Tony Jeffs & Mark Smith

 

A version of this piece was published in: O’Hagan, B. (ed). (1991). The Charnwood Papers. Fallacies in community education. Ticknall: Education Now Publishing Cooperative Ltd.

The opening image is of Kingswood School | BSFinHull – Flickr and reproduced ccbyncnd4 licence

 

It is difficult to identify much that could be described as optimistic in the literature on young people, the Youth Service and youth policy that has appeared in the last two decades. Young people are seen as being in a ’critical situation’ (Kuczynski cl al 1988, p. vii) and largely portrayed as predominantly ’a source of trouble’ (Marsland 1987, p.5). This analysis isn’t only confined to the British context. It is therefore not surprising that a French commentator has youth as mere ’misery-mongering ’ (Mauger 1987, p. 189). Such a sweep­ing dismissal clearly requires careful scrutiny, but even those not content to accept it would need to work hard in order to rebut such a critique. With regard to youth policy, a not dissimilar air of pessimism has tended to prevail. Davies, in the key text of the last decade, argued that the state has adopted a much more interventionist role in relation to the lives of young people, creating a youth policy in the process that is highly re­pressive both in form and content (Davies 1986). This is a theme that has been linked to a widely held belief that young people are increasing­ly being denied a role in production and reproduction. As a consequence, it is argued, they are similarly becoming more and more marginal to and marginalised by society (Chapman and Cook 1988). The validity or otherwise of these arguments does not concern us here, and those wish­ing to follow the debates can do so elsewhere (Jeffs and Smith 1988; 1990). However, what needs to be acknowledged is that, right or wrong, such views and analyses have exerted a powerful influence on the ways in which youth workers perceive their work and the young people they work with, both in the school setting and elsewhere.

The problem of the youth service

Concerns amongst youth workers regarding youth policy and young people have, for many, coalesced will) disquiet over the long-term future of the Youth Service itself. Expenditure levels fell in almost every lo­cality during the last decade, although there was some recovery in real expenditure in the mid-1980s (Smith 1989). The falls were a conse­quence of the restraints imposed on the budgets of local authorities and, more recently, the curtailment of funding dial had been secured through the involvement of the Youth Service with MSC (Manpower Services Commission) and TA (Training Agency) programmes, either as pro­viders or consumers. Insofar as much of the latter was ’hidden’ from the sort of analysis of funding already mentioned, the scale of the reductions is probably far greater than has been publicly recognised (Jeffs and Smith 1988, pp 57-88). At the time of writing, central government has shown no inclination to intervene to protect the Service by legislation or the in­jection of direct subsidy. Instead, it has opted for control via a national curriculum for youth work. The concerns have not been solely the by­product of diminishing budgets. Public and private utterances by HMI’s describing the Youth Service’s ’last chance to get its act together’ have contributed to the doom-laden atmosphere — perhaps not without good cause.

The literature and the political climate have tended to create a number of contemporary characteristics, which although clearly not of universal applicability, nevertheless, form a backdrop against which much youth work practice takes place.

First, there is a tendency towards negative thinking amongst workers – an attitude towards the work that predicts failure, either because the re­sources are inadequate for the task or because the problems presented and assumed are beyond the capacity of the individual worker to tackle. In this, there is something of a ’writing out’ of individual and collective agency and the elevation of structure into the all-determining force.

Second, there is a disproportionate concern regarding the ’problems’ of young people. At one level, this can manifest itself in a belief that all young persons, as a consequence of being young, are experiencing the ’storm and stress’ of adolescence and are therefore in need of help and support. The reality, of course, is that most young people encounter no serious problems or difficulties during the ’period of transition’ (Cole­man & Hendry 1990). In similar fashion, a victimology can be con­structed that labels all women, black or working-class young people, as victims of oppression or discrimination. Many may well be, but there are profound difficulties with the lack of differentiation in such claims (Jeffs and Smith 1990a). Moreover, as such a victimology is inevitably com­bined with an emphasis on structure, what occurs is a reinforcing of feel­ings of powerlessness and hence the whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling analysis which is oppressive in itself. People’s under­standing of their lived experience is often quite different. Many refuse to label themselves as being victims, unable to do anything about the op­pression they encounter. In ignoring those perceptions and insisting upon structuring so much work with young people on the basis that they are powerless, the development of a practice of possibility is lost.

