As I sat in the dark by a smouldering fire before heading to bed, one of the youth work forums I’m part of shared a link to an article in The Guardian with a fascinating half hour interview about the so-called anxious generation and whether a revival in youth clubs could really help.
If you’ve never heard of a youth club, they’re often shrouded in mystery these days or viewed through rose-tinted lenses. One of the main reasons is austerity. Over the past decade and a half, it’s believed 75% of youth clubs have been lost with £1.3billion of funding stripped from the sector. This resulted in 4500 qualified youth workers losing their jobs. Of the clubs that remained, it was believed that during the Covid-19 pandemic, a further 25% closed and wouldn’t reopen.
But what are youth centres?
In their simplest form, they are centres for the youth. Young people.
But they’re so much more than that.
At their beating heart they’re a local, safe space for young people who typically fall into the 8-18 age bracket (sometimes up to 25). They’re places that young people can call their own in order to socialise, receive specialist support and advice, gain skills, and learn from positive role models. As the interview highlighted, they bring a focus to young people, families, and the community as a whole, and can be the spark for positive change.
More than table tennis and tea (although that matters)
Youth clubs help reduce the isolation many young people feel, particularly in a world increasingly lived behind screens. Before I’m beaten down here, I agree that tech has its place, but it can be isolating and we can’t deny the impact loneliness has on young people. There’s a reason mental health conditions such as depression are rising among the young.
By providing a safe space where young people are accepted for who they are, youth centres allow them to be themselves, share, avoid risky behaviours, and engage in an alternative provision that offers the chance to open up to adults far more easily than they might elsewhere. This means early warning signs can be spotted and acted upon.
The spaces also build confidence, allowing young people to learn how to handle conflicts, make decisions, and work together. All skills that can last a lifetime. In turn it can strengthen communities by reducing antisocial behaviour and foster a stronger sense of ownership and belonging.
For me though, one of the greatest strengths of youth work is in providing a level playing field for all who access it. No matter the background, financial situation, or support available at home, generally, access is not an issue and opportunities are provided to many who might not otherwise have the chance to explore these.
Emma Warren highlights the youth work approach as Automatic Positive Regard – the idea that whoever you are, you’re welcome here. What spaces and places do we go to as adults where we can honestly say that same offer is provided unconditionally? Probably very few.
As for table tennis…
It matters. In fact, some of the best conversations I’ve had with young people happened while playing table tennis, pool, darts, or any of the other shared activities we did when I was running youth centres.
It mirrors the idea that people open up more when walking side by side. There’s less pressure, less perceived threat, and less judgement. Neurologically, engaging in this way reduces the threat responses and increases parasympathetic calm. The brain feels safer and less defensive, making emotional sharing easier.
So when you walk into a youth centre and see table tennis being played, it might look like very little is happening, but in reality, far more is occurring than is immediately visible.
Youth work isn’t confined to four walls
All of this said, youth work isn’t restricted to buildings. I once sat in an important meeting when a trustee, firmly rooted in the youth work of 50 years ago (the so called ‘golden era’) insisted youth work didn’t need to happen on the streets because we had a perfectly good building with a pool table.
The reality was that while we did have a good building, it had been closed for a period and was having to be relaunched. We’d had some young people present, but needed youth workers on the ground, in the spaces where young people were (the streets, the parks, the shadows) to let them know the place actually existed for them should they choose to engage.
On this note, there is a perception by many (including that trustee) that youth work has to be in a youth centre but for many young people, this can be restrictive or uncomfortable. Detached and outreach exist for a reason. In fact, one of the first case studies I watched during my degree training focused on a Scottish town where detached youth workers walked the same routes several times a week, meeting young people in their own environment. During this time they’d share food and drinks, offer sexual health advice, employment support, and general life guidance. All the same things that can be offered in a building but in a place that felt more accessible to those individuals.
Youth work has a far-reaching role
Youth work reaches far beyond what it might first appear. Those two hours a week can look like nothing more than a space to ‘hang out’, but qualified youth workers bring a wide range of training from understanding the adolescent brain development and behaviour through trauma-informed practice and adverse childhood experiences, safeguarding, first aid, basic counselling skills, group facilitation and programme design.
They’re also highly skilled in relationship building, crisis response and de-escalation, inclusion and ethics, reflective practice, systems navigation, emotional co-regulation, advocacy, conflict resolution, and risk assessing – quite often having to happen on the spot, and sometimes all at once.
I remember one of the best youth workers I interviewed for a job. They were given a bag of random props and asked to imagine a scene where they had to run a session outdoors because the youth centre couldn’t open. They slid the bag aside and proceeded to describe a programme without relying on it. Others on the panel weren’t impressed that they hadn’t used resources provided, but I sat there smiling. They didn’t need props or gimmicks. They had the knowledge, experience, and adaptability to secure them the job.
That adaptability matters. Youth workers can read a room of 50 young people in moments, understand what’s happening for individuals, groups, and the wider dynamic, and deploy their team accordingly.
In a nutshell, youth workers can hold childhoods together.
