When funding was pulled from youth work, the Church stepped up. Did the government notice?

Last week, Keir Starmer announced a plan to reverse the decimation of youth work services that took place under the previous government.

The Prime Minister has allocated £88m to extra-curricular activities, spaces for uniformed groups, work to address anti-social behaviour and projects to boost youth engagement in areas of significant child poverty, as part of a wider Plan to Change commitment.

It sounds good and should be welcomed across the board.

However, those ten-plus years of cuts run deep. By 2023, some 1,243 youth centres had closed and 4,500 youth work jobs had been lost. Local authority youth work was a sitting duck for cash-strapped councils, and the damage will not be healed by an injection of cash.

Five years ago, I wrote that youth work in the UK was having an identity crisis, hitting something of a low water mark. What was needed then – and is still needed now - is a re-orientation. We need to stop problematising young people and instead work towards building social, emotional and physical capacities and investing in preventative work.

Carry on regardless

In some respects, political policy - or funding - makes little difference to Christian youth work, with its tens of thousands of volunteers who are proactively engaged in the lives of young people. We crack on, whether we’re an employed youth worker or a dedicated extra-timer.

While UK Youth are often celebrated as the largest youth charity in the country, reaching some 120,000 young people through their programmes, recent Youth for Christ research indicates that eight per cent of young people between 11 and 18 now attend church – up from four per cent in 2020. That’s more than half a million young people, many of whom will be engaged in some capacity in discipleship, mentoring or youth groups. Let that number sink in for a moment.

The same research revealed that nearly one in five young people would opt to spend their time at a youth club, which is the bread and butter of church engagement in their communities across the UK… and we are not exactly short of buildings!

We over-protect and over-regulate young people in the real world while under-protecting and under-regulating them in the digital world

And while I’m on a roll, the £22bn “black hole in our public finances” is dwarfed by the £55bn of social value that the Church brings to the UK each year. The charity I lead, Moorlands College, contributed some 30,000 placement hours in 2024, while Urban Promise, a small youth ministry that I am trustee of in Barking and Dagenham, provided over 6,000 hours of after school and holiday activities.

These are just two of thousands upon thousands of churches and Christian charities doing the same. If it wasn’t for the Church - and the army of children’s and youth workers that we deploy - I dread to think where our nation would be right now.

Forward, together

And where we are now?

I would argue that we’re in the middle of a pandemic that has real life impact on virtually every young person you know. Starmer recognised that many young people “find themselves isolated at home and disconnected from their communities” – words that tap into the fears concerning the impact of smartphones and the addictive digital eco-system designed to exploit psychological vulnerabilities in our makeup.

Global research into young people’s wellbeing reflects what we all instinctively know – social media platforms and smart phones have left young people more isolated, less socially developed and more anxious than any generation before them.

If it wasn’t for the army of children’s and youth workers that the Church deploy - I dread to think where we would be right now

My prayer, therefore, would be that politicians partner with the Church and recognise faith-based youth work as essential infrastructure given our collective reach and impact. This could be done by encouraging Christian charities to apply for funding rather than placing restrictions on it concerning how faith is expressed. For many, our works and words are inseparable.

The UK Government should resist the urge to over-reach, as seen in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is currently in the House of Lords. The reality is that we over-protect and over-regulate young people in the real world while under-protecting and under-regulating them in the digital world. This bill, while doing some good, will increase regulation of daily life while failing to confront the deeper, digital threats to youth wellbeing.

Finally, youth work doesn’t need rescuing. It needs recognition. Churches and Christian charities have been doing the heavy lifting while policy makers played politics. If this reboot has legs, let’s see more funding for high quality training, fair pay and permanent jobs. It is time to partner with those already in the trenches, or risk rebuilding on the shifting sands of social policy.