Third, a pattern of exaggerating the scale of the problems encountered and caused by young people can be seen. This arises partly in order to sustain the self-image and status of the Service as a frontline agency working at the sharp end, but also as a means of securing funding and resources. The relative generosity of the government towards Intermedi­ate Treatment work and the current funding of apprenticeship youth work training programmes for young people in ’deprived inner city’ areas are but the latest examples of behaviour that reinforces this belief that the important youth work is that which is carried out at the ’heavy end’.

Finally, there is an obsession with what has become known as ’issues’ or ’issue-based’ youth work. The issues lend to possess a certain street credibility or cachet — homelessness, unemployment, AlDs, child abuse. A great deal of this reflects an affiliation with the latest moral panic and the hucksters’ desire to secure the easy funding. In other respects, it can be seen as a route to status and the promise of higher professional standing. Issue-based work lacks a sound analytical base and can all too easily pathologise and marginalise those worked with (Jeffs and Smith 1989). Unfortunately, an issue-based service, training and orientation is resulting in the very real risk that the needs of the overwhelming ma­jority of young people will either be ignored or given low priority. This leads to youth work becoming a rescue service which rejects its educational origins and becomes an ersatz social work agency — under resourced and providing a second-rate shadow service for young people, its overriding function being to demonstrate that the national and local state is ’concerned’ about problems young people experience or are seen to create.

Optimism and vision have, to a damaging extent, become alien to main­stream youth work thinking. Worse, much of this problem-orientation has encouraged and fed the dangerous preference for feelings and emo­tions rather than serious analysis, helping to sustain and reinvigorate the inherent anti-intellectualism within youth work, which can be traced back to those elements that grew out of the muscular Christianity of the Victorian Public School. Rejection of research and rationality has meant that there is little in the way of a bulwark to contextualise and challenge the exaggerated but dominant air of crisis that pervades so much prac­tice. Consequently, more and more of those working in the Service become prey to a view that nothing structurally can be done to solve the problems besetting either young people or youth work. So the best that can be hoped for is self-redemption and personal change for themselves and the limited coterie of young people who join them on the enterprise and accept their analysis. Frantic activity and exhortation can come to offer a shroud around what is fundamentally inertia. The new opiate of the professionals, the in-service training course, thus becomes a sub­stitute for political and social action. It offers a promise of individual change, a respite from the real world of work and the warm feeling that the issue or problem is at least being addressed in one context (Jeffs and Smith 1989).

Of course, this is not an analysis we would confine to youth work, but it has taken a particularly advanced form in this sector. Some of the rea­sons for this have already been considered, but clearly, they cannot alone provide an adequate account. A major problem has been that within this area, policy has overwhelmingly been constructed within an intellectual vacuum. Given the historical tenacity of the project and the numbers involved as both practitioners and trainers, the paucity of serious texts and research into this area of welfare work is astounding. Blame for such a gap must primarily be laid at the door of those responsible for training during the last two decades. Equally, it stands as a major indictment of those who have controlled the funding of the statutory and voluntary agencies, for collectively they have opted to make policy and to pro­pound particular modes of practice without engaging in either research or reflective analysis. Thus, youth work has been handicapped by an ab­sence of theory-making; a failure to interrogate its practices, and a more immediately damaging absence of data and policy analysis.

School-based youth work and provision is a good example in this re­spect. For an area which has been operating for well over five decades, it has yet to be subjected to serious research and evaluation. Practition­ers in schools and community colleges consequently do not have a sub­stantial body of worked-through practice theory; criteria to measure their successor judge their effectiveness; nor local or national policy to frame their activity. This places them in an intolerable position. Good practice has never been disseminated, relevant training offered, or forums estab­lished for practitioners and managers to exchange experiences. Out of such isolation, a sense of personal and collective failure can all too often emerge — the inevitable by-product of each worker and unit separately seeking to secure aims and objectives without clear and realistic gui­delines.

