News
'Five things we’ve learned’ from Just One Question during COVID-19
At the start of lockdown, we shifted our monthly survey to a weekly ‘just one question’ approach, focused on how youth organisations are responding to the pandemic. Our shared learning so far is an unfolding story, told by those who contribute to the survey with one response each week:
1. Demand for training (as a support need) increased between May and July, with less emphasis on providing equipment and data to young people, and a more specific focus on guidance, training, and support for engaging and safely supporting young people with new and increased needs. This builds on the picture painted by the most recent Data Standard in August, where 85% of respondents state that responding to mental health and anxiety is the top need presented by young people, and 40% of organisations continue reporting that they are reaching fewer than 25% of the young people they usually reach.
2. Between July and September, we saw a drop in the number of respondents telling us that they feel prepared, excited, and motivated for their work. More are now feeling frustrated and confused.
3. In late August and early September, opinions were mixed about whether detached work will continue to increase in place of centre-based work. Some respondents had not yet seen any increase in detached work in their local area.
4. By late September, a large proportion of survey respondents had not found that digital provision has enabled them to reach any new young people (or if it has, it is just a few). Practitioners are now reporting screen fatigue amongst young people, but continuing local lockdowns mean that 87% of practitioners expect to adapt their offer in some ways over coming months - and this is likely to include digital. From the recent Data Standard, 80% of sampled organisations report that they are either already providing an online and digital offer, or that they are expecting to within the next six months.
5. Finally, responses to this week’s live question indicates that in October more than half of practitioners are now collaborating more with other services than they were pre-pandemic. This includes schools, health services, and other voluntary sector organisations. (What is your experience? Let us know before 17:00 this evening!)
We are really grateful for all the responses that you have shared and understand that they often represent very difficult problems with which you are grappling. We know that there are no easy solutions, but where we know of resources that might prove useful, we will publish them along with our commentary.
Trustee Recruitment
We’re looking to appoint two new trustees to join our dynamic board – specifically a treasurer and a trustee with strategic comms experience. We are seeking two credible and influential individuals with a belief and passion for the Centre’s work, practical experience of engaging with strategy and leadership, and of helping to develop and grow an organisation towards high performance.
If you have excellent financial management skills or a background in strategic comms and brand management, then we’d like to hear from you. Both role descriptions can be found on our website. The deadline for applications is next Friday 16 October. If you have any questions about either role, please email Bethia McNeil, CEO at bethia.mcneil@youthimpact.uk to arrange an informal conversation.
Enterprise Development Programme
We are working as part of a partnership for the pilot of the Enterprise Development Programme (EDP), a five-year £40m programme funded by Access - The Foundation for Social Investment. The programme provides a broad range of support for charities and social enterprises in England, helping them make a transition to new enterprise models, or grow existing ones by diversifying their income streams.
As Youth Sector lead for the EDP, the Centre is providing support and guidance to youth organisations interested in taking part, working with three key regional partners.
We are currently inviting Expressions of Interest to join the next cohort of youth organisations on the Enterprise Development Programme. We are expecting a highly competitive field and are looking to work with those organisations that we think have got original, innovative and potentially successful enterprise ideas to pursue.
You can check whether you are eligible to apply to be part of the programme here.
For more information on how to get involved in the programme, please visit https://www.enterprisedevelopmentprogramme.org.uk/how-to-apply/.
Expressions of Interest will be accepted until 13 November, with a closing deadline for applications of 26 November.
Join the Youth Programme Quality Intervention (YPQI) this October - free training and support available!
The Youth Programme Quality Intervention is an innovative observation-based quality improvement process. Since late 2018, the Centre for Youth Impact has supported a diverse range of organisations to pilot this ground-breaking quality improvement process in the UK, with the support of funding from the National Lottery Community Fund. The pilot group covers England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Following a pause due to COVID-19, we are now looking for organisations who want to join a community committed to ongoing quality improvement, using a structured framework for observing and self-assessing your practice as a team. Training and support to implement the YPQI at your organisation will be provided free of charge, and predominantly delivered online.
