I have been revisiting The History of Youth Work in Europe, the remarkable series developed over a decade through the partnership between the European Commission and the Council of Europe. The seventh and final volume is co-edited by my good friend Howard Williamson, alongside Tanya Basarab, and it is one of those books that prompts you to look backwards at your own experience while simultaneously making you think rather hard about the future.
This particular volume feels unusually personal. Chapter 5, “World Scouting: a century of work for youth empowerment”, is written by my good friend Eduard Vallory. Chapter 8, “The Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award”, is written by two more good friends, Amy Pearce and Melek De-Wint. And the concluding Chapter 14, “Reflective trialogue: conclusions from the history project – 12 trilemmas for youth work”, is written by Howard with Filip Coussée.
There is therefore something rather lovely about reading the reflections of people I know and respect on two organisations that have played such a large part in my own life. I have had the enormous privilege of holding senior international leadership roles in World Scouting and, for eleven years, leading The Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award Foundation. Reading Eduard’s account of Scouting and Amy and Melek’s account of the Award alongside Howard and Filip’s conclusions felt rather less like an academic exercise and rather more like looking at a map of territory through which I have spent much of my life travelling.
Howard and Filip’s central proposition is deceptively simple. Youth work may look straightforward from the outside, but underneath it sits a mass of tensions, contradictions and judgements. Rather than reducing those tensions to either/or choices, they identify 12 “trilemmas”, each expressed as a triangle. The point is not to choose one corner and reject the other two. It is to understand the terrain between them, make judgements about where youth work should sit at a particular moment, and be able to explain and defend those judgements.
Before reflecting on them, it is worth setting out the 12 explicitly:
- Roots: what is youth work?
Education – Social work – Counselling - Method: how is youth work done?
Education/learning – Advice and information – Coaching/training - Delivery: who does youth work?
Paid workers – Volunteers – Young people - Pressures: why youth work?
Policy – Principle/philosophy – Priorities of young people - Space: where does youth work happen?
Street – Buildings – Digital - Rationale
Regulation – Recreation – Emancipation - Focus of attention
Individual – Groups – Society - Style of practice
Proactive – Negotiated/exchange – Reactive - Locus of practice
Projects – Issues – Contexts - Target of practice
Delinquent/excluded – “Ordinary” young people – Talented/privileged - Making the connections
Health – Justice – Employment - The value of youth work
Process – Impact – Outcome
It is quite a list, but what struck me as I read it was how little of it felt theoretical. I have spent much of my life involved with young people through Scouting, the Award, Young Enterprise, Career Ready and, today, Oxfordshire Youth and other work supporting young people. Those organisations are very different, but I recognise virtually every one of Howard and Filip’s triangles. Looking back, I suspect some of the best youth work I have encountered has happened precisely because good practitioners were comfortable living with ambiguity rather than trying to abolish it. For me, that is the really important insight: the work happens in the middle.
Eduard’s chapter on World Scouting makes that point almost immediately. He observes that one of Scouting’s greatest strengths is also one of its weaknesses: its educational action is deeply intuitive. Young people generally join Scouting because they think it will be enjoyable, not because somebody has persuaded them that they need a programme of non-formal education. The learning is nevertheless happening, sometimes very profoundly, underneath the games, activities, camps, expeditions, friendships and responsibilities.
That rings completely true from my own experience of Scouting, from joining as a boy through to eventually working internationally with the Movement. We can explain the Scout Method in sophisticated educational language, and there is value in doing so, but the young person does not need to understand the pedagogy for the pedagogy to work. The young person thinks they are putting up a tent, planning an expedition, cooking a fairly dubious meal, organising something with their patrol or meeting Scouts from another country. Meanwhile they are learning about responsibility, co-operation, resilience, decision making, service and themselves.
Eduard describes Scouting as based on self-education, with the young person taking increasing responsibility for their own development. He identifies the interplay of adult support, the values of the Scout Law, personal goals, the Promise, teams and councils, belonging, activity, nature and service as creating the educational environment. That is an excellent illustration of Howard and Filip’s first two trilemmas. Is this education, coaching or advice? In practice it is all of them, blended together so naturally that the boundaries become rather artificial.
