A New Leader, but the Same Young People? What Burnham's Arrival Means for the National Youth Strategy

#YWCR #youngpeople #youthwork #youthworkers #WeAreEducators #nationalyouthstrategy #hope #andyburnham #politics #TheYouthWorkCommonRoom #AndyBurnham

There is a strange distraction to political transitions. While the country watches and waits the process of the leadership contest that looks increasingly like a coronation, the work of youth work carries on regardless — in the youth centres, in schools, in the important targeted offer and in the quiet one-to-one conversations that rarely make the news. The question that matters for those of us in The Youth Work Common Room is not who takes the keys to Number 10, but whether the change at the top will cause an acceleration; stall; or quiet reframing of the National Youth Strategy and the fragile expansion of youth work provision this government has only just begun to build.

So: is Andy Burnham's likely arrival a positive moment for youth work, or a distraction that lets alternative, narrower policy priorities take centre stage? The honest answer is that it is likely both — and the sector needs to be clear-eyed about which version we end up with.

Where We Are Right Now..

Keir Starmer resigned as Labour leader on 22 June 2026, and this has initiated a contest in which Andy Burnham, fresh from his Makerfield by-election victory, is the current front runner. Nominations opened on 9 July; if no rival secures amount of MP’s needed to run, Burnham could be in Downing Street by 20 July.  Not too long from now really!

Meanwhile, the National Youth Strategy — "Youth Matters" — has only just started to find its feet. Co-created through consultation with ‘some’ young people, it rests on three shifts: from national to local, from fragmented to collaborative, and from excluded to empowered. Its two ten-year ambitions are to halve the participation gap in activities between disadvantaged young people and their peers, and to give half a million more young people access to a trusted adult outside the home. Alongside it sit the Young Futures Hubs, a capital programme to develop responsive youth support, the Million Hours Fund, and workforce investment routed through the National Youth Agency.

This is a strategy, in other words, that has finally taken relational, place-based, developmental youth work somewhat seriously. The risk is that a change of leader recalibrates what "youth policy" is understood to mean.  How we interpret the notion of participation and how the routes to qualification remains professionally purposeful.

The case for optimism….

There are some valid reasons to be hopeful. Burnham's instincts align with one of the strategy's central shifts — from national to local. He has built his political identity on devolution, on shifting "power, resources, and taxation away from central government and into the hands of local mayors". He was a mayor and so that does make some sense when in that role. That matters for youth work, because the sector has long argued that provision designed in policy silos rarely lands well in the communities where it is actually needed.

His Greater Manchester "Working Well" programme is perhaps evidence that locally-led approaches can outperform national ones. If that philosophy is extended to youth services — with mayors and combined authorities holding the levers over youth provision, workforce development and capital spend — it could give the National Youth Strategy's localist ambitions and agenda real teeth rather than warm words. This may lead to activation of the ‘accountability’ regarding young people’s right to access provision that meets their needs.

For a sector deeply invested in work-based learning and degree apprenticeships, that is not nothing. A leader who takes apprenticeships and FE seriously is a leader whose worldview has room for the kind of practice-based professional formation youth work has always championed.

The case to consider caution…

But here is the worry, and it is the one the The Youth Work Common Room keeps returning to. The developing youth offer is, at its core, an access to employment offer. The drive in  policies such as a £3,000 youth jobs grant and a three-year, £2.5 billion jobs guarantee for young people unemployed for over 18 months are labour market interventions. They are aimed at "the one million young individuals who are unemployed and not engaged in education or training".  This dresses up the use of participation as an identity of compliance ad whilst the offer promotes support to some young people, there will likely be a large amount where access remains a challenge.

That is a potentially deficit framing in a caricature of ambition. It is the NEET label again that uses a reductive shorthand and locates the problem inside young people rather than in the structural failures around them. We have argued before in this space that youth work's task is to move away from "done-to" approaches and toward youth agency and improved understanding of participation outside of our profession. A Prime Minister whose defining youth narrative is about getting young people off universal credit and into work risks eclipsing the relational, developmental, educational core of the National Youth Strategy. I paraphrase for brevity here and hope to be incorrect.

The jobs guarantee is loud, measurable and politically attractive. Open access youth work, trusted-adult relationships and workforce capacity-building are quieter, slower and harder to score political points with and when a new leader wants to evidence quick wins and a distinctive "brand," it is the noisy employment policy that sucks up the attention, the funding announcements and the ministerial speeches. At risk of sounding defeatist, the National Youth Strategy could get quietly demoted from the government's youth offer to a supporting programme sitting underneath an employability agenda.

What our sector should watch for….

Three things will tell us whether this transition is a positive or a distraction.

First, does the National Youth Strategy survive as a strategy?  with its relational pillars, its ten-year ambitions, its co-created voice (all sounds good right?) or does it get folded into a youth employment plan? Listen, because the language matters. If ministers start talking about "youth opportunity" purely in labour-market terms, the strategy is potentially being hollowed out.

Second, where does the money go? The Treasury's thematic review of cross-government youth spend is already underway, looking ahead to the next spending review. A Burnham government that redirects that ‘settlement’ toward employment subsidies and away from open access provision, clear targeted youth work offer, professional degree level workforce qualifications and capital for youth centres and provision, will have answered the question for us.

Thirdly, and most important for those of us in youth work and informal education. Does youth work get named? Not youth employment, not youth opportunity, but youth work: the professional, relational, voluntary relationship at the heart of everything The Youth Work Common Room and our profession stands for. A leader who can say the words, and fund the people who do it, is worth backing. A leader whose youth policy is really an employment policy with young people as the raw material is a distraction we cannot afford.

A tempered hope?

Burnham's arrival is neither saviour nor setback in itself. His devolutionary instincts and his regard for apprenticeship pathways and access to further education are mostly aligned with parts of the National Youth Strategy, especially its local power and economic shift. But his employment-first framing threatens to pull the centre of gravity back toward a deficit model of young people the sector has spent years trying to outgrow.

The transition will be a positive for youth work only if the sector holds the line: insisting that the strategy's relational ambitions are not swallowed by a jobs agenda, that "local" means local communities and not just local mayors, and that youth work is recognised as core education, not a delivery arm for employability. We are however, impressively good at fluidly morphing into agendas around young people; whether or not we should have to is a whole other thing.

Change, change and change again, new leaders come and go, but seven Prime Ministers in a decade is a sign of how unsettled all this is. The young people we work with need something more durable than that. In a funding climate of necessity of sustainability, it is ironic that a Prime Minister position is not currently a sustainable feature. Young people need a transparent workable strategy, properly funded and properly staffed by pro youth workers.  I have emailed Andy Burnham for a response and will update once I hear back, but I understand he is busy right now!

What do you think about what is happening right now and your ideas on what will happen in a couple of weeks; you can comment on this article thread below... please share across our network..

#YWCR #youngpeople #youthwork #youthworkers #WeAreEducators #nationalyouthstrategy #hope #andyburnham #politics #TheYouthWorkCommonRoom #AndyBurnham

Steve Walker - The Youth Work Common Room (2026) (C)

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