Initial PQA (Programme Quality Assessment) Basics training sessions will be taking place on Tuesday 3 November and Tuesday 17 November - if you are interested in taking part, please let us know as soon as possible by completing this short form. If you have any questions, just drop us a line ypqi@youthimpact.uk.
Sharing our early learning from the Youth Investment Fund Learning Project
Along with our partners NPC, we have just published our fourth Insight Paper from the Youth Investment Fund Learning Project. The YIF is a joint investment between the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and The National Lottery Community Fund of £40m, to expand the delivery of open access youth services in six regions of England. The YIF ran from 2017 to 2020, with the Learning Project working with grantees and the funders alongside.
This new paper set out early findings about the quality and impact of open access youth provision, alongside insights into the development of feasible and meaningful evaluation approaches for this field. We’ve also published an accompanying blog framing our learning as we begin the final analysis and write up of findings. All the previous Insight Papers can be found on the YIF Learning website here.
Understanding impact in open access youth work
Join us and partners Partnership for Young London, Kings College London and London Youth for a discussion about the impact of open access youth work and the recently published report A Narrative Review of Impact. This report looking at the available evidence on the impact of open access youth work has added to the strong narrative emerging from other research (particularly in Scotland). This narrative highlights the role of open access youth work in young people’s lives, including their learning and development, health and wellbeing, safety, and relationships. It also draws out the ‘features’ of open access youth work that contribute to impact. But how should we use this narrative? How can it support and improve the quality of practice? How can it influence future investment into open access youth work? What does it mean for how we evaluate open access youth work in the future?
The webinar is on Wednesday 14 October, 2-4pm. Sign up here.
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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, Jo Hickman Dunne, Research Officer at the Centre, reflects on her personal learnings over the past year.
The first time I wrote something for the Centre was back in February this year, and I was just settling into the organisation and my new role. In that piece, I shared my immediate reflection on our work: that it requires us to think differently, and that is really really hard. It means being brave enough to constantly ask questions, being curious enough to look outside of our day-to-day routines, and being bold enough to share our half-formed ideas and work collectively to streamline and act on them.
Eight months on, my feelings haven’t changed, but our working (and living) context very much has. In some senses, this has made our work harder – we are asking questions where we really cannot know or even begin to predict the answers. Nonetheless, we are still committed to enquiry, as opposed to absolute knowledge and definitive technical know-how. And it is this fact that has led me to some more recent musings on internal team dynamics, which I want to share today. Working at the Centre has helped me to understand some of the fundamentals that help organisations to thrive (and coincidentally make them a positive place to work), even when the odds are stacked against them.
1. A supportive context. This was identified by Richard Hackman – organisational behaviouralist – as an “enabling condition” for team effectiveness. For me this is less about the IT infrastructure or reward systems in place (although these are certainly enablers), and more about being surrounded by colleagues who look for ways to support your own development at work, and look to you to support them. This increasingly difficult now we are geographically spread and dependent on digital channels for our regular communications – but all the more important as a result. One way that we put this into practice at the Centre is through peer mentoring.
2. Clear goals and ability to stay on mission. One thing above all that has become apparent to me over the last year is that mission drift is a genuine challenge – even when you have a clear statement of intent. At the Centre I have found that (1) is essential for (2): a supportive context means honesty and openness, pushing colleagues to think about the direction and quality of their work, and guiding that direction where necessary.
3. Equal contributions. This is something that I think we do very well at the Centre. As an organisation we are both open and responsive to the opinions and efforts of everyone in the team, and create intentional space for this to happen. For me this is crucial, because it means that everyone feels they are a valued member in a shared effort. Encouraging a diversity of contributions is also necessary, to build empathy, and stir imagination and new ideas.
I did say that these are the fundamentals that help organisations to thrive. We have clear goals and a supportive and innovative internal environment, and these are things I have really come to value during my time at the Centre. But there is no doubt we are still working towards ‘thriving’ in the current context – as many others are too. One thing we will be working on as we move towards 2021 is being more assertive – we want to shout more loudly about the good ideas and resources that flow from our positive internal environment. Whilst I am just about to check-out of my current role as Research Officer, I’m looking forward to returning to the Centre in 2021 and supporting colleagues in a new role, to work towards having a bigger and bolder voice in the sector.
