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Youth Sector Insights Creator (YSIC)

Strengthen youth commissioning with the best available evidence.

About the Youth Sector Insight Creator

The Youth Sector Insights Creator (YSIC) is a new digital self‑assessment for leaders commissioning youth sector provision. It helps you quickly reflect on your current approach to preventing violence and highlights practical, evidence‑informed opportunities to strengthen commissioning.

What YSIC offers

Built for improvement

YSIC is designed for honest reflection — not inspection. The more accurately you assess your current arrangements, the more useful and actionable your insights will be. The assessment is designed to support reflection and improvement — it is not an audit or inspection, and there are no right or wrong answers.

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Hear from local leaders

Our Youth Work and Violence Prevention guidance offers youth work commissioners eight evidence-based recommendations to reduce children and young people’s involvement in violence. We spoke to local leaders on how they tackle these violence prevention strategies in their organisations.

Recommendation 2: Close the most urgent gaps in youth club access

What happens when there is nowhere safe to go 

Youth club deserts leave the most vulnerable young people without anywhere safe to go. Jamie Masraff explains what it takes to map local provision, identify the gaps that matter most, and make the case for reopening the doors that have closed. 

Recommendation 3: Raise the standard and reach of mentoring

Trust takes time and the right kind of commissioning 

Mentoring shouldn’t be transactional, it should be a journey. Dez Brown, CEO and founder of Spark2Life, explains why mentors need real training – to work effectively with young people facing complex and acute risk. That journey takes time. His hope for commissioners and funders is simple: move away from short-term funding, and toward the long-term investment that lasting change actually requires. 

Recommendation 6: Make multi-year core funding the default

“What’s next?” shouldn’t be met with silence 

Too many programmes end just as trust is starting to build, leaving young people without the support they were promised, right when it matters most. Sport and Youth Crime Prevention Project Manager at Active Essex Foundation, Jim White explains why short-term, 12-week funding cycles make it harder for organisations to reach the young people who need it most, and why multi-year funding is what lets organisations retain trusted staff, stay the course, and be there for as long as it takes to improve outcomes. 

Recommendation 7: Equip youth workers to safeguard children and young people

Safeguarding isn’t a tick-box exercise – it’s a culture 

Youth workers are often the trusted adult a young person turns to first, yet many are expected to spot and respond to exploitation, abuse, and harm without the supervision or training other professions take for granted. Xyna Prasad, National Safeguarding and Risk Lead at the National Youth Agency, explains why investment in youth services must include funding for supervision, ongoing training, and real involvement in local safeguarding systems – so that safeguarding is properly resourced, not left for youth workers to manage alone. 

Recommendation 8: Prioritise evidence-based strategies and avoid harmful approaches

Evidence plus trust is a powerful combination 

Grace Strong, Director of the Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland Violence Reduction Network, explains why evidence-based commissioning matters most when resources are tightest – not just investing in what works, but being willing to move away from approaches now known to cause harm. Drawing on the REACH programme in Leicester City, Grace shows helping commissioners to be more confident and intentional in every investment they make.