The ‘Secular Culture’ of Youth Work Training: Are English Universities Equipping Youth Workers to Work with Diverse Religious Communities?

ABSTRACT

Most professionally-qualifying youth work programmes in the UK are secular programmes in mainstream universities. Current UK National Occupational Standards require youth workers to ‘Explore the concept of values and beliefs with young people’. Faith organisations form the largest sector of the UK youth work field and all youth workers need to be equipped to work inclusively with diverse communities. This research explored, through a semi-structured survey sent to programme leaders, the coverage of religion, faith and spirituality in youth work training courses in England. We found tensions in how religion, faith and spirituality are incorporated into programmes and how programme leaders think youth workers should engage with it in their practice. Where explicit content on religion, faith and spirituality is incorporated into training programmes, it tends to focus on controversial issues such as radicalisation. The survey revealed a lack of consensus across programme leaders as to how the NOS relating to values and beliefs should be interpreted and whether their graduates are being sufficiently equipped to work with diverse religious communities. The research exposes a need for more explicit recognition of the place of religion, faith and spirituality in youth work and in the curricula of secular training programmes.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• faith
• spirituality
• youth work
• training

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While introductory youth work courses at lower qualification levels do exist, they do not provide students with the JNC-recognised professional qualification but provide youth support worker status. This means they are not eligible for jobs requiring a youth work qualification. A new level 6 apprenticeship route to qualification was recently introduced for those who wish to qualify as youth workers through a vocational route. This had not been launched when we conducted our research.

2 Education and Training Standards (ETS) committees in each nation of the UK validate their youth work qualifying programmes with JNC recognition and provide contextualisation documents for the interpretation and application of the NOS for the particular country (NYA 2020). A Joint ETS committee (JETS) for the UK and Ireland with representation from each country’s ETS oversees validation and standard-setting processes. In England, university training programmes receive their JNC-validation via the ETS committee that sits within England’s National Youth Agency (NYA).

3 This change happened during our research project therefore the survey we conducted referred to the pre-2019 standard (YW14).

4 https://reshetnet.com/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Naomi Thompson

Naomi Thompson is a Senior Lecturer in Youth and Community Work and Head of the Department of Social, Therapeutic and Community Studies at Goldsmiths University of London.

Lucie Shuker

Lucie Shuker is Head of Research at Youthscape, Luton.