A THREAD ON THE STATE OF CHARITIES WHO PROVIDE SUPPORT SERVICES TO YOUNG PEOPLE UNDER AUSTERITY

I was meant to be giving this talk at #britsoc2020 this year @britsoci!

We'll be talking about what existing under austerity is like and what its legacies might be.

The presentation was called "Bruises or scars? Justification practices and the legacies of austerity". I'm not sure what I think of the title anymore, but I'll give you a brief run down in this thread 1/?

@britsoci #britsoc2020

One of the most significant areas of both funding cuts and policy changes as a result of austerity was youth services. Services to support young people saw a greater reduction than other services more generally, but they also saw a change in how that funding was distributed. 2/?

In 2011, the House of Commons Education Committee called for an introduction of a "common measurement framework" by which the value for money of all youth services could be measured. There was also a removal of ringfenced budgets for local authorities, meaning... 3/?

Individual services could no longer guarantee income - everyone would be competing against each other, and the policy priority at the time was for early years intervention. 4/?

Budgets were cut, priorities were changed - we all know what 'happened' because of austerity. And in the place of public services, charitable organizations or other forms of socially oriented organizations came to try and 'fill the gap' left in service provision. 5/?

What does this 'filling the gap' do to these organizations? How do they squeeze themselves in, force open spaces and try to keep a gradually disintegrating world stable? 6/?

The metaphor I would have used in this talk focuses on bodies, and the corporality of these changes (the conference theme was Reimagining the Social Body). We know that austerity was (is) a violent phenomena, but we don't necessarily explore the physicality of that pain. 7/?

My prior work has looked at what the student experience of marketisation in Higher Education is. Here, I was looking for a similar thing with the broader phenomena of austerity as my focus. What is the every day experience of austerity for these organizations... 8/?

and the young people they support? What are its sensations - what does it feel like, make us think, do, or have done to us? 9/?

This research draws on about two years of participant observation and participatory design with charities who provide support services to young people they consider 'vulnerable' and the young people they support. Mostly this has been care-experienced young people. 10/?

(a quick note on vulnerability: the classification of 'vulnerability' is an important marker for these organizations that I'll return to another time - probably in another presentation - but it's important to note that these orgs and funders of these orgs consider the... 11/?

young people they support to be vulnerable - this is no mark of whether these young people actually ARE vulnerable, or susceptible to greater harm. The label of 'vulnerable' person is hugely stigmatizing, and we should move away from it. But as I say - these orgs... 12/?

consider these young people to be vulnerable and that's why this is important).

So how are these organizations and young people existing, at the tail-end of austerity, years after it started, when things have become deeply embedded? 13/?

The clearest thing I found in my research was the centrality of "evaluation". Wherever I went, people were talking about how to evaluate the work they were doing and how to ensure any work they did could measure changes in a young person's "outcomes". 14/?

Evaluation can be a good thing - it can allow an org to be responsive, to understand what's going on, to celebrate successes, and to learn from mistakes. What I often found was much more tokenistic than this, and instead centered on "how to play the numbers game". 15/?

A critical question in evaluation is always "what's happening, and how do we know what's happening?". Yet what I found most often was a separation between managers, who believed in a need for evaluation, and frontline workers, who didn't have the skills or time to do it. 16/?

Trying to understand what to measure brings us to "outcomes". These are what a young person takes away from a project or intervention, and are typically measured numerically. A young person might move from a 3 to a 7 in self-awareness, or move from a 6 to a 4 in teamwork. 17/?

Importantly, changes in these outcomes are linked to the funding orgs receive. If an org can't show an increase in positive outcomes for young people, then they might be subject to sanctions from a funder, including limited access to further funding or resources. 18/?

One organization was obsessed with outcomes because they needed to be able to defend to their funders "why we're spending all that money". All of this measuring, keeping track and defending requires a lot of justification. 19/?

These justifications often look like accountability structures. It's telling the funder what you've been doing. It's telling the funder this intervention does work, and that one doesn't. It's telling the local authority you're doing really good in this piece of work. 20/?

The problem is, the ability to make these justifications becomes central, and starts taking priority. If orgs can't deliver these justifications to their funders or partners, then they might suffer. So they might fudge the details a little. Tell white lies. 21/?

One worker told me how when they were new to their job, they were writing an evaluation for a funder and explained that they had moved a session from the location written in the funding bid to a different town, a few miles away. They were back and forth with... 22/?

the funder for 6 months, defending the changes and their lack of practical impact because they provide transport for everyone to venues anyway. When they told their manager what they'd done, they were told "that's not how we do it". 23/?

So the details of reports to funders and similar documents are a bit off. That's okay, right? They're only doing it because they know the funder will have a problem with it, and it's only small details. Except they're not working with great data in the first place. 24/?