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5 NOVEMBER 2008
NO 1369
Training in Australia
The predominance of a community-based setting for practice has in turn influenced the type of youth work training that staff looked for and that was provided by training bodies. The first accredited training in Australia was provided by a YMCA college initially based in Sydney and which later moved to Melbourne. This college training was eventually taken over by what is now the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, one of the five Australian Universities currently providing youth-worker training. Thus, unlike Ontario and elsewhere in Canada, where the need for training initially came from workers in hospitals and children's institutions, formalized youth-work training in Australia first came about through a community-based organization, the YMCA. Because of this community orientation, the curriculum did not have a primary therapeutic focus.
Thus, the focus of youth-worker training in Australia is a combination of one-to-one, group, and community work-skills development; in-depth programming, and therapeutic and treatment skills development are less prominent than they are in Canadian courses. The small size of these nongovernment community-based settings has also had an impact on the type of course content presented in our university courses. Many of these largely government-funded services employ only two to five staff and are governed by voluntary, part-time boards, or management committees, as we call them. Thus, the paid staff in many Australian youth services necessarily have to learn a wider range of skills than do staff in the larger community-based organizations found more frequently in North America. These skills include a basic knowledge of finances, fund raising, public relations and media skills, submission writing and policy development, political analysis, and lobbying. In many instances, the workers have had to learn skills to "manage" their voluntary management committees. In the larger organizations, these skills often reside in the bodies of the specialist financial manager, the publicity person, or the fundraiser. So our student graduates often have to be jacks (or jills)-of-alltrades; they are specialized generalists, as is the case in the United Kingdom.
VAUGHAN BOWIE
Bowie, Vaughan. (2004). Youth-worker training:
Teaching and learning from an international perspective. Journal of
Child and Youth Care Work, 19. pp. 197.