Young people’s lived experiences

Practice and literature have also, to an unacceptable extent, been con­structed around artificially constructed images of ’youth’. This has not been a one-dimensional process. Negative images have been, to an ex­tent, counter-balanced by equally artificial ’positive’ images — roman­tic and heroic images of young people in struggle which seek to portray young people as the vanguard, as the innocent victim, as the noble sav­age. These are all as partial and unhelpful in their way as the negative constructs they seek to replace. Good and bad, positive and negative, they are unhelpful and misleading but can nevertheless prove attractive to certain practitioners in that they provide a tempting and exciting al­ternative to the often-mundane reality. Much of this imagery, whilst at times claiming to be the opposite, has been profoundly racist and sexist. ’Dangerous youth’ has all too often been translated as comprising work­ing class males and especially black young men. Young women, mean­while, are demoted to the assigned role of passive observer, hovering on the edges of the gang or youth culture. In pushing aside young women and ’respectable youth’, youth work practice and writing have opted to ignore the lived experiences of the overwhelming majority of young people. In doing so, it has overlooked a number of key trends which, un­less they are addressed, will lead to youth work becoming ever more ir­relevant to the majority of young people.

Amongst these trends have been the impact on young people of:-

• rising living standards which have produced, for example, substantive increases in the ownership of and access to consumer goods such as motor vehicles, electronic equipment and household goods — long trends that have continued to reshape the patterns of leisure and the ’transition’ to independence;
• improved and extended educational provision, which has encouraged both greater levels of ’staying on’ and the expansion in the proportion of young people entering further and higher education;
• restructuring of the labour market and, in particular, the youth labour market. This has led, in little more than a decade, to a shift from over 75% entering employment proper to fewer than 25% now doing so al the statutory leaving age;
• the leisure ’revolution’, in particular home servicing, which has encouraged young people to see the home, either parental or their own, as the prime site for leisure activity;
• the growing similarity between the patterns of leisure consumption undertaken by adults and young people;
• the historic shift in the demographic balance within advanced industrial societies. The number of those over retirement age is rapidly coming to exceed that of those 21 or under. This will have not only an impact on the distribution of resources with regard to welfare, education and training, but also an unpredictable impact on the cultural and social lives of these Societies

It is becoming realistic to ask whether distinctive youth cultures will continue to exist among western nations, and whether young people’s influence on cultural movements in music, the arts and fashion will be diminished (Jeffs and Smith 1990: 28-57).

Youth clubs and centres were the product of a particular historic era – responses to needs and problems then pressing and manifest, but which are now of diminishing significance. They were envisaged as providers of social education and leisure facilities for young people who were no longer full-time subjects of the education system and generally in low-paid employment. Equally, it was expected that such young people would be, in the main, living at home in housing that was overcrowded and unsuitable for the forms of leisure that they might wish to pursue. These assumptions no longer hold true for the bulk of young people, and consequently, youth clubs and centres fashioned on such thinking are becoming anachronistic. Like the tram and the music hall, they may well have served their purpose and should certainly not be kept on an educational life-support system for reasons of inertia or nostalgia. If youth work and youth provision are not to slip further into irrelevance, then these and other socio-economic changes must be given prominence in the future construction of policy.

Community schools and youth work

The literature on school-based youth work has, in general, been unsym­pathetic (for discussion of this, see Jeffs and Smith 1988, pp. 112-132). Given the already noted absence of monitoring and research regarding this area of practice, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that much of the opposition to schools has been rooted in prejudice. The Youth Service has long feared that it would be incorporated within a larger, better re­sourced Schools Service. For many, school-based youth work and com­munity schools were merely ’the thin edge of the wedge’ and therefore had to be opposed to preserve youth work as an activity and the Youth Service as an independent entity. Such ideas neatly coalesced and helped to sustain ideological opposition to schools, which gathered momentum within youth work from the 1960s onwards, producing amongst youth and community workers a resistance towards working in school settings (Holmes 1981). This was based to a large extent upon an assumption that schools are oppressive and formalistic in their relation­ships with young people; that youth and community workers are likely to encounter unwarranted constraints placed upon how they work and will be disadvantaged by a hierarchy constructed to meet the needs of the school. Il is a critique that draws much of ils strength from the work of the de-schoolers and lends to exhibit a scant awareness of the community school and education movements.

