Features

Youth Work Impact: Policy context

11 mins read Youth Work
Supply and demand issues around funding have been crucial in the development of a youth work "impact agenda". In 2017/18, local authorities expected to spend 50 per cent less on young people's services than at the start of the decade as a result of reduced government funding for non-statutory early help provision (see ADCS view).

Concurrently, a new set of funders have entered the market to fund voluntary sector youth work projects, from big multi-nationals to social finance investors. This has been underpinned by a number of policy papers and associated government programmes that incorporate payment-by-results (PbR) mechanisms as a requirement for receiving money.

For example, the £80m Life Chances Fund, £16m Youth Engagement Fund, and the Department for Work and Pensions Innovation Fund had funding linked to projects achieving targets to demonstrate their impact. Inherent in the PbR model is the need to monitor activities and meet certain outcomes criteria set by the funders. Some argue that this has led to a narrow way of measuring impact, one that prioritises number-crunching.

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