GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

what they want to achieve for young people and working alongside local

partners and, importantly, young people to shape the provision in their local

area and ensure access to high quality youth work provision.

Councils will be required to develop a diverse universal offer, establish and

submit long term plans for local delivery and establish a local workforce

development strategy. Local authorities will also be responsible for

establishing and facilitating the delivery of local youth partnerships, bringing

together stakeholders from across the community to work together to

understand the social development journey of young people in their local area

and to map how they can best support young people’s needs. This will be

overseen by a strengthened national body for youth work to ensure such

partnerships and provision is in place across the country.

The de-professionalisation of youth work is yet another key challenge for the

key sector and over the last decade many qualified youth workers have

migrated into other occupations, leaving real challenges for organisations

seeking to recruit professional youth work staff and increasing the dependency

on volunteers. We have also seen a significant reduction in recent years of the

numbers of JNC degree programmes in England and the number of students

enrolling on undergraduate courses.

The creation of secure and permanent fulltime youth work positions must be a

priority for a future Labour Government. However, we also need a better

understanding of the national picture, how many youth workers already work in

open access provision that could be included in a national youth service. A

Labour Government will reinstate the national audit previously carried out by

the National Youth Agency of all upper tier local authorities to determine local

authority provision. We will implement a workforce strategy to regrow the

workforce and its capacity to deliver a statutory youth service. Without this

security and demand, our vision for a statutory youth service cannot be

implemented. However, we recognise that becoming a professional youth

worker can be challenging and for many people who do not want to go to

university fulltime with most people entering youth work either as a volunteer,

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