My years in international Scouting also taught me something about another kind of balancing act. A World Movement needs enough common purpose, values and educational method to remain recognisably one movement, while leaving sufficient freedom for Scouting in Kenya, Korea, France, Brazil or Britain to belong genuinely to the society in which it operates. Eduard captures this beautifully when he describes the way Scouting has taken deep roots in very different societies while maintaining a global identity.
I saw that constantly in World Scouting. A global organisation can be tempted to think that consistency means sameness, but it does not. The interesting leadership challenge is deciding what absolutely must be held in common and what properly belongs to national associations, local communities and young people themselves. Eduard notes that when the world organisation was formalised, great care was taken to establish common principles without creating a central body capable of determining how each national association should actually run itself. More than a century later, that tension between movement and institution, common standards and local ownership, remains very recognisable.
It also explains why I have always been so passionate about the international dimension of Scouting. Eduard argues that local belonging and global identification are complementary, and that global identity helps widen a young person’s understanding of citizenship beyond a single national, cultural or religious identity. Anyone who has watched tens of thousands of young people arrive at a World Scout Jamboree as strangers and, remarkably quickly, begin forming friendships across languages, cultures and faiths has seen that idea made real. The tents, badges and neckerchiefs are the visible bit; the extraordinary educational encounter underneath them is the thing that matters.
Amy and Melek’s chapter on the Award provides a rather different but equally revealing example. They describe a framework deliberately designed around non-formal education, personal choice and challenge. Participants choose their own activities in volunteering, physical recreation and skills, alongside the team-based Adventurous Journey, within a framework intended to help young people discover that they are capable of more than they thought.
During my eleven years leading the International Award Foundation, I became increasingly convinced that one of the most powerful features of the Award is precisely that it is non-competitive. The achievement is measured against the young person’s own starting point and goals, not against somebody else. Amy and Melek describe targets that should be achievable but challenging, activities chosen by the participant, and sustained commitment over time. That combination matters. We are not lowering expectations by starting with the young person; we are creating the conditions in which they can stretch themselves.
The role of the adult is especially interesting. Amy and Melek describe Adventurous Journey supervisors watching from a distance, keeping young people safe while allowing them to make mistakes, solve problems and experience authentic responsibility. Award Leaders mentor participants but leave ownership of the achievement with the participant. I have always loved that principle because it captures one of the hardest judgements in youth work. Adults need to care enough to be there, but have enough confidence to stand back.
We have to know the difference between keeping a young person safe and preventing them from experiencing difficulty; between support and interference; between creating an opportunity and taking it over. Anyone who has ever watched a group on an expedition confidently head in entirely the wrong direction will understand the temptation to intervene rather sooner than the educational process necessarily requires.
That connects strongly with Howard and Filip’s eighth trilemma: proactive, negotiated or reactive practice. Youth work cannot simply say, “young people decide”, and leave it there. Adults have a responsibility to bring ideas, experience and challenge into the relationship. Genuine youth participation is considerably easier to celebrate in theory than to practise when young people decide to do something different from what the adults had in mind, but good youth work is not simply about asking young people what they want and supplying it either.
Howard and Filip argue that practitioners should deliberately stretch horizons, introduce new experiences and move young people beyond existing comfort zones, normally through negotiation and persuasion rather than imposition. Scouting and the Award both taught me that at its best youth work says two things at once: “I hear you” and “have you thought about this?”
The third trilemma asks who does youth work, and again both organisations provide useful context. World Scouting is fundamentally a volunteer movement, while the Award chapter describes adults, many of them volunteers, as the backbone of delivery. Scouting taught me long ago that professionalism and being paid are not synonymous. Some of the finest youth work I have ever seen has been delivered by volunteers, but that does not absolve organisations from expecting professional standards. Safeguarding, ethics, good judgement, training and reflective practice matter whether somebody receives a salary or gives up Tuesday evenings and half their weekends for free.
Howard and Filip make exactly this distinction between professionalisation and professionalism. Most youth work in Europe is still delivered by volunteers, but whatever the employment status of the person providing it, they argue that the work should be undertaken reflectively, ethically and professionally. That has been one of the constants throughout my experience: volunteering should never be confused with amateurism.
