Child Safety and Mandatory Reporting in Youth Work
What Every Youth Worker Must Know About Duty of Care (2026 Guide) If you work with young people, child safety is not just part of your job, it is your responsibility. You need to understand mandatory reporting in youth work.Every interaction you have carries the potential to either strengthen a young person’s sense of safety […]
What Makes an Ultimate Supervisor?
Supervision is one of the most underrated tools we have to build strong, capable, and resilient practitioners. It’s more than just a regular meeting or a compliance tick-box. Good supervision keeps youth workers grounded. Great supervision keeps them growing.
Podcast 040: Supervision
In todays episode of the Ultimate Youth Worker Podcast “Supervision” Aaron speaks to us about the need for youth workers to have good professional supervision. As an industry that claims professional status it is ludicrous that mot of our members do not receive a minimum of monthly professional supervision..
Let’s talk about reflective practice.
I was in a youth advisory committee meeting for a local council last week and we asked each young person what issues they are passionate about. One of the answers really stood out to me, a young person said “I am passionate about recognising and understanding my privilege and using it to give a voice […]
Challenge Support Matrix for youth work
Over the past five years we have worked with hundreds of youth workers who are struggling in the field. We have searched for a model to explain this to no avail. We heard stories of the challenge of youth work and we heard stories of the need for support.We have done the research and we can tell you why people leave the field. We can tell you how to keep people in their jobs. However, there was no neat package that we could use to help managers understand what was going wrong and frontline staff to recognise where they were at… until now.
7 signs you need more supervision
You need more supervision! When we tell people what we do at Ultimate Youth Worker and that youth workers need more supervision we often hear “But I get supervision at work?”. When we unpack this with staff members what they mean is that their boss knows something about their caseload or program and occasionally allows them […]
Keeping motivation in youth work
Life is tough, and so is youth work. Keeping motivation can be difficult. From the outside most people only see the coffees, conversations and if everything goes well a young person who appears to be well rounded. What they don’t see is the hours of paperwork, the phone calls, the parent meetings, the heartache and tears. When all of this gets mixed together with the trauma our young people experience and the lack of structured support from our organisations we come up against vicarious trauma. When this happens it is really hard to stay motivated.
Why should a youth worker have supervision?
In the AYAC National Youth Work Snapshot 2013 a survey of youth workers showed that 8.4% of surveyed youth workers had never had a supervision session and around 51.7% receive it less than once every three months. As an industry that claims professional status this is appalling. It is no wonder that the sector in Australia […]
The youth work supervision environment: importance of neutrality
The supervision environment is important to staff uptake All to often I hear from youth workers that they don’t want to do supervision sessions. The concerns range from the classic ‘it would breach confidentiality‘ to the obscure, ‘it doesn’t fit well with my existential philosophy‘. The main reason we hear is that staff don’t feel […]
Seven things a manager needs to know about internal supervision?
You should be doing internal supervision As a youth worker who managed staff one of the areas I spent a lot of my time doing was internal supervision sessions. I saw that my staff needed the opportunity to discuss cases in depth, gain professional skills and a framework for organisational administrative procedural work. These staff […]