Work with Young People

Theory and Policy for Practice

Jason J Wood, Jean Hine, Jason J Wood, Jean Hine

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781412928854, 9781412928847
• eBook ISBN: 9781446246757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

?The book covers a fascinating range of theory, policy and practice research not covered elsewhere in one text. The editors are to be congratulated? - Marian Charlton, Leeds Metropolitan University

?The book offers a broad overview of the issues and literature, and will be of immediate use. It enables students to bring themselves up to date with contemporary concerns and changes in the field of community and youth work? - Jean Spence, University of Durham

This authoritative text is a must-read for anyone working - or training to work - with young people. It considers how theory, policy and practice intersect and influence one another in today?s challenging and rapidly changing social, economic and political contexts. Offering a timely contribution to the debate, it covers key themes and developments, including:

- how we understand the lives of young people

- the principles that underpin work with young people

- the policy and practice in a wide range of contexts, both national and international

- the key concepts currently high on the policy and practice agenda.

An essential companion for the professional training of youth workers, this core text will also be of interest and value to students in a wide range of fields such as education, criminology and youth justice, social work, sociology and social policy.

1

INTRODUCTION: THE CHANGING CONTEXT OF WORK WITH YOUNG PEOPLE

Jason Wood and Jean Hine

Introduction

The past ten years has been witness to significant expansion and change in work with young people. The field once occupied predominantly by youth services, social work and education now contains a wider network of agencies that seek to intervene in a young person’s life. A qualified youth worker today is one who can be called upon to make a contribution to a number of agencies and organisations that, in many cases, did not exist ten years ago. In statutory youth offending partnerships and crime prevention teams, they work to prevent and reduce the reoccurrence of youth crime. In information, advice and guidance services, they undertake work to reduce the number of young people excluded from education, training or employment. Through various health initiatives, they work preventatively in reducing the various health risks that young people face. Positive activities and structured programmes of leisure, once the cornerstone of youth work, persist, but in a wide variety of contexts provided by a range of statutory, voluntary and private agencies. This broad range of work with young people frequently takes place in multi-agency contexts, where the disciplinary boundaries between professions are increasingly characterised as porous. As a result, the professional identity of a youth, health or social worker is somewhat under challenge as partnership becomes commonplace.

Many of the policy initiatives that have underpinned these changes have done so on the basis of a desire to improve things for all children and young people. In England, the Every Child Matters (ECM) framework offers five laudable outcomes for children and young people: being healthy, staying safe, enjoying and achieving, making a positive contribution and achieving economic well-being (DfES 2003). Similarly, the ambitions of the overarching Youth Matters and Aiming High for Young People strategies indicate both a desire to empower young people in the delivery of positive activities and for them to access high quality support in terms of advice and guidance (DfES 2005; HM Treasury/DCFS 2007). These positive messages are also evident at a European level: youth policy is governed by a commitment to advocating youth citizenship, promoting better participation and listening to the voice of young people (Williamson, Chapter 11).

However, such developments also invite wide-ranging criticism. The dominant message about young people is one of ambivalence: they are to be protected and improved through increased intervention, but simultaneously society must be protected from some of them. They are active participants in public life, yet are increasingly excluded from public spaces through dispersal and curfew measures. They are held up as responsible for making decisions, yet are often characterised as lacking the necessary skills to exercise this responsibility in an acceptable way. All of which results in young people being labelled in neat, dichotomous ways that do not necessarily reflect the complexity of young people’s real lives and contextual circumstances.

At the same time as funding the expansion in the numbers of workers with young people, policy has also become more prescriptive, specifying how their work should be done and introducing a wide range of targets to be met by agencies delivering this work. Practitioners are increasingly required to demonstrate how their work results in accredited learning outcomes for young people. These targets are underpinned by an espoused commitment to evidence-based practice, though it is difficult to see the value of the evidence chosen. This is all the more surprising given the extent to which research and wider theory has increased understandings of young people over the past decade. The relationship between this growing body of research, much of it focused on young people, and the definitions and approaches found in policy is clearly not a strong as it could be.

This is a book about working with young people in this changing climate. It provides an opportunity for those who work with young people to consider the theoretical issues and wider theorising within which policy is formulated and their practice occurs. It considers some key theoretical and policy developments, and subjects them to a critical and timely review, inviting the reader to reflect upon the implications for the practice of working with young people.

