Youth Work Process, Product and Practice

Creating an authentic curriculum in work with young people

Jon Ord

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781135009687
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation inclusive

Youth Work Process and Practice provides an overview of the central concerns in youth work today, exploring what youth work actually consists in and developing an authentic theoretical framework for practice.

This accessible textbook places the role of the curriculum and idea of practice as a process at the centre of youth work. Exploring important aspects of practice – such as empowerment, participation and choice, group work, experiential learning and the importance of relationship building – Jon Ord explains how the idea of curriculum can be used to communicate, legitimate and develop youth worth practice, as well as help to articulate its value and importance.

The book includes a detailed and up-to-date analysis of the policy climate, looks at the implications of its focus on measurability and outcomes and discusses the impact of devolution in the UK on youth work practice. It contrasts dominant contemporary perspectives of youth and youth culture and argues that, rather than competing, 'informal' and 'social' education are twin aspects of an educational practice which must emphasises both individual development and wider social change.

Youth Work Process and Practice is an essential read for all students of youth and community work and will also be an important reference for practising youth workers.

Part I
Curriculum theory and practice

Chapter 1
The emergence of the youth work curriculum

The history of curriculum

The explicit use of the concept of curriculum in youth and community work does not have a long history. It does not appear in any detail, if at all, in the major government reports of Albemarle (Ministry of Education, 1960), Fairbairn-Milson (DES, 1969) or Thompson (DES, 1982). The concept of ‘curriculum’ was perhaps thought to be the preserve of schools (Ord, 2004a). The first explicit reference to curriculum was made by John Ewen, the then director of the National Youth Bureau (NYB) who wrote a paper entitled ‘Curriculum Development in the Youth Club’ (Ewen, 1975).¹ In this interesting and thought-provoking paper he proposed that curriculum would be a credible term to use to answer the question ‘what are we doing in the youth club’? (1975: 1). He was generally referring to the group work, activities and issue-based work which took place in the average youth club, and attempting to firmly distinguish between the purely recreational activities of leisure facilities and the educational foundations of youth work activities.

Little appears to have been written subsequently, either by Ewen or by those commenting on his idea, to continue this line of enquiry, although his paper was published as a second edition in 1983. Curriculum, then, as an explicit concept in youth work, to a large extent lay dormant until it was introduced by the then Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Education and Science Alan Howarth MP, who launched the first of three ministerial conferences auspiciously titled ‘Towards a core curriculum’.

The context for what would become a radical change in the conception of curriculum in youth work was the Education Reform Act of 1988. This Act saw the introduction, or ‘imposition’, of the National Curriculum in schools. Teachers’ relative autonomy over their classroom delivery had gone. They were told what they would teach and what outcomes they would produce, and testing regimes were introduced to measure those outcomes. This radical shake-up of the school curriculum set the scene for an application of curriculum to youth work, and hence the First Ministerial Conference. Although some ‘consultation’ was undertaken prior to the conference, most involved saw the process as a ‘top down’ attempt to introduce what was regarded at the time as an unwanted and unmerited concept – the curriculum.

Howarth gave the keynote address, which was later published along with the accompanying conference papers as Danger or Opportunity: Towards a Core Curriculum for the Youth Service (NYB, 1990) . In the address he made it quite clear that he was aware of the controversial nature of curriculum in youth work, but he maintained that the aims of the conference were:

• 1 Clarification of the core business of youth work
• 2 Priority outcomes of youth work
• 3 Agree a concept of ‘Core Curriculum’ for youth work.

Howarth was very specific about what he meant by ‘…core curriculum – that is the priority outcomes which the youth service should seek to provide’ (NYB, 1990: 34).

He was also keen to distinguish clearly between other aspects of youth work, which he thought might be incorporated:

…by curriculum I mean not the aims of the youth service… Nor do I mean the detailed activities or methods of delivery… but the outcomes…

(NYB, 1990: 34)

It is important to point out at this point that though Howarth’s attempt to introduce a concept of curriculum is recounted uncritically, this is because we are concerned at the moment with its historical importance in terms of the emergence of the concept in youth work. However, it must be noted that the concept of curriculum conceived of by Howarth, which focuses exclusively on ‘outcomes’, is a particular notion of curriculum which, it is argued (Davies, 1991; Ord, 2004a), is not appropriate for youth work. Moreover, the curriculum that has gained currency in the field in the period following the ministerial conferences was significantly different to that which was narrowly defined by Howarth – not least because it incorporated the element of process in the curriculum.

Despite Howarth’s bold intentions at the first conference, he did not achieve much of his ambitious plan. Needless to say, the antipathy from the field to what was perceived to be an imposition of a concept of curriculum was considerable, and ‘evaluation forms from the conference reiterated the need for “ownership” by the field of any ‘core curriculum’ (NYB, 1990: 80).

