Redefining and Repurposing Youth Work

Over the period covered by this book, policy-makers and practitioners broadened the concept of ‘youth work’ to include the practices of organisations and projects, often state-funded, which targeted young people’s anti-social behaviour, their school attendance, employment prospects and mental health. With some of these requiring young people’s participation, their starting points and approaches could be very different from—indeed sometimes at variance with—some of open youth work’s key defining features. The endorsement of these wider conceptions of youth work by policy-makers, academics and some within the youth sector itself can be seen as helping to divert attention and resources from open youth work provision and its distinctive ways of working with young people.