I remember countless times when a group of boys would burst through the door at opening time, all talking at once, desperate for me to resolve an issue that school hadn’t. They were swiftly bundled into a side room, listened to, and after ten minutes would emerge calmer, stating ‘We only come to you because they don’t deal with it at school’. Imagine holding everything in until one key moment each week.
The struggle to prove its value
Despite this, youth work is often treated as a sub-par service. I lost count of how many situations we knew would spill into school settings, yet schools, and sometimes other organisations, resisted working with us. In one area it took over six years to establish a connection with a school, and I had actually left before we managed to progress that further. Imagine the difference that could have been made in that time. In another youth work setting, collaboration happened within weeks and our youth workers were welcomed into playgrounds at breaktimes and lunchtimes as extra eyes, ears, and sounding boards.
There is constant pressure to prove the value of youth work to the world, and that’s both sad and exhausting.
I was told by a trustee once (well many times actually that it got boring) that they only wanted attendance numbers for our sessions. Our response was simple. ‘What will it tell you and what will you do with that knowledge that will benefit our development?’ There was no response, probably because they didn’t know. Numbers naturally fluctuate for countless reasons. One week 30 young people attended and nothing out of the ordinary happened. The following week only 15 came, yet the conversations and breakthroughs were staggering. That qualitative data mattered far more in this instance but still they only wanted a number.
Measurement is important, of course it is, particularly for funding. I didn’t secure £63k in one setting by guesswork, but not everything meaningful can be quantified. Some impacts aren’t visible for years. I was reminded of that last year while delivering county lines workshops in an alternative provision. We felt in this particular setting we hadn’t made much impact by the end of the day but as the staff reminded us: ‘Wait ten years. That’s when you’ll see what stuck and the difference you made’.
And seeing what difference you made can come at the most random of times. Just before Christmas I met a young person who I hadn’t worked with for nearly 15 years. We talked, he thanked me, and moved on. Another did the same. Brief encounters, years later, but enough to remind me that the impact was greater than I realised at the time. Recently, I even worked alongside an adult who had once been a young person in a centre I managed. Watching their growth was deeply affirming.
Young people will find support somewhere
The thing is, young people need support, and they will rarely seek it from family as it’s too close and if school doesn’t meet that need either, they’ll find it elsewhere.
Over the last two years I’ve worked with Justice in Motion, a physical theatre company, delivering programmes around county lines and child exploitation. It’s no secret that gang exploitation is rising at an exponential rate, but when we look closely, is that surprising?
Warren makes a case in point in her interview. Gangs function like clubs, and yes, while dangerous, they offer belonging, status, food, clothes, gifts, and ‘skills’ of sorts. They make young people feel seen and valued, and in the absence of youth workers, gang leaders are effectively filling the gap once occupied by them and the youth centres, except now the cost could be your life.
Statistics show that communities without youth centres and qualified youth workers see poorer academic and social outcomes than those that do have them, and further research suggests that young people in the UK are worse off than those in comparable countries, which is quite a sobering fact, given that youth work was effectively born here.
Young people really are paying the price, aren’t they?
So do we need youth clubs?
Jonathan Haidt’s book ‘The Anxious Generation’ points to two major shifts for why our children are classed as such. Firstly the decline of play-based childhoods, and secondly, the rise of phone-based childhoods. A move from free play and overprotectiveness in the real world with a simultaneous move to locked into phones and digital systems with less control. Put simply, childhood has been rewired with a seismic shift – children became overprotected in the physical world and underprotected in the digital one.
Youth clubs are essential for bringing individuals and communities together and developing more well-rounded individuals.
There is also something of a belief that unless you experienced a youth club yourself, you won’t value them as an adult. I don’t fully agree. While experience helps to better understand the impact they can have, even visiting or volunteering in a centre can be transformative. I once had a volunteer retrain as a social worker because of the reflection and meaning they found in youth work.
The government is promising renewed funding, with the expectation that youth work will be available in every community, but without fair pay and proper resourcing, we risk burning out what remaining skilled professionals we have who already are giving everything they have.
So can youth club’s revival help the ‘anxious generation’?
Based on my experiences, yes.
I firmly believe it can, but, and here’s the key, it requires sustainable funding, sector-specific expertise, proper resources, partnership working, and a long-term commitment not simply an open promise and a generic statement that youth work is important because we know that already. In fact, the difference a proper strategic approach could provide is huge. The impact not only on young people but communities could be massive.
Perhaps we’re not talking about youth club revival here then, but youth and family centre revival. Wouldn’t that be great?
Youth work cannot be a one-trick pony. The Albemarle Report, the National Youth Agency, and the informal curriculum that underpins youth work exist for a reason. They should be respected for the frameworks that they are.
Who knows, if youth clubs returned to something on a scale of their former life, including outreach and detached work alongside, how many of our social and psychological challenges could be eased in a relatively short time?
References
Institute for Fiscal Studies – youth service cuts and impact of youth club closures
National Youth Agency / UNISON – loss of youth centres and youth workers