The character of some schools is such that they provide an unsuit­able environment for any form of youth work or community education initiative, either because of their design and structure or because of the attitude prevalent amongst the staff and head-teacher (Stone 1987). This has to be recognised. But an alternative, vibrant tradition does exist which is supportive of school-based community work, youth work in­itiatives and community development. It is this tradition which the Youth Service and youth workers have tended to overlook and failed to adequ­ately nurture. In particular, there has been a failure to acknowledge the significant advantages the school setting may possess over the traditional centre or unit. Amongst these are that, first, it has given young people access to facilities overwhelmingly superior to those encountered else­where within the Youth Service, not only regarding physical resources – such as specialist rooms, activity areas, sports halls and gymnasia, theatres and workshops — but also in terms of staff and community ex­pertise by enabling the youth worker to lap into networks that were un­available to them. As a consequence, although it may often fail to exploit the potential offered, the school setting nevertheless opens up the oppor­tunity for the implementation of superior programmes than have hither­to been the norm outside the school-based setting.

Second, the school or college setting offers workers the opportunity for daily and continuous contact with young people. In particular, it provides the potential for developing work with those groups historically under­represented amongst the young people involved with the Youth Service — young women and young blacks, particularly those of Asian origin. Given that the majority of young people under 20 but over 14 (the statu­tory age range of the Youth Service) are now full-time school students, it becomes an essential point for first contact with a group that is now overwhelmingly outside the labour market.

Third, schools and colleges can provide a better management structure and support network for both full and part-time youth workers in a num­ber of key respects; although it is not a panacea for breaking down the long-complained-of isolation of youth workers from colleagues and other professionals. In the context of the community school, it links them with a team of other community educators who are also working with and alongside young people and those from other age groupings. Further, and irrespective of the designation of the institution, it enables links to be established with both teachers and others, such as EWO’s and social workers who are in continuous contact with the school.

Lastly, situating workers in schools and colleges does encourage them to address educational issues and engage with a key aspect of young people’s experience. It obliges them, where appropriate, to seek to change the practices of schools and involve themselves in the reform of those institutions. It makes it more difficult for them to remain outside as emasculated critics, forcing them to address the actual, rather than imagined, problems schools pose for many young people. Equally, it means that many youth workers and others involved in school-based community and informal education will continue to learn from the school and their teacher colleagues (Jeffs and Smith 1990b). For too long, the assumption has been that the learning process will be overwhelmingly one-way.

Teachers can, it is true, benefit from acquiring some of the prac­tices and skills of the youth worker, especially in relation to working with those young people who pose the greatest behavioural problems for the school. Conceding that should not lead to a denial that youth and community workers similarly have a great deal to learn from important developments in schooling. Constructing links with the home and wider community, curricular development and profiling are all areas the Youth Service has little to teach and a great deal to learn from in the more in­novative schools (Burley 1990).

Weaknesses within school-based youth work, both in the community school and elsewhere, low predominantly from a failure to build upon these strengths and to link these with an understanding of youth work as informal education (Smith 1988). What should disarm the critics is the degree to which poor school-based youth work mirrors sub-standard youth work practised in free-standing centres and units. The narrow, stultifyingly masculine curriculum; the limited and predictable range of ac­tivities; the absence of intellectual content; the domination of the enterprise by the ’adult’ leaders; and the isolation of young people from other age groups — these are the hallmarks of poor youth work in every selling, not merely in community schools. Contemporary accounts of youth work in community schools are in short supply, and earlier materi­al is inevitably dated (Webley 1971; Dybeck 1966; Kidd 1972; Whi­teside 1984). This is a pity, for it means that a great deal of innovative and exciting youth and community work is hidden from wider scrutiny.

