Social investment advocate: Joanne Hay, Teens and Toddlers chief executive

The vista out of Joanna Hay’s office window shows the hustle and bustle of London Bridge station below. Trains constantly rumble in and out of platform one, and are so close you can hear the guards’ whistles and the service announcements. As a metaphor for the work done by Teens and Toddlers, which Hay joined as chief executive in March, it seems appropriate. The charity runs programmes to help re-engage vulnerable young people with learning to try to steer them back on track to further education, training or work.

Teens and Toddlers takes its name from its 18-week peer mentoring programme that sees 14- to 16-year-olds identified by their school as being at risk of becoming Neet (not in education, employment or training) undertake work placements at a nursery to support young children who are themselves struggling.

“The young person will be paired with a toddler who the nursery has identified needs support – maybe they can’t concentrate or don’t talk to anyone,” Hay explains. “We know it’s a challenging experience – how they manage that relationship – and gives them a chance to talk about that experience and reflect on what that means for them and their behaviour.

“We know that when you become self-aware, it opens the door to self-belief. You notice they are more confident.”

Founded in 2001 by Hay’s predecessor, Lady Diana Whitmore, the charity has worked in 34 authorities, reaching 14,000 young people across the UK. The latest significant step in its growth was in March when it was awarded a £3m social impact bond (SIB) through the government’s Youth Engagement Fund.

The three-year SIB will see 1,500 young people across Greater Manchester go through the peer mentoring programme before being worked with for a further 12 to 18 months.

“My first day was working out how to use the phones and then hearing we got the bid,” says Hay, who graduated with a geography degree from the University of North London in 1995, before undertaking a PhD in systems ecology.

Of her PhD, Hay says: “I was looking at how behaviour was influenced by attitudes and why some people do better than others.”

She was able to put this into practice in roles as a commissioner at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, a two-year stint as a Number 10 policy adviser on youth employment and child poverty, and then two years at the NSPCC.

But it was her work on developing employee mutuals and social investment at Kensington and the NSPCC that prepared her for her new job. Teens and Toddlers is one of the few children’s charities to have successfully completed a SIB – its initial three-year Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) SIB in the North West is about to conclude.

“We’ve got a lot of learning from that,” says Hay. “SIBs clearly work for us.”

Benefits of social investment

Teens and Toddlers says the DWP SIB helped young people achieve Qualifications and Credit Framework Levels 1 and 2.

But Hay is quick to point out that SIBs will not be right for everyone. “When you go into it, you have to know it is right for you,” she says. “If you’re in a position, as we were, that you’ve got something that you deliver and that works, social investment is an amazing way of taking it to scale.”

To illustrate this, Hay explains that much of the work Teens and Toddlers does is with individual schools or local authorities and is funded for one year, whereas the three-year funding through the SIB “means you can recruit better people as there’s more job security, develop deeper relationships and then get to test how the relationship works with schools and local authorities”.

The upfront cost of funding the new Manchester SIB has been put in by Impetus – The Private Equity Foundation, Bridges Ventures and the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. It will be managed by Social Finance, which will monitor the outcomes of the programme. Payments for the social investors and to Teens and Toddlers are based on the programme participants achieving improved school attendance, behaviour in the classroom and academic attainment. “That’s what the investors get paid on – if we don’t deliver the outcomes, it affects us both,” Hay says.

With so much riding on the performance of those delivering the work on the ground, data is collected on a weekly basis.

“This is intensive monitoring: challenging, time-consuming and bureaucratic. But it is absolutely necessary,” she says.

“I’ve come from a commissioning background and the expectation on SIBs is much higher than other types of contract – you are scrutinised to a much greater degree. One of the benefits of that is you end up with a really good understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

“Data collection is really important, but so is fidelity and quality. When you’re being paid for your results and delivering it at scale, you need to know that the programme is being delivered in a similar way everywhere.”

Hay says Teens and Toddlers has been able to manage this monitoring challenge because it has always collected data on its activities. “You already have to be doing it to some extent because if you’re not, you will probably have to twist what you do so much.”

But for Hay, the key to a successful SIB is ensuring that sustainability is built into the planning and development of the project from the start. She says: “With the new SIB, we’re already thinking about what the exit strategy is – how we make it sustainable.

“With the existing one, we’re already working with a number of authorities and schools that are carrying on delivering it [after it ends]. It’s important to do that otherwise you’re not best using the opportunity.

“They’ve had a chance to test it and we’ve trained some of their staff. You create something that lasts longer with a SIB.”

While Hay recognises that the onerous nature of the monitoring will put some charities off using SIBs, for the public sector she believes it offers the chance to try out new ways of working with minimal cost – something that is crucial when budgets are tight.

“This is the perfect way for councils, schools and government to try new things and invest in growing a market.

“If you intervene early and work preventatively, that will save downstream. We all get that. But who is willing to do something to make it happen and who’s got the money to invest?”

SIBs can also help evidence what interventions and services work best so that scarce resources can be targeted at these. “There’s not much money about at the moment and we should all be spending what we have on things with science and evidence behind them. You spend it on what works or on something to test it. This is a way of doing that. I’m passionate about spending money on things that work and not on things that don’t work.”

She accepts that stopping doing things that don’t work “is really hard” for some organisations, but says the cuts to public services means “people are being forced to do that”.

Driver for change

To this end, greater scrutiny on how councils and schools spend their pupil premium money – the fund used to pay for additional support for vulnerable children – and ensure that investment is delivering results, can be a driver for change, according to Hay. “The sort of programmes we do helps the schools do what they need to – we’re not replacing the teaching, but helping young people engage with schools.

“It is also why people pay for the programme and why we are getting the traction we’re getting. At the end of the day, heads and schools need to want to have the programme, and nurseries need to want to be able to deliver it. People need to see the value in it. There was greater emphasis from the coalition government on spending less money but on what works.”

The day CYP Now visits Teens and Toddlers, latest unemployment figures show the proportion of young people not in education, employment or training is three times that of the rest of the population. It suggests there is still much work to do to prevent the next generation of younger teenagers becoming Neet in future.

With this in mind, Teens and Toddlers has ambitious plans to open two new regional centres by 2018 that would reach more than 4,000 young peop