Stimulating Excellence in Youth Work

Professionalising Youth Work is about explaining to all stakeholders - clients, workers and third parties - what the professional relationship in youth work is all about.

Lots of professional work with young people: teachers, social workers, police officers, lawyers, doctors, psychologists and so on. Each of their relationships to young people are limited are regulated in accordance with the law, placing them in a position of trust on particular matters. But the special nature of the youth worker's professional relationship is that for them, the primary client is always the young person themselves. The young person's interests are paramount.

This means that professionalising youth work is not about:

• surrendering management of youth work to non-youth workers, such as funding agencies
• cramping creative and unorthodox youth work with too much bureaucracy
• "youth workers" becoming involved with detention, punishments, curfews or other street-clearing exercises
• gaining advantages for youth workers at the expense of young people
• claiming a monopoly of knowledge about the youth sector and refusing to cooperate with other professions

Professionalising youth work is about rendering a quality service to young people and their communities, and modeling a process of human growth and development for the young people concerned, Ultimately it is about ensuring that young people's right (under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other instruments) are upheld.