Youth Access

Youth Access featured in September's Youth Work Now: Youth Counselling remains on the periphery

05 September, 2008

We at Youth Access recently pulled together a response to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) Review’s Call for Evidence. Among the comments from our members, we received the following: “We will have a joint contract with the primary care trust and Connexions, but Connexions want the contract to only be about young people not in employment, education, or training, so we had to respond to the commissioner about young people who would fall through the net if this was so. My deputy grabbed the waiting-list file and went through some of the issues and I think the commissioner was shocked at the levels of issues we worked with.”

In these few sentences can be found the story of much youth counselling – services bounced from one funder to the next and little awareness of the complex issues young people bring to them. Despite a growing body of evidence, including from the former Social Exclusion Unit, the success and value of youth counselling services in reaching out to and working with some of the most vulnerable continues to be poorly appreciated.

Over the past few decades, counselling services have been a well-defined part of youth service provision. This was most recently expressed in the shape of the youth service pledge in the 2002 government strategy document Resourcing Excellent Youth Services. While the pledge did not translate into consistent local delivery, it did offer an important benchmark. Yet after several decades of development, the place of counselling in the current policy context is vague.

With no visible policy commitment and being frequently located in the local voluntary sector, counselling services can often feel doubly marginalised. So will the final report of the CAMHS Review better secure young peoples’ access to counselling? Perhaps.

The review’s interim report certainly indicates a number of concerns about vulnerable young people’s access to services, suggesting a more important place should be given to services working successfully with these young people. With a proven service model, youth counselling services should no longer be available solely as the result of historical accident in some parts of the country. If early intervention and prevention and evidence-based practice are to translate into better services then counselling must become part of every local “youth offer”.

This piece was published in September's edition of Youth Work Now.

Free Workshop for Managers

07 February, 2012

  Introduction to Quality Standards in the New...

Youth unemployment putting strain on NHS

19 December, 2011

Thea’s story highlights an urgent need to improve advice...

Advice improves young people’s lives

18 December, 2011

   A major new report launched today by Youth...