There has been a step change around youth volunteering in the UK in recent years as this once unheralded and taken for granted activity has moved more centre stage, particularly as a key strand of recent Government initiatives directed towards welfare reform, employment and education policies. This article uses the case study of student volunteering to explore the paradox inherent in articulations of volunteering in policy discourses that emphasise self-responsibility for employability and community cohesion. We review the tensions inherent in escalating the expectation that young people should volunteer through situating volunteering as a conduit of control society, and consider how the promotion of participation destabilizes the capacity for sovereign action and choice. Drawing on qualitative research with both HE stakeholders and students, we map out the external policy drivers that universities are reacting to in promoting volunteering, and students' response to these initiatives. Our analysis demonstrates that students resist the expectation that they should volunteer if this is interpreted as devaluing their engagement. Both students and stakeholders recognise that the promotion of volunteering should seek to align institutional practices to promote and support volunteering with young people's own expectations and aspirations.
This article draws on a major study of student volunteering based on case studies of six Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) selected to represent the diversity of the higher education sector in England. The study finds that students contribute significantly to university life and to the wider community through both formal and informal volunteering. However in this paper we consider the challenges and problems with the organisation of student volunteering. Our research finds that students who were supported by their university to volunteer reported better experiences of volunteering and identified greater impacts on their personal development, soft skills, employability and community awareness. In this paper we challenge the tendency of some policy makers and practitioners to view student volunteering as an automatic 'win, win, win'-for students, for universities and for communities. Rather we explore how without adequate support, management and opportunities for reflection and placing volunteering in wider social context, student volunteering can fail to benefit any of these groups. The paper outlines the development of institutional support for volunteering by students before assessing the value such support has for student volunteers today.
Volunteering by higher education students in the UK has a long history which remains largely unexplored despite recent research and policy attention. This article offers a brief overview of the development of student volunteering before the 1960s and then discusses a shift from student social service to Student Community Action in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It argues that this shift was underpinned by a growing student movement in support of volunteering overseas; the perceived failures of the 'youth volunteer boom' of the 1960s and by the wider questioning of the values of higher education. The article then considers the rapid growth of Student Community Action across universities and colleges in the UK before reflecting upon the success and challenges of the movement.
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