Developments in theory and research

The study of youth and work with young people has seen advances in theoretical and empirical understanding over the past decade. Youth studies, itself a contentious area of research, has opened understanding of various aspects of young people’s lives. Youth itself is an ‘artefact of expertise’ (Kelly 2003) which is subject to intensive interrogation and expert representations of ‘education, family, the media, popular culture, (un) employment transitions, the life course, risks and so on’ (Kelly 2003: 167).

Exactly what is meant by ‘youth’ is open to question (see Hine, Chapter 3), though central to the concept is the notion of it being a stage in life between childhood and adulthood. The period in the life course that is defined as ‘youth’ is as much a social construction as it is a period of individual change: Mizen defines youth as a ‘socially determined category’ (Mizen 2004: 5) and in this respect, it is little use to rely solely on individual biological markers as a frame for understanding youth. In very simple terms, the cultural, social and political contexts into which young people grow, invariably shape definitions of what is childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

Childhood is a contested and socially constructed period of the life course (Foley et al. 2001; James and James 2004). Like youth, childhood ‘cannot be regarded as an unproblematic descriptor of the natural biological phase’ (James and James 2004: 13). The experiences of a child growing up in the 1990s compared with that of those today will vary dramatically. Further complexity arises in any cross-cultural comparison of childhood, especially in the values ascribed to certain definitions of childrearing practices as compared to ‘Western notions of what all children should aspire to’ (Sanders 2004: 53). Such perspectives open up a challenge to claims of a neutrally defined ‘normal’ childhood since ‘childhood as a social space is structurally determined by a range of social institutions and mechanisms’ (James and James 2004: 213). These institutions and mechanisms reflect the dominant cultural and social adult expectations of childhood, either in response to the individual and collective behaviours of children or in the wide variety of macro determinates that influence the wider structure of society (James and James 2004).

Adulthood is also subject to social categorisation. What is meant precisely by adulthood is highly contested. Economic indicators would suggest full and continuous participation in the economy and the acquisition of property (Faulks 2000). Normative social indicators may include the formation of stable family units, char-acterised by the reproduction and socialisation of the next generation of children. Civil indicators would suggest political and civic participation. All of these claims though can be subject to dispute. For instance, if full economic participation and property acquisition are indicators of responsible adulthood, then the increase in uptake of higher education and its associated debt mean that many young people are effectively deferring the responsibilities of adulthood.

What is known for certain is that young people in late modern societies are characterised as leading immensely complex and fragmented lives. Their social identities are subjected to far-reaching, diverse and interconnected influences. These range from changing macro forces arising from globalisation (Aubrey, Chapter 4) and the risk society (Kemshall, Chapter 13), to more constant issues of social stratification relating to class, gender, race, disability, sexuality and so on (Chouhan, Chapter 6).

Two strands of recent research are worthy of exploration here since they have direct implications for the significant changes in work with young people over the past ten years. The first examines expanding knowledge about youth transitions in a markedly changing and complex world. The second undertakes to review the interplay of risk and resilience in young people’s lives.

Changing, complex and extended transitions

Young people are frequently referred to as being in a state of transition, of moving between the life stages of childhood and adulthood: a stage termed adolescence or ‘youth’. Age boundaries are often applied to this stage and are embedded in legislations related to education, voting rights and marriage, but in the modern Western world a range of economic and social indicators of adulthood are primary signifiers of the transition. In the discussion above, the idea that childhood and adulthood are problematic concepts was put forward. In any discussion around transition as a journey, one perhaps must accept some sort of a destination. For Coleman et al., adolescence is ‘best understood as a complex transition between the states of childhood dependence and adult independence’ (2004: 227). The extensive study of this transition period has provoked much recent empirical and theoretical interest, not least because of the complex changes associated with the risk society. Such research has been useful in considering:

• The interaction between personal capacity, biology and personality (‘agency’) and the systems and structures that influence young people (‘structure’).
• The ways in which institutions, social policies and systems intervene within a key stage of the life course.
• The ways in which other problems or situations emerge, particularly at the point of transition from education to employment. This is of particular interest to policy makers, often concerned with the interconnectedness of ‘social exclusion’. (Bynner 2001: 6)

While there has perhaps always been a great deal of confusion over what constitutes arrival at adulthood (Coleman and Warren-Anderson 1992), transitions that were once understood to be linear are now recognised as fluid, changing and increasingly without a fixed end-point (Dwyer and Wyn 2001). Consequently, young people growing up in the modern world ‘face new risks and opportunities’ (Furlong and Cartmel 2007: 8) perhaps only glimpsed by previous generations. It certainly makes one’s own reflections on childhood in many cases redundant.

