Professional Youth Work Matters
Dec 9th – New on the horizon – inspired by the promise of government commitment, with young people’s futures at heart and the aim to build an online base for
- celebrating and promoting commitment to quality developmental youth work
- promoting dedicated developmental youth work CPD
- promoting the recreation of local, regional and national ground-up representative infrastructure
- remembering the National Occupational Standards we created and built upon
- restating our long standing and unique central role in our national education system
- celebrating the transformative power and flexibility of quality youth work relationships through adolescent transitions
- restoring and redefining our professional identity
- untangling ‘developmental youth work’ from the undefined, unregulated, one-size-fits-all lay term ‘youth worker’
- re-energising our professional lead as informal educators for young people’s personal and social development
Dec 10th 2025 -Government announce extensively researched National Youth Stategy after 20 years of policy vacuum
Old Name - New Initiative
Youth Matters Network, YMN and the youthmatters.net domain have been used (since the turn of the century!) as a professional identity for freelance professional developmental youth work. Experiences in strategy & governance, infrastructure and training following a long ‘ground-up’ career as a Youth & Community Worker cause me to be both hopeful and critical of the changes in our professional environment; I’m particularly sensitive to our collective amnesia.
Much memory loss is rooted in the effects of a long national policy vacuum and the severance of our education service from its native government department, along with the destruction of public service teams, delivery, infrastructure and regulation, the drift in clarity of purpose and function of VCS infrastructure and the removal of routes to qualification from grounded practice into finance driven academia.
Decades of change and disconnection have all led to lost learning, forgotten principles, lapsed practices and sadly much reinvention and confusion, as leadership and representation have come and gone with funding fluctuations and changes in national youth organisations and their leadership strength and ideology.
Cal Williams – cal@youthmatters.net