Today we’ve got another great guest post from Mince – you can also check out her previous post about the different types of youth worker. Today’s post is about youth work in schools in the UK – come back for the second and third installments over the next couple of weeks.
Youth Work in Schools in the UK – Part 1
If you wanted to be a teacher in the UK, you could complete NVQ levels 2 and 3 in Childcare and Education. That will lead you into either playgroups or schools work.
Alternatively, you could go to University, learn your subject inside-out (for a large fee), and then take either one or two years to do your PGCE.
If you want to specialise then you can do extra courses; for example to work with SEN groups (Special Educational Needs), children with other specific learning difficulties, tutor support, and so forth. You’d do some time in a school where you’d learn all the useful stuff like timekeeping in sessions, school rules, school cultures, uniforms, class management, teacher dress code, where the coffee is, whether you get called ‘miss’ or not, where to smoke, who the disruptive kids are, and all the ‘office politics’ you get in a school.
Youth workers, by comparison, mainly learn their trade on the job – as volunteers, as sessional workers, and eventually as underpaid, awkwardly contracted ‘staff’. Some choose to do an NVQ or a degree, or even an MA – youth work is routinely a graduate profession these days. But the funding, the infrastructure and the support are savagely lacking, and in a time of cuts, austerity, and ‘difficult decisions’, that isn’t going to get any better anytime soon. *sigh*
Now, there’s a reason you’re a youth worker and not a teacher, and often the reasons include:
- You like young people
- You hate schools, or
- You just really like to challenge yourself
Clearly the easier, better-paid and more widely respected career route is teaching. Instead, as a youth worker you’ll fight your whole career to be taken even half as seriously as a teacher. You’ll then spend every family gathering, meeting or party where you accidentally mention your job telling people that you do not just ‘play pool all night’, or ‘entertain teenagers’, or corrupt the fragile minds of the innocent.
Lots of youth workers hate schools for their one-size-fits-all approach. Youth workers will hear all the horror stories from young people about cruel and unreasonable teachers, including bullying issues and ego-shattering comments doled out to students. But we only hear one side of the story; teachers are also overworked, underpaid, undermined and insulted daily by young people, by OFSTED, by ESTYN and by local authorities.
So as a youth worker, at some point, you may end up having to go into a school. Schools are unfeasibly nervous about teaching ‘life skills’ or ‘PSHE’ or ‘SRE’ or whatever they call it this term. That’s fair enough, and anyway, better to have it taught by someone who stays up to speed with this stuff for a living than a Science or English teacher who drew the short straw. A good school will usually call in the experts – that means charities, youth clubs, health workers and other not-for-profit peeps with a message for the youth. *ring ring* oh, it’s for you!!
Mince is a youth worker in England and is therefore officially an endangered species.
Question: What are your experiences of doing youth work in schools? Let us know in the comments below.
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