Growing up is everybody’s business.
Young people do not experience adolescence through the boundaries of government departments, professional disciplines or individual services.
They experience the combined effect of families and relationships, education, communities, opportunities, services, places and the decisions made across them.
Across the UK, responsibility for those conditions is distributed between many different people, organisations and systems.
That creates an important challenge: if youth development happens across the whole of society, how do we ensure the whole system takes responsibility for it?
YOUTHOOD exists to help answer that question.
Youth development exists as a public responsibility
Youth development does not begin with YOUTHOOD.
Across the UK's existing legal and policy landscape, public bodies already hold important responsibilities affecting young people's wellbeing, participation, education, opportunity and access to services.
These responsibilities do not currently form a single statutory youth development framework. But taken together, they establish something important:
supporting young people's development is already a matter of public responsibility.
Our work is grounded in this existing statutory and rights-based foundation.
A Rights Foundation
Our approach to youth development begins with the recognition that young people are rights-holders, not simply recipients of services or support.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) provides an overarching international rights framework for this understanding. It recognises a broad range of rights relevant to young people's development, including participation, education, development, protection, association, play and consideration of their best interests.
The UNCRC sits above and around YOUTHOOD's Statutory and Rights Spine. It provides an important rights foundation for our work, while the Spine identifies existing domestic statutory anchors through which responsibilities relevant to youth development can already be seen.
Understanding The Statutory & Rights Spine
There is currently no single statutory framework for youth development in the UK.
There are, however, existing duties and statutory responsibilities across the legal landscape that connect directly with the conditions surrounding adolescence.
YOUTHOOD brings five of these anchors together as our Statutory and Rights Spine.
We do not suggest that these provisions were originally designed as a single youth development framework. Instead, we consider what they reveal when viewed collectively through a developmental lens: provision, cooperation, opportunity, equality, rights and accountability are already matters of public responsibility.
-
Section 507B, Education Act 1996;
Local authorities have statutory responsibilities concerning sufficient educational and recreational leisure-time activities for qualifying young people, alongside requirements connected to access, publicity and consideration of young people's views.
For youth development, this provides an important statutory connection between developmental opportunity, sufficient provision, accessibility and young people's own understanding of what is needed.
-
Section 10, Children Act 2004;
Section 10 establishes a statutory basis for cooperation between local authorities and relevant partners to improve the wellbeing of children.
Its developmental significance extends beyond any single service. Young people's lives cross professional and organisational boundaries, making shared institutional responsibility and cooperation fundamental to the conditions surrounding adolescence.
-
Section 13A, Education Act 1996;
Section 13A places duties on local authorities in England when exercising certain education functions to promote high standards, ensure fair access to educational opportunity and promote the fulfilment of learning potential.
For YOUTHOOD, this provides an important statutory connection between access, standards, opportunity and the conditions through which young people can fulfil their potential.
-
Section 149, Equality Act 2010;
The Public Sector Equality Duty requires public authorities, when exercising their functions, to have due regard to eliminating unlawful discrimination, advancing equality of opportunity and fostering good relations.
Youth development is not experienced equally. Opportunities, barriers and institutional responses can differ substantially between young people. Section 149 therefore provides an important statutory anchor for examining differential developmental experience and structural inequality.
-
Sections 2, 2A and 2B, Children Act 2004;
These provisions establish the statutory basis surrounding the Children's Commissioner for England, including functions concerned with promoting and protecting children's rights and having particular regard to children's views and interests.
They provide an important connection between youth development and rights, voice, institutional scrutiny and national accountability for children's experiences and interests.
Read together, they tell us something important.
These statutes do not create a National Youth Development Act, establish a shared definition of youth development or provide the joined-up national settlement YOUTHOOD is calling for. But they demonstrate that its foundations are not starting from zero. Across existing legislation, we can already see expectations that provision should be sufficient and informed by young people; institutions should cooperate around children's wellbeing; opportunity should be fair and support the fulfilment of potential; public bodies should consider inequality and differential experience; and young people's rights, views and interests should be represented, protected, and enabled.
The question, then, is not simply whether public responsibility for adolescence exists. It is whether those responsibilities currently add up to a coherent approach to youth development. We believe there remains a gap between responsibilities already distributed across our institutions and a shared national understanding of how they should connect and work together around adolescence. Closing that gap sits at the heart of the case for a new settlement for youth development.
Why YOUTHOOD Exists
YOUTHOOD exists to help build the connections, understanding and infrastructure that a more coherent approach to youth development requires. We are a UK youth development infrastructure organisation working across insight, place and national systems to strengthen how society understands and supports adolescence. We do not exist to replace youth workers, schools, local authorities, families, communities or the many organisations already shaping young people's lives. Our role is to work between and across those boundaries, connecting lived experience, professional knowledge, local contexts, sector networks and national policy.
We pursue that mission through Insight-Led Change, bringing young people's and professionals' experiences into understanding systems; Place-Based Change, strengthening cooperation, leadership and accountability across local youth-facing landscapes; and National Statutory Change, working towards stronger national structures, expectations and responsibilities for youth development. No one organisation, profession or institution can deliver youth development alone, and neither can YOUTHOOD. Development happens together.