The confusion that has always existed in society between working with young people and youth work is clearly one that penetrates the minds of even the most influential policy makers. There is a muddle about the precise nature of youth work intervention. This has been quite deliberate and ideological, and flows from the definitions of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 that began the ideological attack on youth work and paved the way for whole-scale privatisation of youth work.

In this Act, local authorities are required to secure ‘positive activities’ for young people – not to provide them directly, but to secure them through a process of tendering services on the market. In one section there is a clear expression of the epitome of the overall neoliberal agenda – on the one hand, services are thrown onto the market fragmented and privatised. This begins a race to the bottom in respect of terms and conditions. It also lowers quality and introduces layers of bureaucracy to commission contracts and manage them.

New authoritarianism

In taking things out of direct control it adds to the culture of authoritarianism in two ways. First, it removes services from democratically accountable control and second, it tends to associate services with highly monitored crime prevention-type provision. Young people become the problem to be sorted. In this process it changes the nature of the work, transforming youth work into an activity, an event that is positive and lacking the negative, but always enlightening. Activities lend themselves to concepts of physical activity and diversion away from problematic negative activities through recreation. Youth work is associated again with leisure activity and crime prevention. ‘Keep them off the streets’ becomes the repeated cliché.