Our CEO, Gareth Dixon, reflects on what we’ve learned from three years of Level Up Youth Work, which helped us offer training, qualifications and spaces for frontline workers in Hammersmith & Fulham to connect and learn from each other. He explores why good youth work needs more than training, and how those lessons are shaping the support we offer our members.
Written by Gareth Dixon, CEO of Young H&F
Someone can leave a training course with new skills and return to the workplace with little time, money, or management support to put them into practice.
That tension has stayed with me through conversations with Beck Dabscheck during the independent evaluation of Level Up Youth Work. It is also central to what I think we should take from the programme.
Led by Young Westminster Foundation with five partner Young People's Foundations, including Young H&F, Level Up supported workforce development across six northwest London boroughs. Programme data records 156 qualification completions. The published evaluation offers useful lessons about what needs to happen next.
Its qualitative findings draw on 56 participants and should not be treated as representative of the whole sector. For me, they provide a useful basis for examining how we support practitioners and their organisations.
1. Training needs organisational support
The evaluation highlights gaps in supervision, debriefing and reflective practice. It reinforces a concern I have raised before: cuts have weakened the professional infrastructure around youth work, alongside the loss of workers and buildings.
Training can help someone recognise a oncern, understand a young person's behaviour or approach a difficult conversation differently. But people also need opportunities to reflect afterwards and support to decide what to do next.
Did I handle that well? What might I have missed? What am I carrying from that conversation into the next one?
Those questions need somewhere to go. Regular supervision and reflective discussion give practitioners a place to examine their judgement, seek challenge and work through uncertainty. That matters when people are supporting young people whose needs are becoming more complex.
For me, a workforce development offer has to consider the workplace someone returns to. Courses are more likely to make a lasting difference when organisations provide time to learn, management support, and opportunities to put learning into practice.
2 Collaboration needs an owner, time, and a budget
Participants described forums reducing isolation and enabling shared practice and partnerships. Cross-borough collaboration was harder to sustain. The report records that a 20% reduction to the original funding request removed the designated programme management post, with Young Westminster's senior staff absorbing the work.
That detail deserves attention when we design the next programme. Bringing organisations together creates work: understanding needs, arranging meetings, following up introductions and keeping shared plans moving when everyone has other demands on their time.
Coordination needs an owner, time and a budget.
I see this as a lesson for funding and programme design. If collaboration is an expected outcome, we need to resource the work that makes it possible. Otherwise, we rely on people finding spare capacity in roles that are already stretched.
It also challenges how we judge our own networks. Attendance and reach tell us something about participation. We need to ask what changes in practice, which relationships continue and whether organisations can solve problems together more effectively.
3. Development has to fit the workforce
The findings also complicate calls to 'professionalise youth work'. Participants described varied professional identities and concerns about low pay and unclear progression routes.
Across our sector, people also describe themselves as coaches, mentors, play workers or community practitioners. They bring different qualifications, lived experience and relationships with the communities they serve. A development offer has to make sense to them.
For me, the test is whether we help people do the work young people need today while giving them credible routes to develop, gain recognition, and build a career. That requires us to listen to how practitioners understand their work and where they want to go.
I want us to be ambitious about standards and support, while remaining open to how the workforce needs to evolve. Better practice should be accessible across those different routes into working with young people.
What this means for Young Hammersmith and Fulham
These lessons reinforce the direction we are developing for our Member Development offer: sustained organisational support, building on our supervision work, alongside training and forums that help members strengthen their practice.
Our developing model combines a broad offer for members with deeper, targeted support, so we need clear criteria for who receives it. Intensive support takes time, so we need to be honest about how much we can provide and how we decide where it will be most useful.
Attendance is not a reliable measure of need. Limited engagement may reflect limited capacity, which challenges how we reach those organisations. We need to understand those barriers as we develop the offer.
This also presents a challenge for funders and commissioners. We should use this evidence to make a clearer case for funding supervision, practitioner development and coordination as essential costs of good provision. Expecting stronger practice and more collaboration changes what a grant or contract needs to cover.
For Young H&F, that means applying the same argument to our own choices: how we support members over time, how we resource our networks and how we know whether that support is making a difference.
What would change if funders treated supervision and coordination as essential costs of good youth work?
Read the published evaluation.
Thanks to Beck Dabscheck and the evaluation team, Young Westminster Foundation, our partner Young People's Foundations and the practitioners who contributed. City Bridge Foundation funded Level Up Youth Work through Propel.