Introduction

The government’s new national youth strategy: Youth Matters (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2025c) is a significant moment for young people and youth work in England, setting out a ten year vision based on research and engagement with over 14,000 young people (detailed in the accompanying State of the Nation report, Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2025d). The strategy marks a return to intentional youth policymaking at a national level following fifteen years where youth policy has been defunded through austerity, deprioritised through a passing of responsibility to underfunded local authorities (under the Coalition government’s 2011 youth strategy, Positive for Youth, HM Government, 2011), and disjointed through isolated funds and announcements which did not materialise (under the Conservative government).

The strategy also stirs memories of the previous Labour government, a period of rapid policymaking with new youth strategies published every few years, one of which was also called Youth Matters (Department for Education and Skills, 2005). It is revealing to look back at previous strategies to see how much or how little has changed and how to try to avoid the policy pitfalls of the past. As with most government strategies, the impact will be in how the policies are implemented but, on the surface, Youth Matters presents a refreshing new chapter for the relationship between the government and young people. This article offers some initial reflections on the vision of Youth Matters and the challenges and opportunities ahead within the context of previous youth strategies and my experiences in youth work, research and government.

From a deficit to supportive view

The strategy sets out three radical shifts for how the government will implement their vision. The first shift is ‘from national to local’, to move decisions and delivery from the centre to local areas. The second shift is ‘from fragmented to collaborative’, to join up policy across government and civil society. The third shift is ‘from excluded to empowered’, to strengthen youth participation in policymaking at all levels. On reading through the strategy, a fourth shift can be identified in the language and discourse from a deficit to a supportive view of young people. In youth policy documents under every party of government since 1997, young people have often been positioned through a deficit lens where the focus has been more on individual behaviour than structural barriers. Under neoliberal framings, successive governments have stressed how young people need to be responsible and resilient individuals while services have been cut and governments have absolved themselves of their responsibilities to young people (HM Government, 2011). Young people have previously been positioned as needing to earn the right to youth services and opportunities through positive behaviour (HM Treasury and Department for Children, Schools and Families, 2007). For example, in the original Youth Matters youth strategy, the foreword from the Secretary of State, Ruth Kelly, states: ‘it is wrong that young people who do not respect the opportunities they are given, by committing crimes or behaving anti-socially, should benefit from the same opportunities as the law-abiding majority’ (Department for Education and Skills, 2005, p.1).

Youth Matters indicates a substantial shift away from the negative tone and language of past youth strategies by emphasising the role of government to support young people. From the outset, the strategy foregrounds how it is government and society who have neglected their responsibility to young people: ‘As a nation, we have failed to invest in places for them to go and people who care for them.’ The deficit view of past strategies has disappeared and instead, the strategy acknowledges the structural and systemic conditions which young people have had to grow up in: the global economic crash, austerity, the pandemic and the digital age: ‘Young people have been amongst the greatest casualties of a decade of neglect and austerity followed by a global pandemic’. This presents a significant shift from previous governments which rarely acknowledged or acted on the range of interconnected structural factors facing young people, which Davies (2019) viewed as a breach of the social contract. Youth Matters signals a move towards a holistic view of young people by aiming to work across departments to improve policies affecting all aspects of young people’s lives. However, the real test will be if policies outside of DCMS stick to the supportive tone and ambitions of the strategy and remove the structural barriers facing young people, particularly in relation to poverty, education, employment, housing and health.

Long-awaited wins for young people’s campaigns

Several policies in the strategy can be traced back to longstanding campaigns by multiple generations of young people. Lowering the voting age to 16 and including more life skills content in the curriculum, such as financial literacy and political education, have been youth campaigns for decades from groups like the UK Youth Parliament (National Youth Agency, 2025; UK Parliament, 2012). Although many of the young people who have advocated for these policies in the past are now well into adulthood, their years of campaigning should be recognised as helping to push politicians towards these aims. One of the challenges of youth participation practice is working with decision-makers to achieve policy changes led by young people while they are still young enough to experience the results. A recent evaluation of the UK Youth Parliament programme highlighted how the impact of the programme may not always be clear in the moment when only small changes are taking place (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2025b). The slow pace of policymaking and constant changes in government often means that young people grow up before they see the impact of their participation. Therefore, these policies should be seen as a long-awaited success for all the young people who have spent time volunteering in youth participation projects and advocating for their peers – it may be too late for them but these policies will hopefully make a huge difference to the lives of future generations of young people.

