News
Youth sector data standard
Last week, we launched the first version of a data standard for the youth sector. This is a set of standard questions designed specifically for organisations working with and for young people: charities, social enterprises and local authority youth services.
Our immediate goal is to provide one simple process for youth organisations to provide information about their situation during the coronavirus pandemic, and develop a national picture of the current challenges faced by the sector as a whole. We have developed the first version of the data standard as an online form. It includes a combination of standard fields to collect some information about your organisation, and specific questions about the impact of Covid-19.
If your organisation works with and for young people, please click on this link and complete the form: it should take you no more than seven minutes. You can see more details about the initiative here.
We’re thrilled to already have received more than 75 responses, from a diverse range of organisations working across the UK. We will be producing regular analysis of the data received, as well as making the underlying data available for others to use: you can download a CSV of the data collected so far here.
Survey of surveys
We are aware that there are many different surveys being distributed and reported on at the moment. This is, in part, why we are focused on a shared data standard – to create an open source of responses to a small set of common questions – and why we are approaching organisations rather than young people: there are some excellent efforts to amplify young people’s voices at the moment, and we want to support rather than duplicate.
To align with the youth sector data standard, we are working with the NYA Research Hub to bring together an overview of surveys and associated reports related to young people, the youth sector and the impact of the pandemic. This database will be available online over the next few weeks.
The aim is to collect all of these surveys in one place so that practitioners, policy makers and young people can respond to open surveys, and keep track of the findings. This will help to join up insights from different parts of the country and the sector, and build a better understanding of need, opportunity and potential responses .
The database will include initiatives for young people to share their voices directly, a number of which we have highlighted below in the ‘data round-up’. The report most on young people’s perspectives is the Take the Temperature report, published yesterday by Beatfreeks as part of their National Youth Trends Project. Focusing on young people aged 14-25, this report looks into how Covid-19 has affected their day to day, their attitudes towards social responsibility, and their feelings on UK power dynamics and structures.
If your organisation is undertaking a survey (or has released any findings or reports from an already undertaken one) please email the URL through to research@nya.org.uk so we can include it in the database.
Data Essentials training
Using data to help adapt, respond and reach out is particularly critical at the moment. Next week, Superhighways is offering a free online webinar covering some of the core principles that should be used when working with data at all stages of the data journey (collection, analysis, and presentation). It is suitable for beginners, and anyone in a small charity or community organisation that is responsible for making decisions about how activities are delivered based on the information that is available. You can sign up to the training here.
We’re talking to our friends at Datakind about running this session again for a group of youth organisations – watch this space.
Just one question
Taking inspiration from how TeacherTapp has been capturing the views of teachers as they respond to the lockdown, from tomorrow we will be using an adapted version of our existing ‘Asking Good Questions’ survey tool to ask youth practitioners one multiple-choice question each week. This platform allows users to register and receive immediate feedback on how others have responded, as well as a follow-up ‘final score’ via email once the survey has closed, with reminders to complete each weekly survey.
We will be opening a fresh survey question each Friday, along with publishing a quick analysis on the previous week’s question. We’d like questions to be suggested by peers and partners – this is very much a collaborative effort in order to highlight your priorities and needs as practitioners, through this crisis period and beyond.
Our initial question will be:
‘Other than more funding, what do you need most, right now, to help you make a positive difference for young people?’
The survey will be available at www.youthimpact.app, and will go live at 14:00 tomorrow - Friday 8 May - and will be open until 17:00 the following Thursday 14 May.
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Our Thoughts
In this section of the newsletter, our team members set out what’s currently occupying their thoughts. This month, Research Assistant, Jo Hickman Dunne thinks about some of the opportunities the pandemic might offer us.
As an organisation, we have been revisiting our Theory of Change, building on an initial ‘refresh’ we first outlined in February (you can read more here). Working through this process has helped me to understand how complex and ambitious our ToC is – how much we rely on the behaviour of other people and organisations to achieve particular outcomes. It has also highlighted that pressing the ‘pause’ button on traditional ways of working in our sector can provide a real learning opportunity.