Il is often difficult to isolate good youth work in a community school. Unlike the youth club, it seeks to erode rather than erect age barriers. To visit a community school in order to assess the youth work taking place will often bring this point home. Not only are individuals of all ages and sizes seen arriving and leaving by the same doors, they will also be seen mingling comfortably at different venues around the building. Young people, both current and ex-full-time students, are to be found in classes and making things in workshops alongside ’adults’. To take a specific example of a school recently visited, during breaks and after ses­sions the young people wandered along to the youth club bar, which was in fact a trestle table in the corridor stacked with cans, sweets and snacks, with comfortable chairs around, or opted to visit the community lounge, unselfconsciously finding a niche in either.

In the school hall, equipped to a well-above average standard as a theatre, could be found 30 plus young people busy rehearsing their latest production – West Side Story. It was a serious and disciplined affair observed from the balcony by a group of well-behaved, almost admiring friends, many of whom, one suspects, wished they had the confidence to volunteer. In a room down the corridor, a noisy disco organised by older members was taking place, masking the sound of music and dancing from the nearby rehearsal. Half full at the moment, it awaited the 9.30 pm influx, certain to take place when the rehearsal and classes finished.

In the dining hall, it was model racing night with ’boys’ of all ages locked into competition and the swap­ping of lips. Passing the sports hall, it was possible to see the youth club netball team, coached by a member of the teaching staff, about to sur­render occupancy to the five-a-side football, refereed and coached to­night by a part-time leader. When they finish at 10 pm, local league volleyball will take over. Earlier, you would have seen an indoor bowls game; even earlier, a PE lesson and before them, in the early afternoon, a women’s keep-fit class containing some participants young enough to have been taught by the teacher now rushing back to collect her track­suit top.

Upstairs in a classroom, a small group of young people, in the main unemployed, were simultaneously planning fundraising and a camping holiday with a part-time leader. The leader is paid for one ses­sion but is around the campus for never less than three sessions a week. Next door, in her office, the youth tutor and a handful of young people were finishing the layout of the youth activities page of the college paper. In the porch were to be found a cluster of young people, a mixture of current and past school students talking to a middle-aged man in a live­ly but friendly fashion. He turned out, on closer examination, to be the college principal undertaking what, in other circumstances, might be dubbed outreach work.

All the lime, young people and adults walked around or through the group, heading for the well-lit car park, footpath to the road or turning sharply left to the pub on the corner. At another time or place, many of the adults would find this group of young people intimidating, yet here it was clear that they were accepted and in no way per­ceived as a danger. The whole atmosphere was casual and relaxed, both inside and out, and alive with activity, light and movement. Missing from this scene were both the sense of menace, which so many adults feel within or around a youth centre, and any sense of the policing presence of staff. Indeed, it was difficult to identify the part-time youth workers and separate them from the staff and students attending classes and ac­tivities.

This description of a recent visit to a community school is in no way a glossy account of a one-off institution. It is possible to find similar exam­ples scattered around the country. The best — and there are a consider­able number we have now visited that we would include in that category — possess an elan and style that sets them apart from the bulk of youth provision. They avoid the impersonality and often mercenary ethos of the leisure centre, the middle-class earnestness of the adult education centre and the predictability of the youth club. Poor school-based youth work is far from unknown, but examples are, in the main, indistinguish­able from bad youth centres. Significantly, they always seem to have common features: the isolation of the various age and user groups, es­pecially the younger users from each other; an overarching leisure orientation; and a lack of educational purpose.

The future

At the time of writing, significant changes are likely to be made in the not-too-distant future regarding the funding of youth work in the U.K. Linked to these will be an inevitable restructuring of the way in which the Youth Service is managed and monitored, both at a national and local level. Predicting the precise form these changes will take is not feasible, simply because those who will be responsible for legislating and direc­ting them have displayed, so far, a total inability to engage in careful and reflective reform. The drift of events and ministerial speeches, however, does indicate two substantial modifications to past procedures.

The first of these is likely to be the introduction of a national curriculum for the youth service. On educational grounds, it is difficult to perceive the reasons why youth work should require such an edifice. Certainly, few clues can be gleaned from the speeches of those responsible for its introduction. Suspicion that it is merely a device for the better manage­ment by central government of the allocation of resources is certainly confirmed by the manner of its announcement and implementation.

