Trust, choice and the power of open youth work

This Youth Work Week, we’re exploring different perspectives on youth work. In this contribution, Bernard Davies, a respected voice in the youth work field for over 70 years, shares a personal perspective on the principles and importance of open youth work.  

When we talk about the future of youth work, we often skip over two fundamental questions frequently left unasked or underexplored by youth workers and their managers, as well as by policy makers and funders who often seek to set the boundaries of the practice: What do we mean by ‘youth work’? And why is it needed – indeed, important and valuable? 

In response to the first question, my own unapologetic focus is on a form of practice defined by the addition of one small but significant word: open. This practice, for me, signals a number of key features. 

Open youth work occurs in settings and projects that are ‘open access’, where young people choose to participate voluntarily. They engage because they want to, and just as freely, they can choose to step away. The starting point for building any relationship is the youth worker’s effort to earn the trust of those who turn up. These relationships are grounded in how they feel, as well as what young people know or can do. 

Navigating these relationships often involves working with both individuals and the peer groups that matter to them. Through this, the youth worker creates new and potentially challenging opportunities for informal education, shaped not by a fixed curriculum or syllabus set from above, but by a clear understanding of where these young people are starting from. 

This approach also means considering young people’s broader identities, including class, gender, sexual, and/or racial identities, and staying attentive to more than just their stated interests or visible skills. The youth worker looks out for signs, sometimes subtle or unspoken, of untapped or unrecognised potential, and uses these as the basis for offering new and challenging developmental experiences and activities. 

An integral element of this approach is a commitment to shifting power. Wherever possible, the youth worker seeks to tip the balance in the young person’s favour, both within the project itself and, where possible, beyond. 

Making these features explicit helps us explain what makes open youth work distinctive. It’s not necessarily superior to other ways of working with young people, but it is different. And that difference matters. Importantly, it can also encourage policy makers and funders to probe beyond the ‘soft’ ‘recreational’ settings where youth work happens and treat it as an important way to reach disengaged young people often missed by other services – and to do so in a way that supports both their personal growth and social connection. 

Underpinning these possibilities is hard evidence of the potential and impacts of open youth work practice. Research by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in 2022 revealed that this kind of provision was playing a “significant role” in the lives of an estimated 450,000 young people not known to other statutory services. Research published by UK Youth and Frontier Economics that year showed that open youth work contributed £5.7bn annually to the wider economy and saved the government £3.2bn, through improved education and employment outcomes, and positive impacts on mental health.  

What, then, does the future hold for open youth work? Although the broader landscape remains shaped by the post-2010 ‘austerity’-driven decimation of youth services, I think we have recently seen some initiatives that appear, in the long run, at least somewhat promising for youth provision as a whole. Perhaps most significant, given its stated aim of ‘breaking down barriers to opportunity for young people’, is the government’s forthcoming National Youth Strategy.  

But with ongoing pressures on public expenditure, we must ensure that open youth work is never again a low priority. Alongside young people, those of us committed to this practice must continue to explain, defend and indeed campaign for it. That means protecting facilities and spaces that, at the very least, young people choose to be part of; that are built on individual and group relationships based on trust; that refuse to box them in with top-down labels; and that stay true to their roots in informal learning and personal growth. 

Bernard Davies is a qualified youth worker who for over 70 years has been involved in the youth work field as a youth club member, face-to-face practitioner, local authority youth officer and youth worker trainer. The author of numerous publications on youth work’s history and its policy contexts, his most recent book is Youth Work Policies in England 2019-2023: Can Open Youth Work Survive? published in 2024 by Palgrave MacMillan.