This whole debacle was described by Tom Wylie, who was later to become the chief executive of the newly formed National Youth Agency, in his ‘memoir of HM Inspectorate in the Thatcher era’, as follows:

…the attempt to produce a consensus across such a wide field of endeavour – both statutory and voluntary sector – and in a form which would be genuinely useful was doomed from the start. It was made worse, in the view of the HMI, by the failure to offer clarity about the meaning of the very word ‘curriculum’… The department’s great project was also handicapped by the generally ham-fisted management of the tortuous process of a series of ministerial conferences… The result pleased no-one.

(Wylie, 2001: 244)

The second ministerial conference (NYB, 1991) took 165 written submissions as part of its pre-conference consultation. This, according to Bernard Davies, ‘offered a revealing insight into the youth service’s collective and highly pluralistic view of itself, its mission and its methods’ (1999b: 133). As a result the task was redefined to the production of a statement of purpose. The ‘new’ minister did not attend the conference in person, choosing instead to address the audience by video link. However, perhaps because of this lack of prescription from government about what to focus on, the field was able to discuss and agree its own ‘Statement of Purpose’:

… To redress all forms of inequality and to ensure equality of opportunity for all young people to fulfil their potential as empowered individuals and members of groups and communities and to support young people during their transition to adulthood.

(NYB, 1991)

The conference also agreed that youth work should:

• Offer opportunities which are ‘educative’
• Promote ‘equality of opportunity’
• Be ‘participative and empowering’

(NYB, 1991)

It was also recommended that any future curriculum would be based upon this agreed statement of purpose. The fact that the statement of purpose was largely ignored by government ministers did not matter in respect of its influence in the production of future curriculum documents. The statement was widely accepted within the field of youth work and began to inform what was the most important implication of the ministerial conferences: that individual youth services began to produce their own ‘locally specific’ curriculum documents. Indeed, many of the documents to date, as will be seen in the chapters on the essential elements, retain a commitment to these ‘cornerstones’.

By the time the third ministerial conference (NYA, 1992) had been completed, which achieved some discussion and partial agreement around the notion of performance indicators (Davies, 1999b), it was evident the ‘curriculum project’ as originally conceived by Howarth had withered on the vine. As Davies puts it, ‘the second conference proved to be the final resting place of the ministerial bandwagon’ (1999b: 135). However, it would be quite wrong to conclude simply that the status quo prevailed. Although Janet Pareskeva, the then chief executive of the NYA, was right to acknowledge ‘that no core curriculum or even published common learning outcomes were agreed’ (Davies, 1999b: 136), the ‘state of play’ in the field of youth work had changed and curriculum emerged as a concept which would be explicitly applied to youth work in the coming years.

Newman and Ingram’s curriculum research

In the absence of significant writing on a youth work curriculum, there is in fact a very thoughtful and interesting publication called The Youth Work Curriculum by Eileen Newman and Gina Ingram. This was published in 1989, and was an action research project with four statutory youth services in the northwest of England. As stated, ‘[t]he purpose of the project was to discover and record the youth work curriculum’ (1989: 1).

The timing of the project is interesting; it preceded the first, now infamous ministerial conference, since the research commenced in 1988, but it was set up quite explicitly by the Further Education Unit in response to the Education Reform Act of 1988. It should clearly be seen therefore not as an original attempt to innovatively develop notions of curriculum in youth work, as Ewen had, but as a direct response to policy shifts within education. As the authors confess: ‘Following the 1988 Education Reform Act, it is essential that the Youth Service is able to defend successfully its existing role and mark out clearly its contribution to work with young people within the education service and with other agencies’ (1989: vii).

That said, however, in many ways this is a gem; there is a lot one could be critical about, but as the authors say themselves, ‘the project should be no more than a first stage in describing the youth work curriculum’ (Newman and Ingram, 1989: 3). It is in fact disappointing that despite the authenticity of the youth work which is at the heart of the authors’ attempts to describe the youth work curriculum, this document appears to have been largely ignored. For example, it is absent from the NYA’s Planning the Way (1995), their later published guidance on curriculum.

Newman and Ingram demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to apply notions of curriculum ‘unproblematically’ to youth work. They conducted an action research project with four authorities, Liverpool, Knowsley, Thameside and Cheshire, and produced a consensus on key curricular concepts like open and voluntary access, and the importance of micro learning cycles. What is important in their formulation of curriculum is its commitment to ‘process’; they proposed that ‘[c]urriculum is an organic process. It is not a list of subject areas, syllabus or a statement of aims or objectives’ (1989: 1). As we shall see throughout this book, the notion of process is at the heart of an authentic curriculum, despite attempts, often emanating from government policy, to undermine this commitment.

