Help us improve the quality of youth voice practice

Our mission at the Centre for Youth Voice is simple: we want to improve the quality, reach and impact of youth voice.  

As part of this mission, we are delighted to announce that we are launching a free Youth Voice Observatory: an online data bank where you can find, search for, and analyse information about youth voice activities from across the UK.  This will help us to learn more about youth voice work taking place across the sector, and what this tells us about current youth voice practice.

We are conducting a call for evidence to make sure we can showcase the latest, most relevant sources relating to youth voice.

Do you work with young people? Are you engaged in supporting youth voice and participation activities? We’d love to be able to showcase your work by including it in the observatory. More information about what we are looking for and where to send this is below.

Why are we doing this?

In autumn 2023, we consulted with 64 practitioners and young people as part of the discovery phase for the Centre for Youth Voice, to learn more about the strengths of and gaps in youth voice and participation work in the UK. The consultation revealed some of the following issues across the sector, which we think the Observatory can help us to address:

• While there’s loads of good work out there, there’s limited understanding of what makes ‘good’ youth voice, and how we can measure its impact / effectiveness.
   
• We want to raise the bar so everyone can see what good quality practice looks like and has the support to implement this in their work.
   
• Information can be locked away in technical research reports meaning that those working with young people, and young people themselves, lack access to information which could help them advocate for their right to be heard.
   
• Young people facing deprivation and discrimination face greater barriers to being heard: we want to help change this by addressing these barriers and challenging ourselves and the sector to do better. The observatory will help to highlight and track some of these disparities.

 

However, in order to do this, we need to understand more about where youth voice is done well and what we are learning from youth voice activities.

What do we need to make it a success?

For the Observatory to be a success, we need to make sure it contains up-to-date, relevant and good quality information - including innovative and ambitious work.

We are specifically looking for sources that can tell us more about:

• Who is being reached and who is being missed through youth voice activities, including meaningful examples of engaging with young people whose voices have been marginalised;
• What key messages young people are sharing;
• What methods are being used to capture and amplify young people’s voices; and 
• How effective these methods are. -what does ‘good’ look like?

We understand that organisations may have information about youth voice in various formats. We're particularly interested in:

• Research, monitoring, evaluations, and learning relating to youth voice activities, projects, or programmes, both past and present, but ideally conducted post 2020;
• Written or audio-visual case studies (e.g. film or podcasts); and/or
• Youth-led content, such as outputs from youth voice activities, youth-led reports, or blogs

Please share your evidence by completing this form.

This is just the start of a longer journey!

We are working alongside our Youth Ambassadors and Practitioners Panel to ensure the observatory is well-designed and tested with those who will be using it.

We have lots of ideas about how we might be able to develop the observatory in future. If you have some good ideas, feel free to contact Tim Leaman (Head of Partnerships) at Tim.Leaman@ymcageorgewilliams.uk
 

Interested to know more about our work?

We are also committed to providing practitioners and young people with the tools they need to conduct youth voice work confidently and effectively.

In support of this, last week we unveiled our new Youth Voice Resource Hub. The Hub brings  together leading guidance, toolkits, frameworks, and information to support hands-on delivery of youth voice and participation activities. You can find these resources here.