The identity of youth work as an agent of social equality

The current formulation of European Union youth policy is not sufficient for a full understanding of what distinguishes youth work from other services or educational practice for young people. Youth work in Europe has a diverse range of fields, goals, and methods of intervention. Such diversification is considered one of the strengths of youth work, inasmuch as it is associated with its ability to adapt to the variety of problems it faces. Such flexibility is, however, likely to generate vagueness in terms of the knowledge of the special contribution expected from youth work and its execution. As a contribution to lead evaluation research to produce empirical evidence about the key-features of youth work, a theoretical framework is presented in this paper that help to identify the peculiar expected outcomes of youth work as well as those mechanisms able to generate them. Specifically, this paper focused on the ability of youth work to affect a more equal distribution of personal development opportunities for the young outside the formal education. For this purpose, sociological theories on non-formal education, educational inequalities and youth participation have been intertwined with psychological research on transition from adolescence to adulthood and with the theory of educational accompaniment in social pedagogy.