Welcome to the Youth Endowment Fund’s Toolkit, a free online resource that provides evidence of what works to prevent children and young people becoming involved in violence.
The YEF Toolkit summarises the best available research evidence about different approaches to preventing children and young people becoming involved in violence. It is based on real life data about what has happened when these approaches have been used before.
For each approach it explains:
Learn more background information about our Toolkit here.
The YEF Toolkit has been developed to help police forces, local authorities, youth charities, school leaders and others who work with young people, use evidence when making decisions about how best to keep children safe from violence.
For example, you could be…
The Toolkit presents research in a way that’s easy to access and easy to understand. It’s there to complement your own expertise and local knowledge, rather than replace it. So while it can’t provide you with definitive answers, it suggests ‘best bets’ – approaches that are likely to make a positive difference to the children you work with, because they have worked well in the past.
At the moment, finding out what really works is difficult. Research evidence about how best to support children at risk of violence is hard to find, hard to access and hard to understand. That means it’s difficult to make judgements about how best to support and serve children and young people.
YEF’s Toolkit aims to change that. It’ll make evidence accessible and easy to understand. And we hope it will support people to routinely use evidence when they’re making decisions about how to help children stay safe from violence.
Our Toolkit draws on the best available research in our Evidence and Gap Map – a database of over 2,000 studies from across the world, on the effectiveness of different interventions to preventing serious violence.
As we learn more about what works and what information you need, we’ll update the Toolkit and add new approach areas to it.
If you have any questions or suggestions about the Toolkit, please email our Head of Toolkit Laura Knight.
You can read more about our approach to developing the Toolkit and the evidence that sits behind it in our Technical Guide.