks both to persuade and intimidate. Its proposals are marketed as being in the common interest. The rules of existence will be made by experts for our own good. To doubt this expertise is to be misinformed or even just plain stupid, no more than a Covidiot.

Conspicuously absent in the WEF scenario is the demos, the people. Missing crucially is any sense of democracy, the power of the people. Utterly absent is the very notion that we [and no one else] should make the laws by which we live together. At best in the WEF’s vision of the future the people will be consulted.

To return to the implications for youth work it is the democratic question that is at the heart of the matter. Open youth work is education for democracy. Youth workers and young people enter into a dialogue, within which the starting point is uncertain, the journey is still to be created and the destination is open to change. It is a conversation founded on listening to each other, the prerequisite for a democratic exchange.

My anxiety is that the transition to technocratic capitalism will strengthen the neoliberal emphasis on youth work as behavioural modification, the moulding of the compliant, individualised young person. This is expressed in the continued ‘formalising of the informal’ whereby it seems that many of today’s youth workers cannot envisage contact with young people that is not planned or scripted in some way in advance. Our own IDYW Facebook group is flooded with requests for what are lesson plans in all but name. It is a practice that suggests we do know best what’s good for young people before we’ve even spoken to them. It is a practice, for what it’s worth in my rusty experience, from which many young people will recoil.

Where does all this leave us in today’s conversations with each other and young people? For ourselves we need to explore whether our grasp of the present situation leads us to accommodate to or resist the dominant narrative. In terms of our relationships with young people we need to listen to their sense of going along with or challenging the prescribed behaviours demanded by the government. This seems to me to be fertile ground on which to converse. As I suspect that many, young and old, both accommodate and resist. We might well wear a mask as requested, keep our distance in shops yet visit our friends in their homes and give false addresses in the pub.….and so on. Or is the fear of questioning the government’s diktat so threatening that we are reduced to telling young people to do as they are told? And, like it or not, at least some young people will be conscious via the social media of alternative interpretations of what’s happening, some bizarre, but some perfectly plausible.

As ever the dilemmas intensify when we find ourselves in dialogue about collective resistance. Sadly across the neoliberal decades with the undermining of the trade unions and the social movements youth workers have often submitted to management instructions to stay clear of public demonstrations alongside young people. With this backcloth in mind how are we responding to young people ‘partying’? Do we judge this as selfish anti-social behaviour or as an act of resistance to draconian restrictions? If, for whatever reason, enough is surely enough, young people take to the streets about the corner they find themselves in, do we join them or sit on the sidelines as the protest is dispersed on ‘health and safety grounds’?

To talk of resistance is one thing, to resist is another. To resist as an individual is noble, but likely to lead to disciplinary action and/or exhaustion. If we are to defend democratic youth work in the coming period we must renew our commitment to one another as a collective. In Defence of Youth Work has failed to encourage the coming together of youth workers at a local level as a first step, where worries about accommodating too much or resisting too little can be kicked around. Such gatherings of even two or three people are vital without which talk of resistance is empty. Or are we now so fearful, so precarious, so divided that even to agree to meet regularly for an hour in our own time over a drink, to chew over what’s going on, is a step too far?

Finally, my concern is that we are experiencing a slide to authoritarianism at global and national levels, the former being expressed in the WEF’s ‘expercratic’ ideology, its aversion to democracy and its desire to alter what it means to be human, “advances in neurotechnologies and biotechnologies are forcing us to question what it means to be human” [Schwab FIR p36].

In this context I’ll share a couple of heretical thoughts.

  • In the face of rule by experts we must refuse to be seen as experts. One of our great strengths is humility. Of course to say this is to question the very existence of youth work as a closed profession, its claim that it possesses a unique body of expertise and its desire to license practice. In terms of IDYW itself this very question returns us to our roots. At its birth IDYW was not about the defence of a profession as such or indeed about the defence of Youth Services. It was about being with young people on a voluntary journey of mutual education, within which ‘the educator is as much educated as those she seeks to educate’. Our first conference brought together people from both the statutory and voluntary sectors, who shared this philosophy. The process revealed also that, whatever the lip service paid, much mainstream practice was at odds with the IDYW cornerstones laid down in the Open Letter.
  • What also became clear in our initial debates was that we were defending a certain sort of ‘space’, within which we could relate to young people. And for this privileged site of practice to be in harmony with our philosophy it needed to be as independent as possible from Church, State or Philanthropy. Obviously this precious space cannot float free from relations with the community, with funders, with sponsors and so on. However it is vital that the space is afforded a high degree of ‘relative autonomy’ such that young people and workers are able to create together democratic processes and relationships. Perchance too there is a contradiction in campaigning for this democratic space to be rendered statutory by increasingly authoritarian governments.

Perhaps I’m being melodramatic but I believe we are living through a critical moment in history. More than ever the struggle against neoliberal or technocratic capitalism, against oppression and exploitation must be authentically democratic, illustrating in its practices the profound limitations of institutionalised democracy. Resistance will come from below through a renaissance of the social movements.

Where might IDYW fit in this wider background of would-be resistance? As it is, IDYW lives on as a critical voice within Youth Work as a whole. A temptation might be to look inwards and be drawn into seeking to influence the policies, say, of the National Youth Agency or Centre for Youth Impact. I think this would be a mistake, an act of accommodation rather than resistance. Gazing outwards I wonder whether this is a moment when IDYW should explore directly with its supporters the reasons for our reluctance to organise collectively. Am I being old-fashioned in believing that, when push comes to shove, if resistance is to strike fear into the powerful it will spring from acting together on the basis of the classic slogan, ‘Educate, Agitate, Organise’? Am I living in a dream to believe that a passionate and organised IDYW democratic alliance of workers, volunteers and young people could be part of the absolutely necessary social and political resistance to the dystopian prospect offered by the global elite and the World Economic Forum?

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