The Youth Service: Training for the Youth Service

The youth service was originally pioneered by national voluntary organisations and local clubs. It only came into being during the Second World War in association with the education service. After the war the youth service lost its momentum, so far as public authorities were concerned, though national voluntary organisations and local clubs continued to sustain in old and new ways ‘the service of youth’. By the 1950s the voluntary clubs were still struggling to maintain existing services or to experiment with new methods and to raise a large part of their expenditure by their own efforts. Local authority youth service provision was a patch work, sometimes with a close partnership between voluntary organisations and their own youth service officers, sometimes in active competition, sometimes the local authority had decided to go it alone or else to make no provision at a time when their hands were full with problems of finding enough school places and teachers for the increasing child population.