Perhaps the triangle I recognise most strongly is the fourth: public policy, the principles and philosophy of youth work, and the priorities of young people themselves. I have spent plenty of time sitting with governments, funders and boards trying to explain why investment in young people matters, and I have no difficulty with organisations demonstrating impact. Indeed, I have often argued that we need to become much better at doing so. But there is always a danger that the measurement becomes the mission.
The histories of both Scouting and the Award illustrate the point. Both emerged partly as adult responses to concerns about the young people of their age, and both then evolved far beyond those original concerns because young people, volunteers, communities and societies made the programmes their own. The Award began in response to a very particular post-war British context and subsequently became a framework used across very different cultures, while retaining its basic principles and adapting its delivery. Scouting evolved from a programme with distinctly Edwardian British roots into an international movement increasingly concerned with peace, global citizenship and mutual understanding.
That capacity to adapt without losing the thing that makes an organisation distinctive is something I have wrestled with in leadership again and again. At the Award, particularly, the challenge of expanding access while maintaining the integrity and quality of the framework was never merely an operational question. Amy and Melek describe the move towards clearer international standards, licensing and quality assurance while retaining a framework flexible enough to work in different cultures and contexts. Scale is worthwhile only if what is being scaled remains worth having.
I saw the same issue in organisations concerned with employability. Helping young people understand the world of work, develop confidence, build networks and imagine futures they had not previously considered can be profoundly developmental. But young people are not simply units of future economic productivity. Howard and Filip distinguish between learning to earn a living and learning how fully to live a life. Youth work can contribute to employment, health, crime prevention and many other public priorities without becoming an employment service, health intervention or crime reduction programme. Once somebody else’s target completely determines the relationship with the young person, something important has been lost.
Their sixth trilemma, around regulation, recreation and emancipation, made me think too, and Eduard’s observation about Scouting is especially relevant here. We sometimes become rather embarrassed by the recreational side of youth work, as though everything needs an educational objective written beside it. Yet one reason Scouting works is precisely that the educational process often hides in plain sight. Young people are having fun, and the learning emerges from what they are doing together.
Some of the most important things happen while young people are sitting around a campfire, messing about in a canoe, planning an event, walking an expedition route or sharing the aftermath of something that went spectacularly wrong. Relationships form and confidence grows. The activity may be the vehicle rather than the destination, but without the vehicle there may be no journey.
There is a warning here, though. Youth work has historically contained both emancipatory and regulatory instincts. Adults have not always worked with young people simply to liberate their potential; sometimes the objective has been to make them behave in ways adults consider acceptable. Howard and Filip remind us that youth workers are never entirely agents of social change or agents of social control. Scouting’s own history illustrates that tension particularly starkly, moving through different understandings of discipline, citizenship, nationalism, internationalism and individual autonomy. Anyone who thinks their own work with young people is entirely free from adult assumptions probably needs to look again.
The seventh triangle asks us to balance attention between the individual, the group and society. Here again both Scouting and the Award point towards the middle. The Award is individually challenging and non-competitive, yet much of its power comes through service, community activity and the teamwork of the Adventurous Journey. Scouting is concerned with the development of the individual, but does so largely through the small group and ultimately connects that individual with their community and the wider world. Eduard describes its purpose as developing people as individuals, responsible citizens and members of local, national and international communities.
That accords strongly with my experience. Youth work can transform an individual life, but it generally does so through relationships with others. The group provides friendship, friction, responsibility, comparison, encouragement and belonging. Through it, young people begin to work out not simply who they are, but how they relate to the people and world around them.
I was particularly struck by the tenth trilemma, about who youth work is actually for. Public policy often gravitates towards two groups: young people identified as particularly talented and those identified as disadvantaged, excluded, vulnerable or troublesome. Both deserve support, of course, but sitting between them is an enormous number of young people who attract very little institutional attention. Howard and Filip describe those whose names appear neither on the honours boards nor scratched into the desks: the vast body of “ordinary” young people who can become almost invisible.
That speaks very powerfully to my own concern over many years with hearing the young unheard. Being unheard does not necessarily mean being visibly disadvantaged. Sometimes it means simply being unremarked upon. Some young people have neither a label that triggers intervention nor a talent that attracts opportunity.
