Youth work in a pandemic: the shaping of a service through the lockdowns

Youth work within England was disproportionately impacted by austere policies from 2010 through to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. These financial cuts occurred alongside an expectation for youth services to take a targeted approach to youth work and consider vulnerabilities within young people. The current project began during the lockdown phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. This thesis examined the role of one local authority in England, anonymised as ‘’Sunshine’’ Youth Service, through the COVID-19 pandemic. Data collection consisted of 25 in depth semi-structured interviews across the lockdown phases, as well as observation of staff meetings within the Sunshine area. This thesis sought to answer questions related to Sunshine Youth Service during the COVID-19 pandemic. These research questions specifically contribute to wider academic narratives pertaining to youth work through the consideration of the relationship between youth work and austerity, contextualisation within a critical realist perspective, a novel conceptualisation of the youth services’ reflexive approach to vulnerability, and a new way to interpret the space in which services are delivered. These elements work together to demonstrate the reality of working within Sunshine Youth Services through the precarity of a pandemic, the ways in which previous years of austerity may have prepared the youth workers to do so and considers how these may impact youth work in the future.