Youth Engagement Survey (YES)

Self-reported thoughts and feelings of enjoyment, inclusion, attention, and voice indicate active mental engagement amongst young people that is expected to promote socio-emotional skill growth. Conversely, lack of mental engagement is expected to prevent socio-emotional skill growth, or even lead to high levels of skills 'falling back'.  ​

YES scores tend to reflect closely the quality of provision, so these scores can be used to assess how well staff understand the socio-emotional skills of participating young people and adjust their practices to ‘meet young people where they are at’.  

When to Use it ​

Young people should complete the YES during or immediately after an activity or session. It may be useful to use the YES at multiple time points in a programme/project, or in an annual cycle, to enable staff to plan future sessions and to enable the organisation to evaluate delivery.​

Completing the YES in the same session that was observed and rated for quality (using the QPT) enables you to understand the relationship between the quality of provision and young people’s engagement.  ​

We recommend using the YES with young people aged ten and older, although with assistance, children as young as six years old can use the YES.  ​

Formats ​

The YES can be completed digitally or on paper. It was designed for young people to fill out by themselves, but staff can read out the question and record the young person’s score.  ​

How long does it take?​

On average it takes a young person five minutes to complete the ten questions.​

Strengths and Limitations​

Strengths​

• It can be used with different groups of young people, within the context of any type of provision, at different time points, for a variety of purposes.  ​

• It should only take five minutes to complete. ​

• It can be used anonymously, or with some demographic data collected alongside, to explore differences in the experiences of diverse communities of young people.​

• Practitioners are encouraged to explore and explain the tool and the words used with young people. This will not bias or invalidate the tool. The more young people understand it, the more reliable the data is likely to be. ​

Limitations​

• Like all our tools, the YES should be used “as is” without amendments. ​

• It does not measure changes in socio-emotional skills.

Interpreting the Data​

Data collected with the YES can be entered into the College's data portal to collate data for individuals, cohorts and the results for your whole organisation. YES data can also be explored alongside data from our other measures to look at the relationships between quality, engagement and outcomes. ​

The average scores for each item of the survey  can be used to inform decisions about future training or provision planning (e.g. low scores would prompt a focus on making the activities more enjoyable, inclusive, interesting, and participative). ​

The total average score for YES, if high, can be used to demonstrate that sessions are engaging the young people who attended, suggesting that they are appropriately challenging, provide a range of opportunities for young people to get involved, and promote feelings of belonging and being heard.​

The YES total scores can also be compared over time to explore how young people's engagement changes over time, and in response to improvements or other external influences.