Regarded as ‘as important phase in the life cycle’ (Furlong and Cartmel 2007: 34), the lineage from education to employment is one such example. Pathways from post-16 education are now beset by a range of further training opportunities, increased uptake at higher education and new uncertainty in traditional, skilled and unskilled labour (Furlong and Cartmel 2007). Government recognition that the nature of the labour market has shifted towards a ‘knowledge economy’ ultimately means that more young people are required to attend further and higher education and training for longer periods. Indeed, at the time of writing, developments in the UK suggest that the statutory school leaving age will rise to 18 from its current age of 16. One consequence of fragmented employment patterns and extended education is the changing relationship that young people have with their immediate families. In the UK for instance extended periods of financial dependency on parents and carers may mean home ownership takes place increasingly later on in the life course.

Key indicators for arrival at ‘adulthood’ are the acquisition of features that denote a shift from dependence on parents and family to independent living, including obtaining employment, forming a relationship and family, and moving into accommodation. These are the indicators chosen by Bynner (2005) in his description of ‘capital accumulation’ by young people. His findings show that across Europe there is a trend towards the achievement of the markers of adulthood coming at a later age now than previously, the concept of extended transitions, but he goes on to conclude that in the UK:

… over the 24-year period examined, the most dominant feature was growing polarization between the advantaged and the disadvantaged. Emerging Adulthood was very prominent in the former, but the traditional accelerated routes to adult life were still as common as ever among the rest. (Bynner 2005: 377)

This work found that the social and economic changes leading to extended transitions for the majority of young people who are living in reasonable or affluent circumstances have not had the same impact on the lives of young people from more disadvantaged backgrounds. Involvement in extended education and training delays the onset of employment and the life features that depend economically upon that, but rates of such participation are lower for the more disadvantaged, with higher levels of early parenthood and early entry into work. The findings confirm the importance of addressing all the dimensions of youth identified by Hine (Chapter 3), particularly the historical dimension, as contexts change rapidly.

The focus on the notion of transition is accompanied by the view that young people are adults in the making, and thus do not have the awareness or competencies of adults. This view is informed by the dominant developmental perspectives of childhood presented by psychologists such as Piaget and Inhelder (1969). Children are seen to develop adult attributes gradually over their early and adolescent years in an additive and linear fashion, with normative age bandings identified as significant for the acquisition of particular competencies (the biological dimension in Hine, Chapter 3). Where children do not achieve these attributes by the prescribed ages this is deemed to be problematic and to signify the need for professional involvement and resolution. Where children perform better than, or not so well as, the system requires of them at particular ages, such as in education, this creates difficulties, both for the system and for the child.

It is argued that recent times have seen significant changes in young people’s transitions, because the nature of the world in which they live has changed dramatically (e.g. Bynner 2005; Spence 2005). In this new world young people have greater opportunity but less certainty about their futures, requiring them to be more reflexive and make more reasoned choices about their futures (Beck 1992). At the same time, a range of social and economic changes have meant that transitions can be more difficult for young people to achieve and that this transitional phase of life is becoming longer and more complex (Valentine 2003), though as noted above, these changes have not affected all young people in the same way, with those from disadvantaged backgrounds tending to have different patterns of transition than those from more privileged backgrounds (Bynner 2005). At one time aspects such as class, gender, ethnicity and disability may have been more predictive of likely futures for young people, although these features are also likely to have masked wide ranging experiences of becoming adult. Thus the assumed commonality of experience of transition is increasingly being questioned in the era of individualisation, in parallel with increasing concern about the futures that young people will have.

Young people, risk and resilience

Nowhere is the tension between the need to prevent risk and the necessity of learning to manage and take calculated risks more apparent than in the process of growing up from childhood to adulthood. (Thom et al. 2007: 1)

Certainly, young people are leading lives of increasing uncertainty and ‘heightened risk’ (Furlong and Cartmel 2007: 8) an idea located within the now well-rehearsed framework of the ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992). Life is literally prone to risks that once did not exist and ‘people are seen to both cause risks and be responsible for their minimalisation’ (Lupton 2006: 12). Whether these risks are the consequence of seemingly uncontrollable forces (such a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• The Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The Changing Context of Work with Young People
• Part One Theory and Practice
• Part Two Policy and Practice
• References
• Index