Our aim, through the work that we do, is to help youth organisations to gain a greater understanding of what meaningful evaluation looks like; enable them to draw on each other for collaborative understanding and learning; and create and disseminate shared tools to embed powerful evaluation practices. These aims, or ‘outcomes’, rely heavily on the behaviour of others. It is not something we can ‘do to’ the sector. Different actors in different parts of the system have to want to change, and lean in to the process of change together. This poses a question: why is it so challenging to embed meaningful evaluation, and encourage shared approaches to measuring impact? How can we provide a consistent and relevant voice amidst the noise? The multifaceted nature of work with young people notwithstanding, I see the long-term undervaluing of youth work as a key culprit here, something which this current pandemic might be turning on its head.
Whilst we are nowhere near understanding the full ramifications of social distancing and lockdown conditions, one thing is clear – young people are being hit hard and fast by the pandemic. The NYA has demonstrated this in no small way in its latest report Out of Sight? Vulnerable Young People: COVID-19 Response. Young people are some of the least safe and secure at times of crisis, they will feel the effect of the declining job market most sharply and carry the burden of social and economic fall-out in a post-Covid-19 era. There will be a long-term, universal impact on all young people, and where many other support structures are falling away, youth services provide a life-line for those that are vulnerable – and not just those with the most acute needs.
The NYA has called for youth work to be classified as an essential key service in the current context, to acknowledge the role that it plays in supporting young people. The key take away is that youth work is high-value, and can reasonably be considered an essential service, as a consequence of its capacity to connect with and influence the various domains of young people’s lives: family, health, identity, learning and work. Where those that need support do not have access to it, we know the long-term scarring effects.
Back to the question then: why is it so challenging to embed meaningful evaluation and encourage shared approaches? Or, more pertinently, what can we take from current pandemic practices to answer this question? I see it as a turning point, from youth work being viewed as a positive and valued process, to being understood as an essential mechanism through which young people are supported in every aspect of their lives and their development.
There is also a definite shift from competition to collaboration, something that the Relationships Project captured perfectly in its most recent Observatory Sighting. Responding to Covid-19 requires a more joined up approach and a shift in mindset to play “the best role we can alongside others and celebrate the progress we collectively generate”. In April’s Our Thoughts, Ed highlighted the incredible capacity of the youth sector to mobilise in response to lockdown measures, working together to coordinate and disseminate good practice around digital youth work. This rapid response needs to guide our long-term recovery as a sector and inform how we work as we step out of this social-distancing situation. After all, there will be no ‘back to normal’.
To tie in with some (still very) pertinent reading from Project Evident that we sign-posted you to last month, we need to invest in shared infrastructure, building an ecosystem that shapes ongoing evaluation, innovation and improvement in the youth sector. There is no one size fits all approach to youth work or youth sector evaluation, but centralising and sharing ideas, frameworks and best practice must be part of making this sector easier to navigate. The youth sector’s response to this situation has been incredible.
From the Centre’s point of view, when we inevitably press ‘play’ again, we want to hang on to a highly-valued, collaborative youth sector and work towards understanding how some of these new ways of working and sharing (both within and across organisations) can be embedded in a post-pandemic world.
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Ask the Centre
In this column, our resident Agony Aunt Mary answers questions we’ve been asked about impact and evaluation. If you have a question that you would like to us to share our thoughts on in this column, then please email hello@youthimpact.uk and include Ask the Centre in the subject line.
Question: Does evaluation matter during the Covid-19 crisis?
I don’t think you’ll be surprised to know that yes, we truly think it does. We think that evaluation – enquiring, reflective practice - matters now and will continue to be crucially important throughout this crisis and as we recover. There’s an important caveat here, however, and it’s seated within our intentions that drive the evaluations we’re carrying out. Evaluation aimed at ‘demonstrating the impact’ that your individual work has had on your beneficiaries doesn’t matter much right now. Pre-determined outcomes need to take a back seat. Rather, evaluation as an act of service and collaboration matters deeply.
