I touched on this in a previous post here where I mentioned a campaign a group we worked with about 3 years ago which involved young people lobbying Connexions to open at weekends and during evenings. As far as I’m aware the campaign wasn’t successful in their particular area.
In an article in this months Youth Work Now Michael Bracey wrote that Youth Workers should be prepared to work weekends. Her quotes from a recent Government Report that 91% of people said “it was important that youth facilities were open on Friday and Saturday evening”, compared to just 1% who feel its important they open on a Monday night.
Bracey goes on to mention some of the reasons given for not opening at weekends including that young people are out drinking, a lack of resources and the expense of operating a seven day service, he also suggests there’s another reason - that some Youth Workers just don’t want to work at weekends - claiming that very few will work beyond 5pm on a Friday.
I picked up on this again because of a comment on the CYP Now Forums in response to an article about research by the National Association of Clubs for Young People that youth clubs ‘help curb antisocial behaviour’ (well you’d kind of hope they would wouldn’t you?!) - but that aside, Barry Walsh says in the forum “certainly where I work this could be mentioned as we currently open once a week on a Tuesday… we haven’t ever opened on a Friday.. a day generally regarded as a no go day.. as the perception is that’s when young people are at their most rowdiest… drinking and smoking”.
In the courses we’ve organised over the years theres been more than a few occasions that groups have pulled out because they’ve failed to get staff prepared to work on residentials or at weekends. I was very surprised when we first started to run courses for Youth Workers to find that apparently the best time to run them was midweek - not because they were busy working with young people at weekends, but because they don’t work weekends. Well we ran most of them at weekends anyway because they were ran by young people who were at school during the week and I’m pleased that there were plenty of Youth Workers prepared to attend courses at weekends - though it has to be said attendance by professionally qualified workers was very low (most were in related professions or volunteer workers).
My own thinking when doing youth work was that working very late hours, working at weekends and regularly going on residentials was just the way it was and that was the price I happily paid in return for an interesting job. In return I got paid a mighty salary of £4,600 per annum for 3 years for what was supposed to be a 20 hour a week job (in reality more like 45).
What I’d really like to know is what are Youth Workers doing between the hours of 9am & 5pm, Monday to Friday? Is there really more valuable stuff to do during the day than there is from 7pm - midnight + Saturday & Sunday?
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Tags: campaign, youth work
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