Local government reorganisation is, by its nature, a conversation that can very quickly become dominated by structures. Which councils will exist? Where will the boundaries fall? Who will be responsible for what? How will services transfer? What will the new governance arrangements look like? All of those questions matter enormously.
Here in Oxfordshire and West Berkshire, they are no longer theoretical. The Government has confirmed that the existing councils will be replaced by three new unitary authorities — Greater Oxford, Northern Oxfordshire and Ridgeway — from April 2028. But I find myself wondering about another question: what could this change mean for young people?
I ask partly because of my own involvement with Oxfordshire Youth, where I have the privilege of serving as Chair of Trustees, but also because youth work has been a thread running through much of my life. I have seen, in many different settings, what can happen when a young person encounters the right adult, the right opportunity or simply the right place to belong at the right moment.
Good youth work can look deceptively simple: a youth club, a conversation, an activity, someone who notices that you haven’t been yourself lately, or someone who encourages you to try something you didn’t think you could do.
But these moments are also part of a young person’s education, even if we do not always describe them that way. Much of youth work is non-formal learning: learning through relationships, experience, responsibility, challenge and reflection rather than through a classroom or prescribed curriculum.
There is an important distinction here between education and learning. Education can too easily sound like something provided to young people; learning is something they do for themselves. Good youth work creates the conditions for that to happen. It gives young people agency: the chance to make choices, test themselves, take responsibility, make mistakes, discover what matters to them and shape their own development.
The outcomes can be profound. Confidence, judgement, resilience, leadership, empathy and the ability to work with others are rarely the product of a single lesson. They are built over time through experience and relationships, often without a young person ever feeling that they are being “taught”.
Seen in that light, youth work is not simply an activity around the edges of formal education. It is part of the wider learning ecosystem that helps young people become capable, confident and engaged adults. And behind those apparently simple encounters sits something much bigger.
The infrastructure we don’t always see
We tend to think about infrastructure as buildings, roads, technology and systems, but communities have another kind of infrastructure too. It consists of relationships, networks, knowledge, trusted organisations and people who know how to make things happen. That is particularly true in youth work.
Across Oxfordshire, Oxfordshire Youth works with a network of more than 150 voluntary youth organisations and groups, collectively reaching more than 32,000 young people. Some are substantial organisations; others are tiny. Many are deeply embedded in the particular communities they serve, and their diversity is one of their greatest strengths.
Behind the frontline work, however, are less visible things which help make good youth work possible: safeguarding expertise, training and workforce development, good governance, funding advice, quality standards, evidence about what works, opportunities to collaborate and somewhere to turn when an organisation encounters a problem it cannot solve alone.
That is what I mean when I talk about youth sector infrastructure, and I wonder whether local government reorganisation gives us an opportunity to think rather more deliberately about it.
Because the need isn’t getting smaller
The National Youth Agency’s most recent Youth Sector Census paints a challenging picture. Eighty-four per cent of youth organisations reported increased demand for mental health and wellbeing support. Fifty-nine per cent had experienced increased demand from young people simply wanting access to a trusted adult or someone to talk to, and more than half had seen increased demand for support around employment, training and skills.
At the same time, the organisations trying to respond are themselves under pressure. More than two-thirds reported rising operating costs, almost two-thirds declining funding or budgets, and many are struggling to recruit staff and volunteers. That combination should concern us: we need more from the youth sector at precisely the point when many of the organisations within it have less capacity with which to respond.
And this isn’t simply about money. A brilliant small charity can have extraordinary relationships with young people but no HR department, fundraising team, policy specialist or data analyst. Its chief executive may also be its principal fundraiser, safeguarding lead, public affairs department and occasional caretaker.
The answer surely isn’t to make every organisation bigger. Smallness and rootedness can be tremendous strengths. The question is how we create an ecosystem in which those organisations can remain small, distinctive and local without having to stand alone.
Reorganisation creates risk
One of the things that concerns me about any major structural change is the potential loss of institutional memory and relationships. The voluntary sector is full of people who know who to ring at the council. Equally, councils contain people who know which community organisation to call when they need to reach a particular group of young people. Those relationships rarely appear on an organisational chart, but they matter.
As councils reorganise, people change roles, responsibilities move, commissioning arrangements alter and new political and managerial relationships emerge. Large organisations generally find ways to navigate that. A small youth charity run by three people and a group of volunteers may find it rather harder.
There is therefore a risk that, while enormous attention is understandably devoted to transferring statutory services safely into the new authorities, some of the connective tissue between public services and communities becomes weakened. But there is also an opportunity.
What if we designed the ecosystem deliberately?
Rather than waiting until April 2028 and asking how youth organisations fit into three new councils, what if we used the next two years to ask what a really effective youth ecosystem should look like?
Could we map youth provision properly, not merely creating a directory but understanding where the strengths and gaps are? Could we make it easier for a youth worker in a small organisation to access high-quality training and safeguarding advice? Could we strengthen leadership and governance in organisations which may never have the resources to employ specialists of their own?
Could we develop common approaches to evidence and impact which help us understand what is working without drowning small charities in reporting requirements? Could we make collaboration easier, so that organisations are encouraged to share expertise and resources rather than constantly being placed in competition with one another? Could we create straightforward ways for the new councils, health services, schools, employers and others to engage with a sector which is inevitably diverse and dispersed? And, most importantly, could young people themselves have a meaningful role in designing all of this?
None of that requires us to homogenise youth work. In fact, I think the opposite is true: good infrastructure should make diversity easier, not harder.
There is a bigger policy moment here too
This thinking isn’t happening in isolation. The Government’s National Youth Strategy, Youth Matters, talks about moving from national to local, from fragmented to collaborative and from excluded to empowered. It recognises the need for stronger local capability, better mapping and coordination, workforce development, organisational support, stronger partnerships and better data.
I find that encouraging because it acknowledges something those working with young people have known for a long time: no single organisation or service can provide everything a young person needs. Schools matter, families matter, health services matter, social care matters, employers matter, youth organisations matter and informal community groups matter. What matters just as much is how those things connect.
There is an interesting geographical question here too. The new councils will create new administrative boundaries, but young people’s lives don’t necessarily respect them. Nor do colleges, employers, health services, charities, funders or voluntary-sector networks. So perhaps one of the questions we should be asking is which things genuinely need to sit within the boundaries of each new council and which things might be stronger if shared across a wider geography. There won’t always be one answer.
An opportunity to leave something better behind
I don’t underestimate the complexity of local government reorganisation. There will be difficult decisions, competing priorities and a huge amount of practical work simply to ensure that essential services continue without interruption. But major structural change doesn’t come along very often.
It would be a shame if, having expended all that energy, we judged success simply by whether everything that existed on 31 March 2028 had successfully been moved into a different box on 1 April. There is an opportunity to be more ambitious than that.
For youth work, perhaps that means thinking not just about services, contracts and organisational boundaries, but about the infrastructure which allows hundreds of different organisations and thousands of staff and volunteers to do their best work with young people. Perhaps the next two years give us the space to build some of that infrastructure before the new councils even open their doors.
I don’t pretend to have a finished blueprint. In fact, I would be suspicious of anyone who did. The answers need to come from young people, youth workers, community organisations, councils and many others working together. But I do think we should start the conversation now.
If local government reorganisation is going to reshape the institutions around our communities, we should surely ask how we can use that moment to strengthen the relationships and organisations within them too. And if, when the new councils begin work in April 2028, the youth sector is stronger, better connected and better able to support young people than it is today, that would be a legacy of reorganisation worth having.
