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Future Of Youth Work Yhm2009 Brenda Bartlett
- 1. Youth Homelessness Matters YAA Conference, Tweed Heads 12 & 13 October 2009 Future of Youth Work; youth work education and training in NSW. Who do you want working with homeless young people and who gets employed? Brenda Bartlett School of Social Sciences University of Western Sydney
Hinweis der Redaktion
- I’ve been involved in teaching youth work students and or negotiating student placements for them since I first began working at UWS in 1990. Our youth work program ends in 2010 and that is the reason I was inspired to put an abstract into the YAA Conference Organising Committee this year. I have consulted with a wide range of people including those who were involved in development of the TAFE Youth Work Diploma back in the mid 1980s and the various youth work degrees at the University of Western Sydney at the Bankstown Campus at Milperra.
- For this paper, I contacted a range of people to get their ideas on a number of topics relevant to YAA’s membership, although the majority of my sample were from the Western Suburbs of Sydney and the Inner City suburbs of Sydney. The findings are Sydney-centric, however, they should be of interest to staff from around the state! I hope we are able to have a discussion on the issues raised in this paper at the end of the presentation.
- New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia have offered degree courses for a number of years. The Australian Institute of Welfare and Community Workers (AIWCW) has accredited a number of university degrees and TAFE youth work diploma courses. This includes some Christian Colleges that offer Youth Welfare and Youth Ministry courses.
- After looking at TAFE websites, I telephoned Ultimo TAFE to receive this information. The proposed youth work courses are at Blue Mountains, Meadowbank and Coonamble TAFES for 2010.
- There are also a Post Graduate Certificate in Human Services (Youth Work) at ACU and a Graduate Certificate in Community & Youth Work at Griffith University Brisbane, QLD; there may be other universities offering youth work, but this is all I was able to locate.
- The first subjects in youth work were part of a welfare program offered in the early 1980s. while the first courses in youth work were two year associate diplomas offered at Milperra College of Advanced Education in the mid 1980s, which changed its name to the Macarthur Institute of Higher Education, which later became the University of Western Sydney Macarthur in 1989, and then the University of Western Sydney in 2000. The courses included the Associate Diploma of Youth Work, Bachelor of Social Science (Youth Work), Bachelor of Youth Work and finally the Bachelor of Community Welfare (Youth Work). A number of students have completed diplomas and degrees in youth work from the mid 1980s to the present. We previously had an elective called “Residential Youth Services” that covered the topic of youth homelessness, however that unit has not been offered since the early 1990s. Vaughan Bowie was instrumental in setting up the youth work courses at UWS and remained active in the courses until 2008. .
- There was a lack of casework skills in some of the youth work courses.
- At UWS we have had a wide range of students who over the years have enrolled in our youth work courses; they vary from students who have excellent academic records to those who don’t. Primarily we attract school leavers who are female aged 17-20 and many have had experience running a youth group or bible group in their church with a range of views from conservative to progressive ideas. Another group are those who are political, along with those who may have once been clients of youth workers or who had received welfare services. There are a small group who have completed TAFE courses or Child and Youth Diplomas from Canada and many of these students have employment in the human services sector. You can see the mismatch as many agencies want older students and/or male students. The male/female gender divide of enrolled students is about the same in both the Bachelor of Community Welfare including the Youth Work Program and our Bachelor of Social Work at UWS with around 10% being males.
- The academic staff in the school both supported and fought for the youth work courses for many years despite the low enrolments, until the university said they would no longer offer and fund units that had less than 25 students enrolled in them.
- We get some excellent students from TAFE but we also get some TAFE graduates who really struggle academically at UWS. A former colleague described “ the students who came from TAFE to UWS varied between brilliant and abysmal” while another former colleague responded fondly to one in particular who said she was bored working in a factory and decided to try to get into our program. She was surprised we accepted her and said that nobody in her family had completed high school.
- This person teaches at TAFE and has taught in the youth work course at UWS.
- Most people interviewed were very content with the range of short term training courses on offer to staff and took advantage of them. The Youth Accommodation Association of NSW, Youth Action and Policy Association, and The Association of Children’s Welfare Agencies INC. (ACWA) provide a wide range of short term courses for youth workers and other staff employed in the sector along with Government Funding Bodies, however, the short courses do not replace a TAFE or university qualification.
- Mark Lack and I as part of a Bachelor of Social Sciences, interviewed a number of youth refuge, medium term and long term staff in the Western Suburbs of Sydney. Our findings revealed that most workers did not have tertiary qualifications, including 1/3 who left school at year 10, although a number of the staff were both working and studying. It was interesting that the research suggested that the management committee membership in age and ethnicity often mirrored the staff employed in the youth work service. Some managers interviewed for this paper, reported that they employ students as casual staff while are some full-time staff are studying part-time in a range of courses.
