Mapping Youth Work Across Wirral
- Alex Fisher
- 1 hour ago
- 2 min read
What’s Strong, not what’s wrong.
“Almost half of all council areas in England have youth work “black holes” with few or no services despite high levels of deprivation and antisocial behaviour, analysis shows.”
In February this year, The Guardian ran a story that pointed to significant gaps in youth work provision across England. The research estimated the level of youth work activity based on organisations it deemed likely to have youth work activity and although this might be the fastest and easiest way to put this data together I don’t think it is necessarily accurate, because it’s hard to predict where youth work happens.
It is clear that youth work has been in decline for a significant amount time and I am not suggesting this article is overblowing the extent of that. But I think it’s important to hone in on what we deem a likely youth work organisation. There are a lot of voluntary, community and faith organisations that fill gaps in community needs when they present themselves and it’s important to recognise that about our communities.
The Wirral Youth Alliance (an alliance between Community, Voluntary, Faith and Statutory organisations) is collaborating on a project to collect information about youth work from three main sources. Organisations who participate in youth work, young people’s opinion of youth work and the opinions of parents and carers on youth work. This collaboration is the start of a collective examination on what we have not on identifying what we are lacking or in ABCD terms ‘what’s strong, not what’s wrong’.
We posted about the Youth Matters national youth strategy late last year which had a focus on supporting local youth efforts over national programs but we don’t want only organisations who are ‘deemed likely’ to have youth work activity to be considered we want to capture all of the work that organisations on Wirral do. So if you participate in any form of youth work please do use the links and let us know.
For parents and carers:
For providers:
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