Evaluating Activities for Young People

This page summarises findings from the evaluation and contains links to reports and other documents.

Activities for Young People (AYP) was an initiative we ran between 2002 and 2007 in England, Northern Ireland and Wales.

The focus of the programmes varied between countries, but overall they were concerned with supporting young people at the point of key transitions in their life, notably in moving to secondary school or coming to the end of compulsory education.

SQW evaluated the initiative as a whole.

Main findings

Young people who took part in AYP overwhelmingly enjoyed the experience, even though the different approaches and contexts mean that results and achievements varied between programmes.
The programme in England aimed to help young people who needed support to make more informed choices about education, employment and training. While the programme was effective in doing that, it faced strong challenges in identifying, engaging and retaining young people from the target group, so projects tended to recruit a much wider range of young people with differing needs. Meeting the original aim is probably best achieved by operating on a smaller and more focused scale, perhaps as part of a wider youth activities programme.
The programme in Northern Ireland encouraged successful joint working between stakeholders at a time of significant policy change. The programme may well have driven some of the new agenda, and many of those involved identified learning that can be applied far more widely. As a result there were good prospects for mainstreaming the type of work that we supported.
Similarly, the programme in Wales offered a wide range of approaches to identifying and responding to local needs and priorities. The timeliness and flexibility of the programme made it more likely that projects and activities would be sustained after our support ended.
Across all three countries, projects could benefit from standardised systems of tracking participants and young people in general. Improved monitoring is important, not only for day-to-day management, but also for providing evidence of effectiveness.
Young people who took part in AYP overwhelmingly enjoyed the experience, even though the different approaches and contexts mean that results and achievements varied between programmes.