This article responds to the recent announcement by the National Youth Agency (NYA) approving the reconfiguration and downgrading of a qualifying youth work education in England. This signals the intensification of a longer-term trend whereby youth work has been driven along increasingly instrumental lines through the imposition of outcomes concerned with social and economic goals. This reorientation is, I argue, primarily associated with the encroachment of neoliberal policy on youth work and associated provision whereby all forms of activity are increasingly subject to the performative strictures of the market. Symptomatic of this broader political project is, I argue, the downgrading of a qualifying youth work education. This is, fundamentally, a structural transformation of what it means to be a youth worker and cannot, therefore, be viewed as neutral. The NYA has essentially colluded with a deeper ideological project that seeks compliance and control of both youth work and young people. In short, this article argues that an intellectually hollowed-out education equates to a diminished capacity for critical thinking, thus reinforcing a debased practice concerned largely with social control.

The instrumentalisation of youth work

Over the last two decades, youth work – once characterised by open-access provision, respect for young people, and concerned with transformative educational processes – has been driven along increasingly instrumental lines (Nicholls, 2012; Davies, 2019). This large-scale restructuring of youth work has been prescribed by neoliberalism – a hegemonic ideology concerned with market fundamentalism, a small state, and efficiency through managerialism, measurement and performativity (Harvey, 2005). The neoliberal project has had broad ramifications for the entire public sector, wherein services have been reshaped in the image of the market characterised, on one hand, by a rollback of state provision and, on the other, increase in state control and discourses of discipline via mechanisms of audit, inspection and performative measures (Power, 2007; Davies and Taylor, 2019). Not all public services have suffered equally, however, as youth work has experienced the greatest decline in funding, provision and status, compounded by austerity (Unison, 2016; Davies, 2019). The introduction of a commissioning model accompanied by outcome frameworks and performance management is now firmly embedded in youth work infrastructure (de St Croix, 2017). These processes have, in many ways, facilitated the de-professionalisation of youth work whereby its underpinning values and principles have been steadily eroded. Essentially youth work has been polarised and degraded as a distinct and specialised form of practice with young people (Davies and Taylor, 2019).

Increasingly, contemporary youth work is marked by a reductive scope and often deployed as a tool to inculcate conformity amongst youth driven, in turn, by the imposition of ‘hard’ measurable outcomes under a commissioning funding framework (Taylor et al., 2018). This has basically reshaped youth work practice to be concerned with getting young people to conform and perform according to the priorities of the neoliberal state. Nowadays, for example, youth workers can be found in a diverse range of provision which aims to tackle ‘the problem of youth’: crime, anti-social behaviour, youth unemployment, educational disengagement, drug and alcohol usage, homelessness, mental health, and so on (Davies, 2019). Moreover, to gain funding, youth work organisations essentially need to embrace deficit constructions of young people, wherein they set out to deliver predetermined programmes geared towards predefined social and economic goals (Davies and Taylor, 2019). This, in turn, carries inherently moralistic overtones, which aim to change, fix, or rectify young people’s attitudes and behaviour with limited room for engagement with the structural and material conditions which affect young people’s lives. This means that youth work is not only grounded in a discourse of deficit about young people but also contributes to the pathologising of youth in contemporary society. 

While youth work has always been caught in the tensions between education and welfare, or care and control, the inculcation of neoliberal policy has driven youth work towards a triage model of provision and driven practitioners into a position rooted in a combination of paternalism and social control. Fundamentally, this has reconfigured the relationship between youth work and young people. While this sounds fatalistic, literature emerging over the past decade makes explicit that many practitioners and organisations on the ground – armed with a critical education – are demonstrating resistance to the hostile policy environment, wherein they attempt to provide quality, principled youth work (de St Croix, 2016; Davies, 2019; Connelly, 2024). It is nevertheless within this political context that the downgrading of youth work education must be understood – not as an isolated decision, but as part of a broader neoliberal project that has reimagined youth work and repositioned practitioners as agents of social control. 

The realignment of youth work education

The NYA has, traditionally at least, advocated for professional recognition and sought to defend youth work as a distinct practice based on a clear set of values which promote the personal and social development of young people rooted in processes of informal learning. As of late, however, the priorities of the NYA have shifted towards recruitment and workforce expansion (NYA, 2025). Presented as a pragmatic response to workforce needs, earlier this year the NYA announced its intention to restructure the qualifications framework to enable access to lower-level accreditation. After a tokenistic consultation process, and despite ambivalences amongst many in the field, particularly youth work academics (Thompson et al., 2025), the restructuring of the qualification framework has now been greenlit.

Youth work education will be reconfigured into a staged qualification framework. Qualifying youth work credentials have effectively been downgraded from a Level-6 university degree to a Level-3 vocational pathway, typically provided by FE colleges. The new framework has not completely abandoned Level-6 and will also include a Higher National Certificate (HNC) and Higher National Diploma (HND) at levels 4 and 5 as so-called progressive stages. This,  Thompson et al. (2025) argue, marks a significant shift which will ultimately weaken youth work’s claim to professional status and its position in the academy – with far-reaching ramifications in terms of parity with allied social professions and the pay and conditions for youth work practitioners. 