There can have been few more ridiculous and artificial educational exer­cises than that set up by the DES to construct the bare bones of the cur­riculum. The modus operandi consisted of a desultory consultation by the National Youth Bureau with a seconded researcher, appointed orig­inally to carry out other work, being given the task of travelling round the country talking to ad hoc groups in an unstructured way, about what they thought of the idea. This process was quite dishonestly described as ‘consulting with the field’. It was followed by the publication of a discussion paper, supposedly culled from those consultations, although participants in those meetings did not receive copies to assess its accu­racy. It was distributed hours rather than days before a conference, com­prising hand-picked participants, conveyed by the DES. With no advance papers to work from, the Minister of State in his ‘keynote ad­dress’ then proceeded to instruct the 100 plus delegates to “agree on a core curriculum; that is, the priority outcomes which the Youth Service should seek to provide, and then this would be published” (DES 1989 p.11). They had 24 hours to undertake the task between listening to other speakers.

Inevitably, the conference, or rather a working group that stayed up half the night, produced a bland, consensual paper of packaged buzz words that would offend no one. Worthless as an educational or policy document, it nevertheless served its purpose, which was to give those in the DES carte blanche to proceed as they wished with a spuri­ous mandate from the representatives of the ‘field’ and key statutory and voluntary agencies. Insulting as the whole exercise was, it nevertheless confirmed the suspicion of many conference participants and outsiders alike that the function of the national curriculum resided less in terms of securing clarity around Youth Service practice and more in meeting the administrative needs of the DES and, via delegation, the LEAs. This meant the setting of objectives and outcomes, linked in the jargon of the moment to ‘core competencies’ which, after involvement with youth work, young people will somehow measurably have acquired — out­comes simplistic enough to be scored for the purposes of allocating fund­ing. This suspiciously draws us closer to the second modification or reform looming on the horizon.

Contracting out work has for the present government been both an ide­ological imperative and an attractive policy option from the outset. Set­ting targets, identifying discrete areas of work and then inviting statutory, voluntary and commercial organisations to tender for the work has neatly enabled it to maximise central control over the content and direction of policy whilst distancing itself from public displeasure with the service and the inadequate levels of funding. Blame is neatly trans­ferred to those delivering the service. In creating a free-for-all market, it has been able to drive down the cost of a given service in the name of efficiency, whilst replacing permanent with short-term patterns of em­ployment in the public sector and thus eroding the power base of the unions and professional organisations.

The proposals for the reform of the youth and community service in Northern Ireland (Department of Education 1978), like those of the Grif­fiths Report on Community Care (DHSS 1988), provide a model of how this might now be implemented in relation to youth work. Both of these also reduce the role of the state to that of managing agent, assessing ten­ders, awarding contracts and monitoring delivery — all carried out ac­cording to guidelines imposed by central government. Simply put, the creation of a national curriculum for youth work is in all likelihood mere­ly the essential first step towards the establishment of the parameters re­quired for the introduction of just such a pattern of service delivery. If so — and it is a big if, for such a structure in respect of youth work is unlikely to be operational before the next general election — what are its implications for community schools? And how would such a struc­ture complement, or run counter to, the introduction of LMS and the im­plementation of the ERA?

The long-term impact of LMS on community schools and school-based youth work has been a matter of considerable debate. At the present time, it is clearly impossible to arrive at any firm conclusions. So far, the range of opinions varies from the profoundly pessimistic (Harvey 1990), through a range of uncertainties, to the basically optimistic (Riddiough and Foreman 1988; Burley 1990). Much will, as Swain (1990) stresses, depend upon the initial approach of the LEA and, in particular, the ex­tent to which it chooses to delegate responsibility to governing bodies. LEAs have before them three policy alternatives. The first is to delegate management to the school governing body, providing them with a sep­arate budget to compensate for the costs they incur. The second is to pro­vide funding to individual Youth Service users who accordingly buy facilities from the school according to the directions of the LEA. The third is for the LEA to retain management responsibility and to contract usage with schools, compensating them as required. All three are fraught with difficulties and reliant upon variable, but never absent, levels of goodwill on the part of schools towards the aims and objectives of the Youth Service and individual workers operating on site. Here we will look at a few examples.

