Lynn Ruane (Independent)
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I thank everyone for their presentations. It is a nice addition to the last session, which focused heavily on the principles of youth work and what youth work is. Today's session focuses on why we have not been able to concentrate on actual youth work. We found ourselves, for example, talking about food. That is not really a discussion about what youth work is. However, the need is there, and services are having to fulfil the unmet need. As a result, when we talk about youth work we suddenly find ourselves talking about other stuff like poverty and structural inequality. Poverty is so destructive of communities that it is often very difficult for schools, youth projects and families to be able to fight against such a big, powerful historical, intergenerational system that has set some communities many years behind regarding employment and education. That is a very hard thing to have to keep battling against.

Youth work plays a very specific role in the battle by empowering people to discover who they are and their place in the world separate to what their environment and conditions tell them they are. In New York, there are places where schools take a holistic, community development approach to education and youth work. Everybody works out of the same premises. I remember Ms Áine Lawlor gave examples in another committee about that model, which I think is great. However, there is a part of me that gets a little bit worried about the over-connection between the school and youth work. There have been reports of some youth services refusing to work with certain young people because the school has let the youth service know that the person has not been attending school. Then the youth service makes the decision not to work with the young person unless they attend school, which seems like the inverse of what youth work is actually supposed to do. One cannot ask the young person why they are not in school unless they are in this group. That should be the whole purpose, to be able to explore those things.

It is important to be very clear on the role of youth work, even if it has a relationship with the school. It needs to be independent of what is going on in other services or in the community or with justice. Young people need to know that youth work is still youth work and will still serve them if they are looking to avail of it, regardless of what else is going on. Many speakers have made similar points about the youth work model, which seems to be influencing what youth work looks like in relation to target groups. If an organisation has funding for a target group that is where its focus will be and it makes for an easy report to write. However, when the remit is to simply work with everybody and not a specific target group that can be neatly defined, then youth work cannot really be pinned down that way in terms of outcomes.

Is the real issue here with retention of staff and funding that we need to drastically pick apart the UBU model? This is using a crude instrument to measure what is an essential piece of work happening in communities. We need to move away from the individualised pieces of work that seem to be happening. They seem to be very focused on soundbites like this "individual has been activated" into employment because of their time with us. It is all about job activation and economic units instead of having a funding model and structure that empowers whole communities rather than just individuals within the youth work sector. I have some questions in relation to that point. What is the alternative? What does that model look like? What policy would the witnesses introduce or change or go back to that will allow that type of work to happen?

The second question is about the shortage of youth workers. We can talk about increasing the number of youth workers, but the main issue is retaining youth workers within the sector, so maybe the witnesses could comment on that. What is causing people to leave the sector? Is the pay and conditions? Why are we losing youth workers to other professions? Is it because of the lack of multi-annual contracts? Is it because people cannot make a good living because youth work is not paying them adequately in line with their professional qualifications?.

Perhaps the witnesses can comment on the idea of the youth work apprenticeship. I know a group of people have been working on this idea but it appears to have hit an obstacle. The block seems to be that even though services may want to support a youth work apprenticeship, they would have to use a vacancy that was already there. They would have to use annual funding that is already there, rather than creating a fund which allows youth work apprenticeships to happen outside of guaranteed grant aid agreement funding. That obviously does not address the sustainability of the job when people are in it.

What are the witnesses' thoughts on increasing people's participation in the youth work sector with professionalised accreditation and apprenticeships? Then how should we move beyond that? Under a new model should there also be specific funding from the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science for apprenticeships within the youth work sector?