- Many youth work agencies do not want young students and boundary issues sometime arise. So again there is a mismatch between what the field wants and what we can offer. Some young students make excellent youth workers, however, they often do not have the life experience to deal with the issues facing the clients of the services. A lot of youth workers first started in the field as people in their 20s and early 30s.
- The type of learning varies from agency to agency and the capabilities and personalities vary from student to student with some more suited to a residential environment then others. The benefits is they are able to complete useful projects and programs and sometimes become future casual staff or permanent staff for the agency.
- They only take older TAFE students.
- This same manager did take a young student on placement 15 years ago and now she is a manager of another program within the service!
- What works best? Some staff complained that local newspapers were not good, others faulted the Sydney Morning Herald. Most staff seem to use a combination of the above. How staff are recruited has changed; Twenty to thirty years ago it was through the Sydney Morning Herald and the CES; perhaps informal networks and word of mouth were used.
- Some staff I interviewed said they recruited some of those the students who successfully completed field placements to become casual staff in their agencies.
- Some managers felt they had to train staff themselves in addition to sending them off to complete short courses including skills in case management.
- Most staff said having good communication skills was essential!
- Some staff felt perhaps they were now ageist when it came to employing young staff.
- When I interviewed someone who has employed our graduates she spoke about the loss of the degree as loss for the profession Andrew Lochhead at the University of Victoria in Canada was writing about how the ‘field straddles the boundaries between professions of welfare, medicine, mental health and education’ (2001,73) and I think youth work in Australia also straddles several the same professional boundaries, however, I am not sure if it a concern of staff. Any ideas?
- Literature on professions suggests that having a code of ethics is one of the conditions to a profession! Would having a common code of ethics change practice or make recruitment easier?
- Any ideas on this? FCYR was set up as a community organisation with a community based management committee; when I commenced working there, the original management committee had resigned the Fairfield Community Resource Centre’s management committee was auspicing it until a new management committee could be formed. What is fascinating from that time is that we had three committee members who were District Officers known as DOs from the Department of Youth and Community Services (YACS) who volunteered at the refuge and did night shifts every week and then went into the office to work 8 hours! All the staff were encouraged to attend the management committee meetings! I suppose we have all become more professional in our policies and procedures from OHS to award conditions and employment practices. Some staff feel there are fewer resources for young people and fewer places to refer them to once they leave the service. Most youth workers would use the terms “to empower young people” so they have the skills to make important decisions about issues that will affect their lives and general well being; Victor Wong refers to this as a ‘poststructural understanding of youth needs and youth work practice’ (Wong, 2004, 11). Any ideas?
- These are a few of the challenges workers shared with me, however, partnerships can bring great benefits but also pose challenges for the services involved. There have been big changes in the way the Government works; from outsourcing government services and changes in the relationship between government as a purchaser and not-for-profit organisations as providers of government services( HRSC 1998; Nowland-Froeman 1998; Neville 19999; DoCS 2001; Darcy 2002, Brown and Keast 2005; O’Shea, 2006 as sited in Sidoti, Banks, Darcy, O’Shea, Leonard, Atie, DiNicola, Stevenson, & Moor, 2009, 3.)
- According to an article in the September 2009 ‘Board Matters, newsletter for Non-profit boards’ on How do services survive economic downturn Examining opportunities to merge with or acquire other non-profit organisations was listed as the first dot point followed by cutting staff salaries as the second dot point. This was adapted from Managing in Tough Times- May 2009 Nonprofit Leaders Survey Update by William Foster, Gail Perreault and Sarah Sable, published by the Bridgespan Group June 2009. What does this group think about these first two options?
- How many youth refuges were there back in 1979? FCYR was meant to have been the fourth crisis refuge to be set up……One refuge that was set up in the late 1970s was called “Shanti House” when it was first began. Later it moved from to Erskineville, it changed its name to the “Baldwin Street Project” and then to the “Lillian Howell Memorial Project” (Lillian’s) after the woman who had written the submission which got the funding; she died a week before the money came though”.
- On the 28 th of September 2009, I heard on the ABC local radio station the staggering figure that 54% of the unemployed in the USA were young people under the age 24. During times of economic downturns, even more so, there will always be a need to provide a wide range of services to young people as more people become homeless. Young people are being particularly disadvantaged in the present employment market and this is a world wide trend in many OECD countries. For small not-for-profit organisations, Purchase of Service Contracting (POSC) represents a big shift in practice (Kramer 1994 as sited in Darcy, Waterford, & McIvor, 2009, 7).
- I’m still passionate about this field!