What we're reading
Working with young people
The Readiness Projects seek to advance work informed by science and grounded in practice, and to accelerate work that both demands equitable learning and development opportunities and builds on the strengths of people working at all levels to help children and young people thrive. This recent report takes a look at the science of learning and development in community youth provision in the US, and a ‘whole child ‘ approach that draws on positive developmental relationships, safe environments, rich learning experiences, opportunities to develop knowledge, skills, mindsets, and habits, and integrated support systems. Recommendations draw on some familiar approaches, such as the Youth Programme Quality Intervention and the Search Institute’s Developmental Relationships Framework.
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The Search Institute has also been reflecting on how the Developmental Relationships Framework can be used to advance racial justice and equity, specifically how it can support organisations that work with young people to become more intentional and inclusive in cultivating developmental relationships. The blog looks at work with five partners who have focused on cultivating developmental relationships as a core element of their strategies for advancing racial equity and justice; how it informed their interactions with young people, and how we might move forward from this.
Tools, training, and resources
Inspiring Impact has launched a collection of new resources on using creative evaluation methods. Check out this page for a practical guide of different creative evaluation methods, as well as guidance on their benefits and limitations and some key principles for use.
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While many of us are no longer newbies when it comes to running online workshops, it can be difficult to make the leap from smaller team presentations to larger group sessions.
If you’re preparing for an upcoming workshop with a sizeable number of attendees or simply looking to increase the impact and enjoyment of your sessions, Zoe Amar Digital has pulled together a tips sheet based on their reflections of best practice for running virtual workshops. Insights include advanced prep work before sessions to maximise engagement and use of interactive features such as whiteboards and breakout rooms to emulate ice breakers we would ordinarily enjoy in real life.
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The Relationships Project has built a tool that can help you to generate a relationships ‘heatmap’ for a particular ‘place’ - this could be your organisation, a project or something else. The 16 question self-assessment will build you a heatmap covering your ‘place’, your approach, your methods (for example, activities, incentives, and how you use digital or physical space), and your strategy, and can help with identifying and prioritising particular areas for development.
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Finally, the Early Intervention Foundation has launched a new and comprehensive Evaluation Hub on their website, which walks users through the ‘journey’ of understanding and measuring the impact of an early intervention. Each page of the hub relates to a key step in the process - from designing a theory of change to measuring impact - and provides a range of resources relating to a particular step or steps on that journey.
Impact for young people and communities
The British Academy has published an independent review for the Government Office for Science on the long-term societal impacts of COVID-19. Its companion report ‘The COVID decade’ concluded that there are nine interconnected areas of long-term societal impact arising from the pandemic which could play out over the coming decade, and offers a range of policy issues for consideration about how to respond to these social, economic and cultural challenges beyond the immediate short-term crisis.
Specifically, the report touches on the predicted impact of negative mental health and wellbeing for children and young people, as well as the implications of school disruption that will likely be felt for young people at all levels of education, but not equally. The Education Endowment Foundation’s median estimate also predicts that the attainment gap for pupils eligible for free school meals will increase by 36%, reversing the progress made since 2011 in narrowing performance differences.
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From April to December 2020, the Citizen Enquiry into Youth Work in the Time of COVID-19 has received monthly diaries from youth workers. A team of citizen researchers met each month to discuss the diaries, identifying key themes, commonalities and divergence. The collected diaries will form part of the Mass Observation archive of the pandemic, held at the University of Sussex. The team of researchers, led by Janet Batsleer, has recently written about the first phase of its work here and is holding two events to discuss the research and findings further, which can be booked here.
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Reflecting also on the impact of disrupted learning for young people, and the data that indicates ongoing barriers to learning are higher for particular groups of young people, including girls, those who identify as non-binary, Black, Latino, and Indigenous students, Phil Buchanan from the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) urges that “foundations and individual donors need to reconceive impact in a way that puts hearing firsthand the experiences of those they seek to help front and center”. He makes the case for a more nuanced and more thoughtful approach to how we assess impact, for example - in education settings - looking beyond academic learning to the social and emotional (as well as logistical) elements of life. Whilst the article focuses on education and philanthropy in the US, it offers much that can apply more broadly to our work with young people in the UK.
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Last month we shared a number of readings related to shifting mindsets. The Behavioural Insights Team has since published a really interesting reflection on the power of narratives as a tool for shifting mindsets at scale, particularly in relation to creating a new story about inequities. This particular example focuses on the context of health narratives, but the article gives plenty of food for thought about how we approach many elements of our work - the young people and communities we work with, the challenges and opportunities that our teams and organisations face, and how and why we engage with learning and evaluation efforts.
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Finally, this article from Naomi Falkenburg gives a really interesting and detailed exploration of power relationships in monitoring and evaluation. It looks at what a meaningful approach to participatory evaluation can look like, the difference between a functional and transformational process, and raises some important point for consideration; for example, ‘we cannot ask communities to spend their time and energy participating in M&E if we do not believe that decision-makers will take our findings seriously.’
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