Youth policy in Whitehall limbo

The Department for Education could be about to relinquish oversight of youth work in England. It has confirmed it is considering transferring responsibility for youth policy, with the Department for Communities and Local Government its likeliest destination.

If this was to happen, it would represent “the most profound shift youth policy has ever experienced”, says Tom Wylie, former chief executive of the National Youth Agency.

Youth work, he says, has been the responsibility of the various incarnations of a “ministry of education” ever since 1939, when the government came up with its first national youth work policy. He says the education department is the right home for youth work since it is “outside the formal system, but still an educational service”.

Sector concerns
Wylie is concerned that Education Secretary Michael Gove misunderstands this, and that the educational value of youth work will be lost if responsibility passes to another department. At the beginning of March, Gove told the British Youth Council’s national scrutiny group that he was considering the move because the DCLG already has responsibility for some youth programmes, most notably the Youth United initiative.

“DCLG will only concern itself with the machinery of what local authorities do – not with the actual content of what they do,” says Wylie. “It will all be left to local decision making, with no central guidance drawing attention to teenage pregnancy or gangs, for example. All of that content focus will be lost – and that’s a worry.”

He doubts whether the DCLG has the “competence to do anything about youth”. But it will, he says, benefit Gove’s political aims: “Gove clearly wants to shift bits of his budget. He can appear to make savings at the DfE by giving this away. The govern­ment also has a general ideology to favour localism. You can see how it makes policy