After School: The Disruptive Work of Informal Education

Abstract

The relationship between school teaching and youth work has, in the United Kingdom at least, always been close. School teachers trained before 1988 are deemed to be ‘professionally qualified’, and in the past many part-time and volunteer youth workers were teachers during the day School buildings offered physical sites for youth clubs by offering either flexible (dual use) spaces or distinctive ‘youth wings’ (see DES, 1969). For a range of political and occupational reasons this interrelationship waned in the later part of the 1980s and youth work became increasingly separated physically and philosophically from school teaching (Booton, 1980). For very different reasons the last decade has seen a rise again of youth work in schools, but this time delivered by professional workers with a distinctive background in ‘youth work’, and usually as junior partners in the school space. Such ‘co-located working’ has been seen in education, health and elsewhere in the UK public sector as a positive response to a range of difficulties from child abuse to the need to increase examination scores. In England¹ this has been articulated as ‘teams around the child’ and in the Every Child Matters legislation (HM Treasury, 2003). The core commitment to multi-professional working in this area has been recently reaffirmed by the coalition government’s ‘Positive for Youth’ agenda (see DfE, 2012). In Scotland the ‘Curriculum for excellence’ provides a similar umbrella strategy for education, including schools and community learning for young people.²