BA (Hons) Youth and Community Work

Sue: Marjon has just a great history of delivering youth and community work. We've been doing it for over 25 years. The programs really focus both on the taught modules that we have here in the university, and the placement modules that they do. We have some very, very good relationships with employers, which enable us to have a wide range of those placements. Most of our students will go into youth and community work posts, but range of opportunities now has changed incredibly. So we've got graduates in all kinds of different settings, both here and abroad.

Lola: Because obviously it's a small campus, you get the attention that you need, especially the stuff you're struggling with. A lot of the lecturers are very open. They share a lot of their life experience as well.

Ashleigh: The lecturers are all really good, actually. One thing that appealed me to the course is that it's a professionals degree, and all of them are professionals and they've worked in youth work, or still are, so they're really in there with youth work and they know what they're talking about and they've got that skills and experience. They're not just lecturers, they are professionals.

Lola: For me, the best part about this course is placement. I'm not naturally a very academic person, but I enjoy the face to face stuff a lot more. And I think it definitely made me realize that this was definitely an avenue I wanted to go down, whether it was with youth work or community work.

Ashleigh: We've got to do three placements, one every year. I'm in my second year and I'm doing my block full-time placement. So I'm going away for three months in-house in youth department, and that's just an amazing opportunity.

Stella: I'm a drug and alcohol worker with young people. I've been in this role for just over eight years, and I work primarily with young people on court orders. I found the depth of learning at Marjon, what I liked about it the most. I commuted, so I went in specifically for the modules and the classes. And for support from staff and from the resources that were on site. I just really enjoyed the topics that were covered in the modules as well. I found my time at Marjon hugely beneficial for both my personal development, my own learning, and my career, both historically and currently. It's remained relevant to me right throughout. So it's great to have done a degree that's still really relevant to me now.

Carin: So, my name is Carin Laird and the course I did was the BA Honors in Youth and Community work. So, I currently work for Barnardos. I work for the child sexual exploitation team. So, I work in a very different way to the way I've worked historically. So, youth work is normally quite informal, it's about young people, helping them to make informed choices. In that sense, my role is very different. A lot of young people are forced to work with me, it'll be part of their child protection plan. There are two of us that are youth workers in the team, and we work with around about 15 young people each at any one given time. Aged between 10 to 18, who are extreme high risk of, or currently experiencing, child sexual exploitation. So for that reason, they tend to be on child protection plans and they come to us either just before they go to child protection or just after.

So we make part of a multi agency team that supports that young person. For me, it's all about the one to one work. You can have a really bad day, and then your last session of the day will be a young person and they just let you know they've made a really healthy choice, and it can be something as simple as not running away last night, not self-harming last night, not taking an overdose last night. And you get that real buzz and you think, "Yeah, this is what it's all about. Nevermind the paperwork that I'm going to be up to really late doing." It's that sort of stuff.

I was a mature student going back. I had a job, I had to work financially. Even if you took away those barriers, I would pick Marjon now, I would pick it again, if I was 18. Uni just gave me the confidence I needed and like I said, I didn't think I'd ever be able to go to uni, and in that first semester, I remember getting out of my little Dictaphone in my first ever lecture, putting it on, thinking "I can't miss a word. If I miss a word, I'm going to fail, be thrown off the course. They're going to realize I don't belong here." And I can say the tutor was really good at giving me the confidence to carry on. And I did well. It's one of the things, other than my children obviously, and my husband, it's one of the things I'm most proud of. I came out with a first and that was just such an amazing feeling.

I'd worked really hard and got that. And then since then, it's kind of like with all that theory, I can now sit in meetings, whereas before I'd go along to a meeting and I was just a youth worker. Now I am a youth worker, I'm not just, I can hold the same academic conversations, use the same language as other professionals and not feel intimidated or undervalued in a way that I maybe did before. I'm not sure if that was a confidence thing, but uni certainly gave me the language to be able to have this job and the understanding of the law, and like I said, all that theoretical stuff that you, well you're sitting in class, you're thinking "Really? Really?" But actually underpins everything we do.

So going to Marjons opened so many doors. I was able to apply for jobs that I hadn't been able to apply for before because of the qualification, the JNC. And five years ago, I'd have never have thought I could have ever had this job. So that's what going to Marjons gave me.