Qualified by virtue of experience? Professional youth work in Britain 1960-1989

This chapter explores the role of experiential expertise in the professionalisation of youth work following the influential Albemarle Report in 1960. It argues that this form of knowledge was valued and fully integrated into the recruitment, training and practice of youth workers in South London and Liverpool after 1960. The model of youth work at this time joined together academic and theoretical underpinnings with reflective practice and the expertise of experience. The youth workers who came into practice at this time also brought their experience of post-war welfare cultures, broadly speaking, and within youth work itself, to their roles in the Youth Service. The chapter explores how the local experiences that youth workers shared with young people, and the lived experience of having grown up in the same social contexts and localities, shaped youth work to include or indeed sometimes be centred on a variety of forms of activism. While youth work did professionalise between 1960 and 1989, this process was incomplete and youth work struggled to gain the same status as other educational and welfare professions.