The
green paper Youth Matters
revised
28th January 2006
YOUTH
MATTERS PARLEYING AND PUSHING ON
what Bill thinks we should now be doing about Youth Matters
Theres plenty of talk about Youth Matters - some doubts
and not a little exasperation:
muddle
headed
why dont they just say whats going to happen?
not enough nit, and hardly any grit at all!
"careers education" gets three mentions in three-hundred
paragraphs!
what are they trying to tell us?
they really dont understand us!
whats anybody actually supposed to do about this?
Its
a pity that the green paper could not have been written around a
more recognisable portrayal of what we have been doing. It would
have allayed anxieties. And we can safely assume that youth- and
social-workers have their own versions of such reactions.
But
the green paper is not about what we have been doing, it is about
what we need to do - reform. Different game - the word-count score-line
was careers education 3; reform 46. Thats
an away win!
So
now what are we to make of it? Youth Matters rates a lot
more thought.
find
further material
If we
are to move forward on Youth Matters we still need to negotiate
with its assumptions and grab its opportunities both to parley
and to push.
The parleying
has to do with assumptions about the extent of change in contemporary
society. We must either refute them or negotiate. To ignore, or
to rebut - because they dont fit our assumptions about ourselves
- would be to invite marginalisation.
Pushing-on
means looking for opportunities for useful action. It is not what
policy does with us but what we do with policy. It happens with
every policy initiative - the reality emerges after the launch.
parley and push
So,
where are the negotiations and opportunities? Some examples:
economy
and culture
Weve learned to talk about careers-education-and-guidance
in terms of employability and economy. But the policy ground is
shifting. Youth Matters is as-much interested in social-and-cultural
change as economic-and-technological change. This is change in
our learners experience, not least in how they accord trust.
If they change so must we. Theres a lot of room for negotiation
and opportunity here.
IAG and curriculum
Youth Matters gives careers-ed few mentions because it
sees it as part of the personal-development curriculum. It repeatedly
looks for this kind of integration - between a range of resources
and the requirements of contemporary change. It needs reformed
curriculum at least as much as reformed IAG. Careers-ed
was never going to cope; even psd would struggle. The integrated
relevance of Tomlinson is yet to have its day. Opportunities here.
professional and
voluntary
No big budgets promised in Youth Matters. The strategy
is to maximise available resources. The tactic is integration,
linking existing resources to new projects - both curriculum-
and community-wide. It will mean more projects calling on other-than-professional
partners and in other-than-specialist roles. Itll not harm
our professionalism, though it should cause us to rethink it.
We can parley that, and then maximise the opportunities.
14-19 and life long
At first sight there doesnt seem to be much hope for life-long
careers work. But there is this: the proposals will put careers
work in a position where more people will be able to find it,
learn to trust it, use it - and (heres the point!) come
back for more. That may not be a policy for life-long careers
work; but it is a life-long dynamic we can use. Big push needed
here.
national
and local
We could get used to thinking of careers work as a global phenomenon,
framed by universally-applicable targets and standards. The green
paper doesnt see us that way. Thats why its
short on operational detail it expects us to work differently
in different locations. It offers us a new position among our
users locality! We are expected to be able
to turn what we know of our own communities their cultures
and their economies - into a basis for arriving at appropriate
frameworks for local action. This is the green papers biggest
challenge to our capacity for negotiation and for taking opportunities.
what
now?
We won't
refute the assumptions in Youth Matters. If anything, it
has underplayed the extent and direction of changed attitudes among
young people.
There
is one issue on which we need both to parley and seize an opportunity
big time. Youth Matters maps several layers of management
local authority, childrens trust, Connexions, schools-and-colleges.
Much of what they will do will be central-services tasks
hiring-and-firing, commissioning, regulation, staffsupport,
resource allocation, back-up facilities, evaluation, dissemination
and so on. Its not hard to see, in each case, where appropriate
subsidiarity will settle.
Its less
easy to see where programme management will locate. Youth Matters
will mean working with professional and voluntary helpers, non-specialist
and specialist partners, curriculum and community-wide. This kind
of management does not resemble tasks set up by bureaucracies
with clearly-defined boundaries and roles. If we go about this with
any imagination and sensitivity at all, we are going to be setting
up a lot of good-will driven and opportunistically-arranged projects.
It is how were going to learn how to do this well.
Weve
been here before. Remember the Technical and Vocational Education
Initiative which, when it got into its stride, managed local
projects calling on integrated help - like Youth Matters.
Shouldnt
we be considering YM consortia - for programme management
on a neighbourhood basis. Theres experience out there. Lets
call on it.
You
are in the magazine section of
The Career-learning Café
www.hihohiho.com
in touch
WHERE
NOW?
This article
is part of a series. Others are still available:
which
way is forward?
- changing landscapes
a bridge too far?
- Connexions and Tomlinson
The Café
also has a series of pdfs to help you with your work on what Youth
Matters proposes.
The most
recent are:
Learning
from experience - the changing value of information and
expertise
Fewer
lists more stories - using narrative to make better use
of informal experience
And you
can still get:
Youth
Matters
what we need to know, to know how to respond
Integrated
Information, Advice and Guidance
the pros and cons of integration
Youth
in the Community
how community can be involved
New Start
for Connexions
theory and practice for Youth Matters
more
to come.
so come back to hihohiho.com.
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