Ms Mary Cunningham:

The challenge in being able to attract and retain people in youth work is that it is increasingly difficult to balance life and work, which is quite different from work-life balance. Where you have short-term contracts and uncertainty about whether the funding will continue the following year, you will not be able to take out a car loan, never mind take out a mortgage. Of course, people aspire to all of the milestones that we would all want in life. That is getting increasingly difficult. We are now not able to compete with other parts of the public sector that are attracting youth workers.