A missed opportunity to strengthen the statutory duty

The strategy recognises the enormous funding challenges facing local youth services in both local authorities and the voluntary sector. As a youth worker in both settings, I have seen services completely disappear through cuts and programmes never reaching their full potential due to a lack of staffing and resources. Many youth organisations from grassroots youth clubs to national charities are in a constant state of precariousness and surviving through the passion of volunteers or additional unpaid hours of workers. Youth Matters identifies these problems and aims to strengthen the workforce and local authorities. It states that local authorities are ‘uniquely positioned’ to join up services and will spend nearly £70 million over the next three years to rebuild and improve local youth services. However, there is a missed opportunity to immediately strengthen the statutory duty to make the intention clear from the outset that local authorities should have youth services. The strategy aims to only explore reviewing the statutory duty and consider the ‘appropriate regulation of youth services.’  The duty has already recently been reviewed in 2023, a process which took four years and which did not change the ‘get out’ clause: ‘Local authorities must have regard to this statutory guidance when exercising their statutory duty to secure, so far as reasonably practicable, leisure time activities and facilities for young people…’ (DCMS, 2023). With local authorities still facing huge budget deficits and many unable to financially meet their existing statutory obligations (Inman, 2025), they could maintain that it is not reasonably practicable to secure youth services.

Unless the government makes local authority youth services statutory with ringfenced funding for all councils and not just those fortunate enough to be selected in short-term place-based funds (such as the 12 areas in the Local Youth Transformation Pilot, DCMS, 2025a), many of the strategy’s ambitions will be difficult to implement. Fundamentally, without a meaningful statutory duty, local authority youth services will always be at risk. A change in government or a shock to the economy could result in the destruction of youth services once again. The government should learn from the previous Labour’s government ten-year strategy for young people, ‘Aiming high for young people: A ten year strategy for positive activities’, which was published in 2007 (HM Treasury, 2007) and lasted less than three years before the Coalition government brought in austerity measures and cut youth services. There is not enough time left in this parliament for another review of the statutory guidance to be completed and implemented at a local level. Rebuilding youth services only for them to be cut straight back is a harsh reality all too familiar for many youth workers and one which we must not go through again.

A call to action for youth participation

Involving young people in decision-making is a core part of the strategy. Young people said they don’t feel their voices are heard and the government has responded with actions to deliver with young people and be held accountable by them. By delivering a comprehensive consultation for the strategy with over 14,000 young people taking part and supporting a Youth Advisory Group to help shape Youth Matters, the strategy suggests that the government is taking young people’s voices seriously.

Youth participation (or youth voice) has been a feature of youth policy under every government since 1997. Every youth strategy has emphasised the importance of young people having a say on policy and being involved in decision-making processes. However, my doctoral research on the reality and potential of youth participation in national policymaking has shown that the policy rhetoric is not always delivered in practice (Weavers, 2024). Unless there is a culture of youth participation within both government and local authorities, with long-term funding and staff capacity, participation initiatives rely on passionate individuals to sustain them and a cycle of similar short-term projects which are rarely built on. Although Youth Matters goes further on youth participation than previous strategies through promising to involve young people in policymaking and accountability measures, none of the policies appear to have funding attached to them. For example, the strategy states new local youth councils will be established across England but there are no details yet for how they will be implemented and the timeframes for this. It is also unclear what this means for existing youth councils or the UK Youth Parliament programme which has been operating precariously in recent years following the closure of the British Youth Council and due to short-term grants from DCMS (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2025b). This chapter of the strategy has lots of ideas but needs dedicated funding and support to embed a culture of youth participation from the national to the local level of government.

Concluding reflections

There is no doubt that Youth Matters is a major step forward for young people, youth work and youth policy in England. The recognition of how austerity has eroded youth services and the structural barriers facing young people is long overdue but now needs to be tackled. There are promising policies which if implemented meaningfully, will hopefully make a real difference to the lives of young people. However, there are also significant challenges ahead. For local authorities which have closed their youth services, there is a substantial loss of youth work knowledge and capacity. To bring them back, it will take not only time and investment, but innovative leadership and willingness to take this opportunity to work in collaboration with young people, the voluntary sector, education and other services.

For young people, youth workers and youth researchers, Youth Matters presents opportunities for us all to work together to hold government departments and local authorities to account as the strategy implores us to do. As the Secretary of State, Lisa Nandy, states in her foreword, “this is just the start” but it must not be a false start after the long years of austerity. As policies begin to be developed and implemented, there will hopefully be opportunities to ensure what comes next reflects the changes young people and youth workers have long campaigned for at both local and national levels. This is the best opportunity for decades to try and build a sustainable future for youth work but it must include guardrails to prevent future governments from potentially dismantling any progress which comes from this strategy.

Finally, reflecting on the strategy on a personal level, I really hope this is the start of a positive transformation for how young people are positioned and supported in both policy and society. As a youth worker, I will be sharing the strategy with young people I work with to discuss the vision and support them to hold decision-makers to account. It would be great to see a youth-led movement of accountability in town halls across the country with young people sharing their ideas for the next steps, asking their councillors and MPs how they will be implementing the strategy locally, and leading the way on shaping the future of youth services.