The Covid-19 crisis has had an impact on almost all aspects of all our lives, and we know that its effects are experienced deeply unequally. Even if some things feel like ‘business as usual’ to us, we are all working to overcome this crisis for ourselves and others: another reason why impact evaluations of individual projects or initiatives will hold little value right now (and for a while). The Covid-19 crisis is systemic and needs to prompt a systemic response. Regardless of what your organisation’s mission statement is, at the moment we are all working towards the same aims. If the problem and response are both systemic, so should be evaluation, learning and ‘ownership’ over positive change for young people.
It matters greatly that altruism underpins all evaluation work carried out during the Covid-19 crisis in order for it to be meaningful. The position of carrying out evaluation to ‘demonstrate impact’ – often stemming from a place of defensiveness, competition, or even arrogance – can quickly undermine altruism. Evaluation positioned as an act of service, however, means using approaches and methods to continuously listen to the needs of the people you work with, responding to them, reflecting on how it went, and what could be improved. If we don’t know what the future holds, the very best we can do is act with care and intentionality now, focusing on what we know about the highest quality support for young people.
So, in answer to the question, yes. Because our actions in response to the coronavirus matter so much, so does evaluation as a means of a making sure that we’re staying true our intentions.
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What we're reading
Across our reading this month, we’ve followed the themes introduced in our last newsletter, with an additional ‘data round-up’ to reflect current efforts to gather data and learn as the sector responds. There are resources and reflections to inform both short and long-term work, and trust and relationships are a thread that run through a number of these readings, with reminding us that we must centre equity in our collective efforts.
Digital youth work
We’re going to be doing some new work on digital youth work over the coming months, in response to the pandemic’s impact. This blog written by Mary McKaskill, Practice Development Manager at the Centre, outlines the intentions behind creating a set of resources to support evaluation and learning for online youth work.
This extensive guide from Digital Youth Work provides a thorough overview of the different types of social media and how they can be used for youth work online, supported by a range of case studies from around the world.
The Early Intervention Foundation has just published an overview of evidence related to the virtual and digital services to children and young people. It aims to support providers as they make adaptations to their programmes in response to Covid-19. The report outlines some key points to consider when adapting programmes, summarises the crucial components of effective digital and virtual programmes, and highlights potential challenges to be mindful of.
MURAL has shared a Definitive Guide To Facilitating Remote Workshops, which includes a section on a building a ‘digital-first mindset’ across teams, tools, and techniques, and a comprehensive manual for digital-first practice, including the nitty gritty of managing ‘essential factors’ (for example, mitigating for audio issues), and various practical tips, tools, and checklists.
The team at Catalyst has also been sharing a whole host of helpful resources. We’ve highlighted a number below, and you can sign up to the newsletter and check out the blog to see the full array:
- This digestible guide runs through six ways to involve your users, remotely, in shaping your new digital delivery
- This collection of ‘Service Recipes’ gives practical examples of services that charities have delivered digitally, helping charities to learn from one another’s work, including a case study from Young Somerset (see below)
- This overview signposts a range different places that organisations can access digital support, depending on their needs
- Finally, this case study details how one youth organisation digitised its one-to-one therapy services in a week
Learning, evaluation, and quality work amid a crisis
This article from the Health Foundation on ‘Making messages work’ explores how we think about and assess truth - it is framed in relation to public health messaging, but we found it helpful to reflect on the vast amount of information needing to be processed at the moment, and the role of evidence amidst it all.
We also enjoyed FSG’s blog on ‘Learning in a Time of Crisis,’ which shares a model for reflection based on three specific time periods, supported by questions that can be used to put this into practice. It also prompts reflection on the role of accountability at this time, and what behaviours we might need to let go of in order to make progress. Whilst geared towards philanthropists, the principles can apply to many of us that are thinking about how to “[seize] opportunities for reflection that include creating spaces to think, slowing down, being mindful and paying attention, creating new patterns of thinking, surfacing alternative interpretations, and creating new theories of action.”