If the LEA opts to delegate the management of school-based youth work programmes to governing bodies, responsibility for the staff who man­age them is included in the package. Paradoxically, such delegation is likely to be an attractive option to those LEAs who have a strong his­torical commitment to community schools, matching as it does policies already, to varying degrees, implemented in areas such as Leicestershire and Cambridgeshire. Equally, it is proving attractive to LEAs who have historically shown little interest in developing cither community schools or school-based youth work for it provides a means of shedding respon­sibility for services that were given a low priority, whilst delegating to the school the task of making unpleasant choices as to who should or should not be made redundant. Either way, it is likely to lead to contra­dictory outcomes within localities.

In those areas hitherto seen as ’leaders’ in this field, there exist heads who have been fair-weather friends of both the community school ethos and, often, school-based youth work in particular; individuals who have gone along with the wishes of the LEA to secure funding, promotion or out of de­ference to the Director. Such characters are less likely to do so in the fu­ture. Provided they can carry their governing body with them, and all research published in this area so far indicates that heads encounter few difficulties in doing this, they are unlikely to maintain the pretence for long. When the opportunity arises to replace the ’troublesome’ youth tutor with an additional maths teacher, there will be little to constrain them.

Equally, if the other models are adopted at the outset by the LEA, such heads and governing bodies will pose difficulties for they possess the ca­pacity to make life uncomfortable for those LEA youth workers who operate on their premises. The idea that, for any length of time, school-based youth work can be protected by LEA directives is a fallacy. In the past, when the LEA had far greater direct control over Head teachers, Youth Officers rarely proved capable of protecting full-time, let alone part-time, youth workers from harassment. Where conflict arose, the result was, at best, an unpleasant stand-off producing a high turnover in Youth Service staff, the curtailment of certain activities and embargoes on the affiliation of certain individuals or groups. In far too many other instances, it presaged the eventual eviction of youth and community pro­vision. Henceforth, the result of such conflicts is likely to be a foregone conclusion.

Whatever the structure initially sought by the LEA, it has to be recog­nised that an increasing number of schools will certainly choose to opt out of LEA control. Their reasons for doing so will be varied but poten­tially such departures risk leaving the Youth and Adult Education Ser­vices in certain areas with little or no facilities available to them in those localities where no or few suitable alternatives exist. Irrespective of whether the school remains within die orbit of the LEA, or whatever model is adopted for the funding of youth work, the schools under LMS will be under intense pressure to raise income. From the outset, many are seeking bookings for private and commercial functions and acti­vities. Where possible, they are endeavouring to do so on a long-term contractual basis. Block booking or one-off, it will matter little if the re­turn is going to be higher; many, if not the majority of schools, will, in the present climate, sacrifice low income, and often low status, youth and community work for more profitable and prestigious alternatives.

Alongside such organisational changes, the impact of the national cur­riculum must also be recognised. At this stage, it is difficult to predict what the impact will be of such cross-curricular themes as personal and social education and citizenship. Within a number of schools and col­leges, youth workers are substantially involved in the delivery of pro­grammes in these areas. In areas of severe teacher shortage, such as parts of the southeast, some Heads have been talking about making far greater use of youth workers in such programmes. The significant feature here is that they would be employed directly rather than contracted in through the Youth Service. A further consideration has been the question of dis­ruptive students and school non-attendance. The Elton Report, Disci­pline in Schools, recommended that all LEAs should encourage schools and youth services to explore the possibilities for developing closer links within particular catchment areas and, where appropriate, base youth workers in schools (1986, p. 186).

Concerns about control have encour­aged authorities to employ workers within schools and colleges to work in a ’detached’ way in common rooms, corridors and play areas. This has been a noticeable trend in colleges of further education. Authorities such as Newham, which have historically high rates of non-attendance, have secured ESG funding to employ youth workers to work with young people, both in schools and in their catchment areas (again on a ’de­tached’ basis). How likely such work is to continue under the combined weight of the national curriculum and LMS is difficult to assess. One sus­pects it is dependent upon just how troublesome young people are per­ceived to be in school, or what panics there are about their non-attendance.

