What class do youth workers belong to? Do classes still exist? Haven’t we done away with ‘us and them’? Youth workers are part of the working class. This has consequences, and practically all that follows in this book flows from this reality. Being working class means that you are part of the vast majority of the population who depend for their survival on a wage. The working class do not own the factories, utilities, services and companies that enable their owners to live off the work of others, they do not work at the heart of the establishment. In order to live they have to work. This makes them workers.

Cool cats

However much youth workers like to behave like cats and remain impossible to herd or, like water, impossible to sculpt, they are part of a working class, and they are both a brilliantly organised and frustratingly disorganised part of it. As I go on to argue they are an exceptionally important part of it but with too little acknowledgement of their importance and too little recognition of their position within a working class.

This reality has puzzled many youth workers and they have sought to deny it as best they can. They have sought to escape the fact they are working class by saying and doing various things that would appear to deny this. Many tried to establish a professional association in the belief that they were middle class and superior. The National Association of Youth and Community Education Officers (NAYCEO) is one of the remaining exponents of this tradition, and having merged with the union Aspect, is now merged within the Association of Teachers and Lecturers. Workers join unions and many youth workers have said this is too working class for them.