Chicago Beyond has shared six core equity principles to uphold in responding to Covid-19, with some helpful reflections on collaboration, and a clear message: “simply put, if we do not intentionally focus on equity, we are almost guaranteed to generate more inequity.” Finlay Green from Dartington Service Design Lab also reflects on Chicago Beyond’s ‘Why Am I Always Being Researched?' paper, which lays out the problems that arise when power isn’t shared in evaluation. In his blog, Finlay summarises the paper’s key recommendations, and reflects on how he has recently used these to inform his own practice.
Impact on young people and communities
Sally Baxter, a youth worker in a small London-based organisation, has shared her experience of both ‘going digital’, and then being furloughed. It provides an accompanying perspective to an earlier account from Lauren Barclay, a youth worker for Youth Focus: North West who documented her experience of shifting rapidly to youth work online.
Research in Practice has brought together a summary of key considerations related to the broader child protection implications of Covid-19. It highlights that “only by working collaboratively and tenaciously that such risks can be mitigated.” The Children’s Commissioner for England has also shared an article on child protection at a social distance, detailing the associated challenges and some of the ways in which child protection teams are navigating these.
The Institute for Employment Studies has published an assessment of the economic challenges presented by the pandemic, along with five evidence-based priorities for action. Whilst the paper covers all ages, they note that “there is clear evidence that prolonged spells of unemployment, particularly while young, can cause long-lasting ‘scars’ on an individual’s future earnings, employment prospects and health and wellbeing.” This brief report, from The Collaborative for Student Growth at NWEA, also explores what summer learning loss data can tell us about the potential impact of Covid-19 on student academic achievement, with recommendations for policymakers, educators, researchers, schools, families, and communities. It recognises that school closures caused by Covid-19 involve additional aspects of trauma to young people, loss of resources and opportunity to learn that go beyond traditional summer breaks, and raises the challenge of determining when and how to collect “valid and reliable formative and interim data to guide curriculum and instruction”, in a rapidly changing context, a broader challenge that many will likely identify with.
Finally, this podcast from the Centre for Science and Policy looks into how the pandemic is impacting the wellbeing of children and adolescents. It covers a lot of ground, from immediate issues such as mental health and safeguarding, to longer-term questions such as what strategies are needed to support young people in catching up when schools reopen, and whether the situation that we are facing presents an opportunity to rethink education - what is it for, and how do we operate it?
Data round-up and calls to action
As mentioned above, we are pleased to be working with the NYA Research Hub to bring together an overview of the various surveys and reports shared in recent weeks. In the meantime, below are a number of initiatives to have a look at and, if possible, circulate among your networks:
As part of the HYPE project, researchers at King’s College London are inviting young people aged 16 years and above to complete their Covid-19 online survey. Responses will help to develop understanding about the health and social needs of young adults following the pandemic. The team is particularly trying to increase uptake among people under-represented in research, including young adults who may be disproportionately affected by the pandemic (BAME, LGBTQ+, and young men). This survey is in addition to the project’s main survey, which focuses on various risk factors for long-term physical and mental health disorders together with associated health service use. Both surveys are currently open.
Youth & Policy has shared a ‘call for a citizen enquiry’, encouraging youth workers and young people to write a monthly diary to explore and document what is happening for young people, youth workers, and youth work at this time. It will also contribute to a wider Mass Observation taking place on 12 May. To take part, you can contact Janet Batsleer.
Finally, the Relationships Project asks “what do we need to do now to look back on 2020 as the year we not only helped each other in an emergency, but also the year we changed for good?” Through their Observatory, they are gathering and curating examples of relationship-centred responses to Covid-19, with weekly reflections on ‘sightings’. Last week, we really enjoyed the opportunity to join an online session on ‘the recalibration of trust’ and have since been reflecting on what this means for our work, moving forward. You can contribute to the Observatory here - this week, the team is exploring the theme of participation.
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Network News and Events
Whilst Regional Network meetings are not happening at the moment, we are talking regularly with our regional leads to understand what is happening locally and how they are supporting their networks. These consultations are informing our current and future work, and starting from next month’s newsletter we will feature a spotlight on a particular region to find out more about what is happening there, and what the sector wants and needs locally.
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If you have any questions or comments about anything featured in this newsletter, please Tweet us @YouthImpactUK or get in touch at hello@youthimpact.uk
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