Despite this, the NYA will, over the next year, begin ‘rolling out’ Level-3 programmes as the new desired route for qualifying youth work education. In contrast to the Level-6, which is concerned with professional formation, the new Level 3 is more concerned with functionality. Generally, a Level-3 qualification will involve considerably less intellectual depth and rigour vis-à-vis existing degree-level youth work programmes. The Level-3, as outlined by the NYA (2025), will focus on basic-level foundations, practice skills and functional competencies measured against set benchmarks. This may include, for example, engagement techniques, programme delivery, safeguarding, health and safety, and so on. It is therefore essentially concerned with operational competencies rather than professional practice informed by a coherent body of informed, critical skills and knowledge. Similarly, Level-4 and 5 will be concerned with developing confidence, competence and practical experience (NYA, 2025) rather than broader debates about the place of young people in contemporary society, even though twenty years ago Moore (2005) criticised such provision as lacking sufficient depth to enable the effective professional development of youth workers. The remit and scope of these new qualifications, it can be deduced, is aimed at ‘doing’ rather than thinking through robust engagement with academic literature – which will, in turn, displace the concept of praxis which has long been a central component to professional formation of youth work practitioners in England (Jeffs and Smith, 2005; Jones, 2018), as well as further afield (Bradley et al., 2024; Cooper, 2025). Praxis is about combining theory and practice, thinking and doing, to ensure practice does not become thoughtless action and/or actionless thought – meaning the competencies developed from the new NYA framework do not equate to, nor are they a substitute for, professional theoretically-grounded youth work and integrated praxis.

Competency-based training contributes to a vision of youth work as concerned with prepacked programme delivery and instruction. At a structural level, this constitutes alignment of youth work education with instrumentalised practice concerned with social control. This decision to narrow the scope of a qualifying youth work education not only facilitates the de-professionalisation of youth work but also legitimises its marketisation whereby youth workers are trained and prepared for needs-based intervention in outcome-based provision. Such an approach will train youth workers as ‘doers’, rather than critical thinkers who can engage in praxis – and can be conceived as an assault on youth work’s traditional established pedagogical core. This, I argue, will come to displace critical capacity, strip practitioners of agency and autonomy, and ensure minimal resistance to top-down funding objectives and will, in turn, make youth work more compliant and more easily integrated into commissioning and measurement systems. While workforce pressures are a legitimate area of concern, these concerns are being used as a smokescreen to cloak the extent to which the restructuring of the qualification framework has ideological alignments. 

The dilution of criticality

The production of practitioners who lack the capacity to critically question top-down priorities concerned with behaviour modification has significant ramifications for young people. As discussed earlier, these new arrangements are rooted in discourses of deficit about young people, which gives legitimacy to the instrumentalised controlling function of youth work provision (Davies and Taylor, 2019). To be able to resist and uphold the values of youth work, it is crucial therefore that practitioners have access to the analytical tools to enable deconstruction of these deficit discourses – ideas, images, and language – which serve to individualise structural inequalities by personalising social issues (Davies, 2019; Connelly, 2024). 

As youth work is a social practice that takes place within a social context of inherent conflict, a central component of a professional youth work education should therefore be focused on gaining understanding and insight from critical theoretical perspectives rooted in the social sciences (Sercombe, 2010; Batsleer, 2013). Youth work higher education courses incorporate a wide range of theory from academic disciplines including but not limited to sociology, social policy, philosophy, education, and psychology. These subjects promote critical awareness about how policies, structures, systems and ideologies shape and structure young peoples’ lives, as well as the context of practice (Sapin, 2013; Ord, 2016). Additionally, engagement with this multi-disciplinary foundation supports values development and capacity for ethical reasoning (Banks, 2010; Batsleer, 2013). To dilute or desert such conceptual knowledge diminishes the ability of practitioners to engage in critical thinking and implies that both practice and the lives of young people take place within a vacuum, free from the constraints of social, economic and political forces. This could not, however, be further from the truth (see, for example, Savage, 2015; Davies, 2019; Simmons et al., 2020).  

Without any critical awareness of how social inequalities shape young peoples’ lives, youth workers are in danger of unconsciously colluding with social control via a reductionist mode of practice; generic activities and generalised support aimed at uncritically incorporating young people into the current social formation. This degradation of practice would essentially reinforce the marginalisation of young people – particularly dispossessed sections of working-class youth – wherein practitioners confuse symptoms with causes and superficially hold young people accountable for issues that are structural in origin (Connelly, 2024). The de-intellectualisation of a qualifying youth work education therefore degrades youth work practice and produces a congruence between practitioner views on young people and the ‘hard’ outcomes in their practice, legitimising control and surveillance practices. While it could be argued that this is a depoliticisation of practice, it is worth noting this purposeful ‘dumbing down’ associated with neoliberalism is, in fact, highly politicised.

Conclusion

In summary, this reconfiguration of the qualification framework not only facilitates the de-professionalisation of youth work but essentially embodies a political attack on its pedagogical foundations, its commitment to social justice, and its mission to serve youth. The NYA is aligning a hollowed-out youth work education with an instrumentalised contemporary variant of practice which supports the reproduction of systems of control over young people. A critical education through professional formation is arguably the antidote; with no critical education, youth workers become de facto gatekeepers of social control even if their practice is disguised as care and support. In undermining critical youth work education, the NYA has compromised its integrity in protecting the interests of professional youth work as a distinct, values-led profession, and is therefore complicit in the subordination of both youth workers and young people to the strictures of the state. 

While this ideological alignment is clear for many within the field to see, some may welcome such reforms. For the latter, do not overlook the stakes. It is not just about professional status or qualifications, it’s also about the relationship society chooses to have with young people – one defined by deficit, discipline and control, or one based on solidarity, fairness and justice. The answer will, to a large degree, be determined by the kind of education offered to those who work with them.