March Reading List

The Prince’s Trust has just published the results of its 2022 NatWest Youth Index mapping the views of 2106 young people aged 16-25. The annual survey, now in its thirteenth year, tracks how young people feel about different aspects of their lives. Largely due to the pandemic, this year’s results show that overall wellbeing has dropped to its lowest level since the Index was first published. Young people's happiness and confidence are both at an all-time low, and one fifth of young people said that they would never fully recover from the emotional impact of the pandemic. Dimensions of poverty, education, ethnicity and employment all showed marked inequities underlining, yet again, that the pandemic has deepened existing injustices. This study, whilst small, adds weight to the need for all services for young people to address issues of equity and social justice. This means planning with equality in mind, ensuring services are high quality as these benefit young people facing the greatest challenges the most, and ensuring evaluation of impact is concerned with equity and is equitable in its approach. – Kaz, Director of Strategy and Learning 

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In this blog for The School for Social Entrepreneurs, Charles Rapson sets out the reasons why pursuing profit isn’t inherently selfish or negative for social enterprises (and/or charities who are pursuing enterprise development projects, like our participants on the Enterprise Development Programme). Trading income can offer an alternative to grant funding or be used in different ways. Developing or evolving a social enterprise model can also offer opportunities to make new connections, develop innovative partnerships, and create a unique ‘win-win’ situation where profit can be generated in a way that benefits all those involved. – Soizic, Enterprise Development Manager 

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The Department for Education has published its annual 'State of the Nation' report into children and young people’s wellbeing. In particular, the report provides a useful evidence base for practitioners working with young people to reflect and build upon better wellbeing outcomes as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. For the first time, the report also provides data on children and young people’s views about wider society, as well as investigating concerns about self, society, and the future. Although a number of data sources cited consider the experience of different groups of children and young people (i.e., across protected characteristics), the report acknowledges methodological limitations and that stronger evidence may be available in future reports, particularly for assessments that included a pre-pandemic baseline. Nonetheless, the report highlights some interesting findings, including areas of substantial variation in wellbeing between groups, such female secondary pupils consistently reporting lower wellbeing than male students. Post pandemic, it will be vital for the youth sector to continue to monitor young people’s mental health and wellbeing, helping to identify whether certain groups are more at risk and how youth work and provision for young people can meaningfully embed support. – Hannah, Research and Evaluation Project Manager 

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Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner for England, has recently published a review of her first year as Children’s Commissioner. The report focuses on ‘The Big Ask’, the largest ever survey of children in England, and how the results of this survey have helped to shape her priorities as Commissioner. From over half a million responses from children, the Commissioner has identified the following areas as key priorities: Family; Community; Health and Wellbeing; Education; Jobs and Skills; Children in Care; and A Better World. The report also sets out how the responses to the survey, published in The Big Answer report, have influenced policy development including the new ‘Youth Guarantee’ and investment in children’s social care. The report notes the level of consistency of responses across age, gender, ethnicity, family income levels, and vulnerable groups in terms of what children want, and outlines a forward view of her focus for the coming year(s) under the seven priority themes, and how the Office of the Children’s Commissioner will contribute towards them. – Steve, Head of Partnerships 

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 This article published in SSIR (Stanford Social Innovation Review), argues for the effective use of evidence in influencing policy and informing decision-makers. Applying an integrated framework, the IPA (Institute for Poverty Action) lays out the ‘who’, ‘what’, and ‘how’ of evidence use. This approach commits to identifying opportunities for evidence to influence change, in collaboration with partners and end users, using a research toolkit that goes beyond impact evaluations to ensure sustained learning. The ‘who’ of evidence use: equipping an entire ecosystem with evidence. The ‘what’ of evidence use: seeking high-impact policy opportunities prioritising four criteria: an existing body of research, opportunity to influence important decisions, existing relationships, and existing funding for implementation. Engaging the whole sector of relevant actors has potential to build a culture of sustained evidence use. The ‘how’: clearing a pathway for evidence use and equipping partners to follow through, such as key stakeholder engagement and multi-level evidence champions. The authors conclude that funders and recipients need to commit to an evidence-to-policy cycle with built-in accountability and a plan for evidence use. To achieve this aim, investments need to be partnership-focused, flexible, cost-effective, and based on data-driven learning. – Zunaira, Research and Projects Assistant 

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Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisations (GMCVO) has produced this easy-to-navigate guide to support community organisations undertaking their own research or planning to do so in partnership with other institutions. What we particularly like about this resource is its focus on how to generate high quality evidence. The golden thread running through the guide is the exploration of key issues related to ‘trustworthiness’ in the research process. To this end, Part I focuses on trustworthiness, ethics and bias, before moving on to a stage-by-stage breakdown of the research process itself in Part II, where considerations relating to trustworthiness are woven throughout. The guide also signposts to several other resources to support understanding. Our work here at the Centre prioritises collecting data that is useful, meaningful and of high quality, and supporting youth sector organisations to do the same, so this work from GMCVO really resonates with us. We encourage any community organisations considering undertaking research to put this guide on their reading list. – Jo, Project Manager 

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The Young Advocates Project, delivered in partnership between the Alliance for Youth Justice and Leaders Unlocked, and supported by BBC Children in Need, has published the first findings of its youth-led peer research into young people’s perspectives on the youth justice system. The research, designed and led by the project’s Young Advocates, focused on three priority areas (‘stereotyping’, ‘education and warning signs’, and ‘jail’), and sought to identify patterns that run through society, education and justice systems overall to find out what young people feel increases the chance of entering the justice system. The result, a culmination of interviews, focus groups and workshops, is an illuminating and sometimes harrowing account from 120 children and young people across England and Wales and their lived experience of the youth justice system. In response to their findings, the Young Advocates have developed a series of recommendations for decision-makers to address challenges facing young people at risk of entering the system, including reducing school exclusions, improving representation and diversity across all professions, and implementing the Young Advocates guidelines for media reporting on children and young people in contact with the law. – Hannah, Communications Officer 

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A decade after the framework for large-scale community collaboration was first introduced, the definition of ‘Collective Impact’ was recently updated to include a focus on equity. In this article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Jennifer Splansky Juster and Cindy Santos dig more deeply into how those involved in Collective Impact initiatives can live up to this updated definition, ‘advancing equity by learning together, aligning, and integrating their actions to achieve population and systems-level change’. A key theme is about maintaining a long-term, unwavering commitment to equity at the heart of this work even in the face of adversity and uncertainty, and constantly asking ‘does our work advance equity at every juncture?’ Juster and Santos also explore other priorities: shifting power imbalances; building trust and strong relationships, and ‘showing up’ when learning from and working with grassroots organisations and community-led initiatives, and giving more attention to shifting mental models, narratives, and culture (‘transformational work’). More broadly, the reflections on sharing learning globally are helpful for anyone thinking about drawing on learning from and making connections with peers around the world, and there are useful prompts for us to reflect on when considering what sustaining collective impact approaches could look like for us in the UK. – Catherine, Organisational Learning Lead