6 Country Reports on Youth Work - Jugendpolitik in Europa

the accomplishment of youth-specific tasks”? Youth associations are especially interested in
data that highlights the new cooperation structures between youth work and all-day schools.
However, all these tasks need funds.
Nevertheless youth associations have taken action to improve the documentation of
volunteerism. The Juleica statistics will be converted into an online database and in future
there will be possibilities to differentiate between the associations. The data will be used to
identify factors that exert a sustainable influence on volunteerism.
German experts believe that a European reporting system focusing on the processes and
effects of lifelong learning in youth work would foster an increased visibility of informal
learning processes in this sector.
11.4 Greece
The experts interviewed in Greece were
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� a young member of the European Parliament,
� a prefectural counsellor of Thessaloniki and board member of the National Youth
Council,
� a prefectural counsellor of the Cyclades Islands,
� a lecturer doing some research on youth studies at the University of the Aegean,
� a lecturer doing some research on youth studies at the University of Bournemouth,
� a youth expert and ex-adviser of the General Secretariat of Youth.
Although the interviewees praised several developments initiated in the youth field during the
last years – by national authorities, local communities and other agents – most of them are
not satisfied by the current status of youth work in the country. In particular, they believe that
youth work services should assume a more prominent and comprehensive role in Greek
society and that more coordinated efforts should be made in this direction.
Some of the interviewees consider the level of education / training of youth workers as
unsatisfactory due to the lack of youth work-specific studies / training programmes within the
Greek educational system. More specifically, as Popi Kalaitzi suggests, ‘In Greece no proper
attention has been paid to youth policies, so there is no actual need for professionals who
will design youth and child policies, or fully trained youth workers’. 89 Fotis Nestoras stresses
that ‘Professional work with the young is in an initial stage. One could claim it does not even
exist. The first to blame for this is the state, which has not given priority to this field, and in
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Kalaitzi, Question 11.