Curriculum is embedded in youth work

Importantly what resulted from the ministerial conferences and occurred throughout the 1990s was an acceptance by statutory youth services of the task of articulating their work in terms of curriculum. Equally importantly, however, this was on their terms. The NYA was tasked with the job of facilitating this process. Equally importantly, the responsibility for the production of the subsequent curriculum documents was undertaken by youth workers in their respective services, autonomously and without prescription. As summarised in the NYA guidance on curriculum, Planning the Way (1995):

The concept of a core curriculum for the service as a result [of the ministerial conferences] shifted to a framework for fundamental principles in order to facilitate flexibility and to take account of the social factors which have an impact on young people at the local level. The importance of local determination and the freedom for each organisation to define its own values, goals and priorities was a major feature.’

(NYA, 1995: 6–7)

By the mid-1990s many local authority youth services did produce their own locally agreed curriculum documents. Kingston Youth Service had their first document in 1990, West Sussex in 1989, Hampshire in 1991 and Gloucestershire in 1992. The fact that so many local authority youth services were able to make a shift from what appears to be animosity and antipathy towards the concept of curriculum to acceptance of the notion and production of their own documents appears to need some explanation. There were very real concerns expressed by a large majority over the introduction of curriculum. The NYB’s own consultation in 1989 ‘revealed profound concerns about the term curriculum and whether its definition in relation to youth work could indeed encapsulate and do justice to the nature of youth work’ (1990: 5). What this concern alludes to is not, however, a fundamental inability of youth work to be articulated by curriculum, or a fundamental inappropriateness of an application of curricular concepts to the principles and practices of youth work. Rather, what underpins these concerns is a lack of power and control in the application of the concept of curriculum to youth work. This is evidenced by the request for ‘ownership’ from the delegates at the first ministerial conference (NYB, 1990).

That curriculum can be integrated into articulations of youth work was shown quite clearly by Newman and Ingram (1989). The four local authorities they worked with in their participative action research project produced a consensus on many important features of a youth work curriculum, including issues of content and methodology, as well as making suggestions for an overarching framework. In addition, their suggestion that services should be able to produce their own documents which have local currency among their workers shows that curriculum itself, if produced and agreed locally, is not an alien concept.

This acceptance and incorporation of the concept of curriculum could be explained by a victory of pragmatism over principles. The youth work profession saw curriculum coming, and realised that it either incorporated curriculum into its work or it would have had it imposed. Indeed, this was noted by Jeffs (2004), who suggests the development of curriculum was out of ‘fear’. So have youth workers ditched their principles and been pragmatic in utilising curriculum? This has the appearance of plausibility, since it should not be forgotten that Newman and Ingram’s research project was initiated because of the Education Reform Act of 1988, with its imposition of curriculum in formal education and a concern that a similar fate may befall youth work.

Plausible though this is, however, it is not the correct explanation. If there was a genuine lack of fit between curriculum and youth work, Newman and Ingram’s project would not have been so successful. Neither would it have been possible for services up and down the country to have produced their own locally agreed curriculum documents without an uproar similar to that encountered by Howarth at the first ministerial conference. The pages of the youth work press would have been full of accounts of the horror at these attempts, as workers rebelled. This did not happen because, in principle the concept of curriculum is not alien to youth work. Rather it is simply the case that the concept of curriculum had never before been explicitly articulated or utilised.

This conclusion is supported by the example of the youth work curriculum in Northern Ireland, the first version of which has been in use since 1987 and was entitled Youth Work: A model for effective practice (Northern Ireland Youth Service, 1987). It was described ‘as something to encourage youth workers to develop their own practice, and see it as a tool that can be adapted or reshaped to suit the situation in which they are working. Above all however it was not intended to lead to a single prescriptive and inflexible curriculum’ (Harland et al., 2005: 57). The implementation of the curriculum was not contentious and debate was ‘passed over’, and according to Harland et al. it has not ‘contribute[d] to a break with the historical mode of practice’ (ibid.). They go on to comment ‘with dismay as lessons from Northern Ireland appear to be ignored’ (ibid.).

The correct explanation for this transition from antipathy to acceptance would be that given that the risk of imposition had subsided, the curriculum simply moved from being implicit to explicit. This point is first made by Davies where he questions whether or not ‘the key premises and constructs underpinning curriculum really [are] so foreign to youth work thinking and action’ (2005a: 87). He goes on to conclude that ‘from its early days the practice of youth work has been explained, justified and shaped by implicit notions of curriculum [and that] they are no less powerful for being implicit’ (ibid.).

Despite the validity of this argument for those who remain a little uneasy about the notion of curriculum in youth work, they should refer to Chapter 21, which responds to a number of other possible reasons behind a continuing antipathy towards the concept.

Note

1 Although it will be argued towards the end of this chapter that the notion of curriculum merely moved from being implicit to explicit throughout this process of apparent emergence (Davies, 2005a).

Chapter 2
Meaning of curriculum in youth work

Possible reasons...