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What we're reading
Young people and communities
YouthLink Scotland published two pieces last month. The results of the Access to Facilities survey provide a snapshot of current access to community facilities, indoor and outdoor, by youth work organisations across the country. We’re thinking about how we can gather similar insight for England. For a longer read, the Youth Work and Employability report makes a case for greater recognition of the role of youth work within the employability system, setting it out alongside the policy and practice context for youth work in Scotland.
The National Youth Council of Ireland has shared a comprehensive independent review of the issues affecting youth work provision, young people, and youth workers over the pandemic, and how the youth sector has responded to these challenges. The report ends with a note on the importance of advocating for the sector in coming months, as well as some practical recommendations for youth organisations.
The Children’s Commissioner for England has shared a number of publications over the past few weeks, including a report on stress among children in England during the lockdown, and another on childhood in the time of covid. Back in August, the Commissioner also chaired a virtual Q&A event where 12 children from across the UK had the opportunity to ask their own COVID-19 related questions to three government scientists. The event was co-hosted by the UK Children’s Commissioners’ offices and the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). Hear the recording, and see some of the additional questions and answers that were covered by the young people and scientists here.
Working with young people
More Than Robots will be hosting an online meet up for anyone interested in the role of digital in youth participation, engagement and support, featuring presentations and a Q&A from a range of presenters. Find out more and sign-up here. As we’ve been coming together with others in various online training sessions ourselves, we’ve also found these guides and tools for human connection in online spaces from the Deepr team really helpful.
Last week the National Youth Agency (NYA) released the National Curriculum for Youth Work, a new framework for practice in England. A copy of the curriculum and introductory video can be found here. The NYA will also be hosting their next Tea Break discussion on 13 October,10:30 - 11:30am, with a focus on anti-discriminatory practice in youth work. Sign up here.
If you didn’t catch it at the time, you can see a recording of UK Youth’s recent panel session focusing specifically on Black LGBTQ+ Identity, as part of their #YoungAndBlack series.
Finally, Youth & Policy shared a report on the Citizen Enquiry into the lives of youth workers over the pandemic, featuring entries from 22 diaries submitted in May and 35 in June. The project is ongoing, with the team planning to continue to collect diary entries once a month until December, contributing to the wider Mass Observation archive at Sussex University.
Learning, evaluation, and quality work
We need to talk about how we talk about systems change is a great six minute read from the FrameWorks Institute. It suggests that the way in which we often talk about systems can actually lead to inaction, rather than progress: ‘we see it, we can know it’s wrong, but we feel deep angst because we believe it’s too big for us to solve.’ The article ends with some steps that we can take to help strike the balance between helping people ‘see systems’ and reminding them that we have the power to change them.
The British Educational Research Association (BERA) recently hosted Thinking Critically about Impact, Evaluation and Accountability in Youth Work, an online webinar looking at how evaluation and impact measurement can act as and through policy to reconfigure youth work practice. The session brought together four studies from scholars in the UK, Ireland and the USA, covering a wide range of themes including: youth impact as a policy agenda, economic evaluation, language, race and the politics of community-based youth work, accountability mechanisms, and theories of critical numeracy ‘to subvert, play with, and make numbers messy.’ The link above will take you to a full recording.
We’re looking forward to learning from a session on Rebalancing data for the 21st century, which will focus on why equitable approaches to evaluation matter, and set out a vision for how evaluation can support a more equitable and inclusive sector. The online event will include contributions from Jara Dean-Coffey (Founder and Director of the Equitable Evaluation Initiative) and Bonnie Chiu (Managing Director of The Social Investment Consultancy) and is part of NPC Ignites online conference for 2020.
If you’re not able to sign up for this session in time (or if you are looking for more opportunities to broaden your learning and understanding on this topic) on 21 October the Charities Evaluation Working Group (ChEW) is hosting an action planning session to help build understanding of what actions we can collectively take to increase diversity and improve equity in evaluation. Bonnie Chiu will start the event with a workshop, providing an opportunity for attendees to reflect and take action in their own work. Sign up here: From Words to Action: How Can The Evaluation Sector Become Anti-Racist?
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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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