New Support for Practitioners to Build Evidence and Act on Insight

The COVID-19 pandemic reduced opportunities for youth organisations and practitioners to engage with high quality evaluation practice and demonstrate the impact of their provision in the lives of young people and their communities. As youth practitioners responded to the immediate needs of the pandemic, opportunities for developing their approach to evidencing impact were often paused or cancelled. Feedback from across our projects and partners has shown a need to step forward in the journey to improved evidence and insight in the youth sector. 

Between January - March 2022,  the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is supporting the Centre for Youth Impact to expand access to quality tools, data, and frameworks that support shared approaches to learning and evaluation across the youth sector. 

With DCMS support, we will:
 

• Relaunch  A Framework of Outcomes for Young People - the sector's outcomes framework for everyone working with and for young people. Revised with the latest evidence on developing young people’s social and emotional learning, the framework will support practitioners and commissioners to have shared ways of designing, delivering, and evaluating their provision for young people.
• Renew our social and emotional learning outcome measurement tools with new user-friendly manuals, how to guides and training materials. 
• Launch a new data portal to provide a one-stop shop for collating and visualising data from our social and emotional learning outcome measures. Following early testing with our Practitioner Panel, the data portal will enable any youth organisation to access a digital dashboard from their provision overtime. 
• Refresh our ‘Resource Hub’ and associated training resources to enable the sector to further develop their impact evaluation and quality improvement practice. The revised ‘Resource Hub’ will enable anyone working with young people to find good practice in designing and evidencing their provision with signpost to top resources from across the sector. 
• Develop a new entry route to publicly available data sets about young peoples’ lives. We will help practitioners navigate complex data to find what they need and better design provision which meets the real issues affecting young people in their community. 

In addition to these enduring resources to support youth practitioners and organisation leaders, we will be completing a sector-wide needs analysis to understand practitioners’ monitoring and evaluation requirements. Building on the views shared amongst our Regional Impact Networks, we will gain insight into challenges faced by organisations in designing their delivery and evaluation planning. This mapping will help the Centre, and other like minded organisations and funders, to understand the barriers organisations are facing following the pandemic to plan and evaluate high-quality transformational services.

We will be launching our resources and tools from March 2022, so keep an eye out for further announcements. If you would like to find out more about this work, please get in touch with us here.