Optimism is in short supply at the moment. School-based youth wor­kers, home-school liaison teachers and community staff, in a recent series of interviews undertaken by the authors, all expressed consider­able pessimism regarding the future funding of their work. Those located in schools where they encountered degrees of hostility and indifference from colleagues and headteachers inevitably fell most insecure. The re­mainder, although based in supportive environments, shared a belief common to all, that the combined impact of LMS and the Poll Tax made them vulnerable. As one put it, “The school places a high priority on my work and the staff all now recognise just how valuable the post is, yet how long will the Head be able to protect me when the choice is between me and a subject specialist? Or when the budget for supply teachers runs out, how can they avoid using me as floating cover?” When, not if, they all assumed, reductions in expenditure had to be made, they were re­signed to seeing their posts being amongst the first to be considered as dispensable. Their fears may prove to be misplaced, but as of the moment, they are very real.

A number expressed some expectation that as LEAs were losing much of their direct control over schools, their attention and investment would switch to areas of informal, adult and social educa­tion. The problem with this analysis is that it ignores the determination of the central government to erode both the budgets and the power of the local state (Shaw, Jeffs and Smith 1989). It certainly smacks of desper­ation, and early evidence concerning where and how local authorities are responding to the introduction of the Poll Tax simply does not lend any credence to it. Offering false optimism will not help. It has to be rec­ognised that community schools and school-based youth work are both in for a difficult time. A great deal of current community provision will not survive as schools turn in on themselves to survive failing rolls and diminishing incomes, desperately seeking the life-saving elixir of ’good examination results’. This is especially true where competing schools opt to become nakedly entrepreneurial, yet, where judged appropriate, clothing their activities in the language of community education, com­munity service and philanthropy with all the unctuous sincerity of a Mur­doch, Maxwell or the PR mouthpieces for ICI or Shell.

Some schools, either independently or with the continued support of some LEAs, will, however, attempt to operate according to different values, and it is to these that we will have to look for the survival of much community education. However, we need to honestly acknowledge that these values are at odds with those espoused by the present government and educationalists who have either become converts to their ideology or chosen to join the ‘winning side’. In the best sense of the word, com­munity education and the community school have become oppositional. Yet all is not gloom and doom. For the new climate does, to an extent and by way of compensation, offer the community school some fresh but limited opportunities. It will be a difficult route to follow, but not an impossible one. For example, if youth and community work is to be funded by a system of grants allocated to tendering agencies, why should such schools not use their expertise and facilities to offer provision else­where as well as on their own premises, thereby helping to create an in­tegrated local service. The stated aim of the Minister is that the Youth Service will ’be well integrated with other educational provision’ (DES 1989, p.4). If that is a genuine statement of intent, then few agencies are better placed than the successful community school to respond.

In simi­lar fashion and over time, such schools may well begin to see themselves as providers of care packages for older people and those with disabil­ities, establishing Day Centres and securing funding from the restruc­tured Social Services Departments. Similarly, why should they not bid to become the locale, and managers, of directly funded Intermediate Treatment units or Probation Day Centres, thereby injecting into the pro­vision, whatever the client group, a much-needed and, at present, often lacking, heightened educational dimension? Henry Morris always saw the community school as the natural site for the delivery of a wide range of welfare services. Until now, that has been beyond the scope and ca­pacity of the community school, dominated as it has been by the LEAs. The compartmentalisation of welfare has made such developments vir­tually impossible, but the break-up of the large central and local govern­ment agencies that is now taking place may at last provide an opportunity for such integration to begin, albeit on a small scale. Like Morris, we are operating in a harsh and alien climate, but we have much more to build upon and infinitely greater reserves of experience to draw from. Those strengths must be exploited and the new opportunities sought to construct a more accessible and democratic system of welfare and edu­cation.

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© Tony Jeffs and Mark Smith 1991

This piece was published in:

O’Hagan, B. (ed). (1991). The Charnwood Papers. Fallacies in community education. Ticknall: Education Now Publishing Cooperative Ltd.