When I started the youth-work-specific elements of my degree – the parts that focused on the teen years, there was a great anecdote found in one of the books (Harrison and Wise, 2005), telling of a mother who visits the local youth centre which her son has been attending for several months.

What she finds is something of a dream for many in the field – a wonderful facility with enough workers providing every conceivable avenue of support and activity under one roof, all with a rose-tinted hue to it, where nobody falls out, and calm is found around every corner. Clearly funding has reached the right place and harmony does exist.

As the mother leaves, she turns to the worker in charge and asks ‘What an interesting hobby…but what’s your real job?’

I know I’m not alone in being on the end of this actual conversation.

A fellow youth worker and I once noted how we would often attend family gatherings and be met with ‘You can look after all the children as you like playing games with them’.

Hold your horses. Youth work is more than being able to co-ordinate pass the parcel (although it does feature as ‘any other duty’ on a job description – I am adept with a bin bag!).

And yet, there’s so much difficulty describing what youth work actually is. If I asked all my colleagues and peers what youth work is, I guarantee we’d each have our own version that resembled one another’s but wasn’t a carbon copy.

A quick search online gives an AI fluffy answer stating that youth workers work 37 hours a week, with additional compensations, and can be paid £22-35k per year, possibly up to £42k. For the record I’ve never met a youth worker anywhere near this, and only once got relatively close myself…if the job had allowed, but alas, had to be part-time (on paper anyway).

With barely an ounce of digging, there’s jobs offering four hours a week as a manager of a youth facility with a pay equivalent to £12ph, which gives a salary of £2k a year (and needing a fair ol’ supplement to live) through to more reasonable full time offerings. One advert even left off the pay insisting ‘pay depends on experience’ – OK, but not even a hint of a scale to see if it’s worth applying in the first place? Good luck appointing.

Some insist on a professionally qualified worker at level six (with JNC accreditation and registration), others who say ‘a bit of knowledge of how an eight year old ticks will see you through’…or words to that effect.

One website offering a ‘youth worker’ role stated ‘You must like working with children’ which proves they’re good at one thing – stating the obvious.

Before youth services began to be decimated under a previous government, funding allowed vital community-based resources to be open like the one in the opening anecdote, perhaps without the soft haze lens added. People still cry out for this, but they need to be able to provide so much more.

Some hold the view that it’s enough for a youth worker (however/whoever/whatever that is) to rock up to a dilapidated building, roll out the creaky table-tennis table with its single bat and crushed ball, and everyone sits around a singing adult with a guitar, before walking home laughing with a ginger beer in their hands.

The reality is, these spaces, where they exist, have needed to adapt vastly to provide a greater emphasis on life skills and the modern difficulties faced by young people which seem ten-fold compared to even a decade ago.

And because many of these centres have ceased or cut back, youth workers can be found on the streets more (to avoid building costs), in schools (supporting as early interventionists), hospitals (helping those with medical needs or homelessness), and other spaces, and will be known either as youth workers (great) or have that masked slightly under other titles but still providing their high-level of expertise. Some, like myself, are self-employed and work freelance with a number of organisations because hey, why not stretch yourself?

In several instances I know of (and thousands exist), professionally-qualified workers have sought almost completely non-related roles to get by, and yet their knowledge can be so much more vast than teaching pool or dodgeball (and yes I’m the worker who could barely hit or throw a ball).

But what knowledge do Youth Workers possess that’s really greater than ‘must like children’?

A quick glance through some of the documents I’ve retained from Uni days shows learning in these areas:-

• Ethics, concepts, accountabilty, and modernising the field
• Counselling, one to one and group work, and other interventions
• Reflective practice (which I’ve posted about before online) and managing people
• Leading and managing oppresive work, change management, and influencing others
• Community cohesion, partnerships, networks, and integrated services
• Research and development
• Historical, anthropological, sociocultural, and modern approaches to childhood
• Childhoods in crisis
• Cultures, play, and the impact of media
• Displaced childhoods and finding your place in the world
• Social inequalities, poverty, violence, health, and wellbeing

I think in reality, this is why it’s so hard to say what a Youth Worker is and does because from these areas of learning, they can be found filtering into a plethora of different locations, often being the glue that holds childhoods together. I would say I’ve touched on every single one of these bullet points in the last week of work alone though.

Yes, ‘must like children’ is great – we need to build those working relationships, but I would urge anyone who asks a youth worker ‘but what’s your real job?’ to re-evaluate where their thinking and bias comes from, and what the need is to demean such a vital role.

Would the same question be asked to an accountant, teacher, doctor? Would it be asked to any other profession that hits each of the areas above?

If not, why should it occur for youth workers?

And if youth workers possess this vast knowledge and associated skills, surely their worth is greater than a salary of ‘we’ll see what we think’.