One of the things I valued enormously about the Award was its insistence that the framework should be inclusive and achievable by any young person, irrespective of ability, interest or background, with challenge calibrated to the individual rather than imposed as a universal benchmark. At the same time, the international network increasingly sought deliberately to extend access to young people and communities less likely to encounter such opportunities. Amy and Melek describe this particularly through work with marginalised young people and the ambition that every eligible young person should have the opportunity to participate. Universal availability and focused effort to overcome inequality are not opposites. Done well, each makes the other more meaningful.
The eleventh triangle takes us into another area I have wrestled with throughout my career: youth work’s relationship with the bigger public policy systems around health, justice and employment. Youth organisations can achieve greater reach, resources and influence by working alongside those systems, but there is a price if partnership becomes subordination. Howard and Filip describe a “precarious equilibrium”: too much independence and youth work risks becoming irrelevant to the wider world; too much dependency and it risks becoming irrelevant to young people.
Again, my experience of the Award made that tension very real. Around the world I saw it delivered through governments, schools, charities, businesses, youth organisations and institutions working with young offenders. Amy and Melek capture the extraordinary diversity of those arrangements. The strength of a common framework was that it could enter all those settings without becoming entirely defined by any of them. The answer to dependency is therefore not retreat from partnership, but clarity about purpose.
Which brings me to what may be the hardest triangle of all: process, impact and outcome. Anyone who has led a charity knows that the question “What difference did it make?” is entirely legitimate. If we ask the public, donors or government to invest in something, we should be able to explain why. Howard and Filip do not duck that. Youth work cannot retreat into saying that relationships, patience and trust are enough and that nobody should ask what happened as a result.
The Award chapter is particularly interesting here because it describes a serious attempt to articulate outcomes including confidence, resilience, relationships and leadership, civic competence, intercultural competence and personal wellbeing, and then to connect those to longer-term social impact. I strongly supported that work. We should be able to describe, research and evidence the difference that non-formal education makes.
But neither can everything worthwhile be reduced to a dashboard. Howard and Filip argue that if youth work becomes dominated by outcomes and impact, it risks ceasing to be youth work; if it refuses to engage with evidence at all, it risks losing credibility and support. I have spent much of my career occupying exactly that uncomfortable territory. We need evidence, accountability and a serious understanding of whether what we do works. But I have also met adults who have told me that something which happened to them in Scouting, the Award or another youth organisation twenty or thirty years earlier changed the direction of their life. I am not sure which quarterly KPI would have captured that, and perhaps that is part of the point.
There are other triangles in Howard and Filip’s twelve that deserve much more thought: the changing balance between buildings, streets and digital spaces, for example, or the question of whether youth work is best understood through projects, issues or contexts. The Award’s adoption of digital tools while deliberately retaining face-to-face mentoring is itself a neat illustration of the former. Their value is not that they provide twelve answers. Quite the reverse. They force us to resist oversimplifying something that derives much of its power from being flexible, relational and responsive.
That is why I like the image of the triangle so much. Good youth work is rarely found at the corners. It is not completely led by adults or completely directed by young people. It is not simply education, recreation or welfare. It is not purely about individual development or social change. It needs volunteers and professionals, physical and digital spaces, independence and partnership, process and evidence. The craft lies in navigating between them rather than allowing ourselves to be pulled permanently into one corner.
Howard and Filip eventually bring all of this back to the idea of youth work providing both space and bridges: somewhere young people can belong now, while also discovering routes into a wider world. Their final image is a particularly powerful one, youth work offering young people a safe harbour from which they can set sail, combining association, activity, autonomy and advice.
After a lifetime in Scouting and eleven years leading the International Award, that feels remarkably close to what I think we were trying to do all along. Give young people somewhere they belong, but do not leave them exactly where you found them. Introduce them to people they might never otherwise meet. Let them try things they did not know they could do. Allow them to fail without defining them by the failure. Give them responsibility before the rest of society thinks they are quite ready for it. Be around when advice is wanted, and know when to intervene and when to keep quiet.
Most importantly, resist the temptation to decide too precisely in advance exactly what sort of person a young person is supposed to become. The genius of Howard Williamson and Filip Coussée’s twelve trilemmas is that they do not offer youth work a comfortable answer; they offer something much more valuable, a way of asking better questions. After a lifetime around young people, I increasingly think that is where the best youth work begins.
