The majority of students felt there was a good ‘fit’ between their personal values and those of the youth work profession. This was most strongly felt by those students who were newer to the course with less life experience, namely Cate, Laura and Jamie. Those students with more training, youth work and life experience, namely Samuel, and to a lesser extent Tom and Dani, expressed some concern about the ‘fit’ and an awareness of where there may be value tensions and ethical dilemmas for their practice.
Cate, Jamie and Laura found consonance between their own values and their understanding of youth work values, having recently made the decision to study youth work at university. This is not surprising: someone who felt no affinity with the values of youth work, and who did not think they could at least make a competent youth worker would be unlikely to opt to train for this role. Jamie believed that as youth work prioritised relationships, the importance he accorded to relationships would suggest his values and youth works’ sat together ‘comfortably’. Where he believed he needed to develop was in his approach to planning and programming more formal youth work, which he was currently finding very difficult. It was his preference to engage in more informal types of youth work and he was beginning to realise he could not ‘just wing it’. As Jamie discussed this, it appeared this was less about a clash of values and more about fulfilling ‘professional responsibility’ and ensuring his personal preferences did not negatively affect his ways of working and developing himself as a rounded youth worker.
Cate felt there was nothing in her experience up to that point which pointed to any conflict of values, but, like Dani, she was aware that there may be some issues, for example, pregnancy and abortion, which could present her with more of a personal value dilemma. However, also like Dani, she was clear about what her role as a youth worker would be in that situation:
if a young person was saying they were pregnant and they wanted an abortion, that goes against my beliefs, but yet I’m saying that my value as a youth worker is to go on a journey with them and to help them.….. as a youth worker I want to show them ….. that I’m there for them to do anything with them no matter what their decision. Cate, Interview 1
I was sitting in a science class and they’d say stuff that’s controversial to my faith about evolution or whatever and that’s been kind of like a personal [conflict] ….. so for me to hold values that are different, you know, that’s besides the point. I think that if you’re there as a youth worker, you’re there for the youth, so your personal kind of values only get challenged if you are the one that’s having to teach that, you know, but you just help them in their understanding and education, I think, so it’s not much of a problem. Dani, Interview 1
Dani discussed how the setting impacted her thinking on how she responded in school, acknowledging ‘I think you kind of put different hats on in a certain sense, like you’ll be able to
emphasise that the youth worker should be guided by the priority to meet young people’s needs, whilst understanding the context they were working in.
Similarly to Dani, Tom also found that, ‘mostly, youth work values sit quite comfortably with
my own generally’, but he was very aware of situations he had recently encountered where
young people were acting in ways contrary to his beliefs, which caused him to think about how he responded in his role as a youth worker. He talked through various challenging circumstances, (these are explored in more detail in the section on Values in Action), where he was very aware of drawing on safeguarding policy and practice and some of the ethical dilemmas around confidentiality in these situations. Frequently he framed this as policy designed to ensure the protection of workers - talking about exonerating oneself from blame by reporting to one’s line manager, taking action to ‘cover your back’, and the need to ‘protect ourselves better’ – evidencing his then understanding of the main tenets of safeguarding – to minimise risk to the worker and the agency. However, this approach unsettled him: he was eager not to simply report and walk away, but to continue to support the young person.
But they’re the sorts of things that I find it really difficult to – with my values – because I really want … I don’t like the idea of just saying “That’s off my shoulders. I’ve given it onto the next person.” That’s something I want to be working through that with that young person. Tom, Interview 1
Samuel was surprisingly emphatic about the tension he felt between his personal values and professional youth work values, arising from his questions about the role his faith should and could play in his youth work as a Christian youth worker, compared with that of a secular youth worker. This echoed what he said earlier on in the interview, when interrogating his Christian ‘mandate’, which perhaps reflected the fact he was moving from a professional healthcare setting, where his primary role was not faith-related, to one where he was training in a theological college explicitly as a youth minister/ Christian youth worker. He expressed his discomfort about being compromised in relation to his faith – questioning: if a child asked him about God, would he be allowed to answer this question fully and if he did, would that get him into trouble?. He traced this concern back to a conversation he had had with the project manager of the small inner-city church-established youth project where he had volunteered. On induction, the manager had questioned whether Samuel had an underlying agenda to convert young people. His response was to say ‘’No, I’m coming with
Should I respond?’ Do you know what I mean?’ I understood this as Samuel wanting to work
out of the fullness of who he was, and what he felt his faith gifted to him, recognising he was training for a role that was more explicitly Christian, even if that role led him into secular settings. This, again, was a recurring theme thoroughout the three interviews for Samuel.