Evaluating Violence Prevention: Key Insights for School Leaders 

The impact of violence on young people  

Violence and the fear of violence has both physical and emotional impacts on children and young people, perhaps more acutely than many of us realise. 

67% of teenage children are concerned about becoming victims of violence and 22% say that the anxiety has taken a toll on their mental health, disrupting sleep, suppressing appetite, and making it harder to focus in school. 

20% have experienced violence in the past 12 months and over half (61%) of these incidents led to physical injury, according to our recent survey of 10,000 13–17-year-olds in England and Wales. 

The need for effective interventions 

Violence impacts upon the daily lives of too many children, so we need to keep working and doing more until we see this change. Our data tells us that some children are more susceptible to exploitation and violence than others.    

For example, children who’ve been arrested, excluded, severely absent from school, or gone missing from home are all at increased risk of committing acts of violence. 53% of children who’ve perpetrated violence have at least one of these characteristics, this small but vulnerable group of young people is overrepresented in violence data. 

Similarly, pupils who have been temporarily suspended from school, children with Special Educational Needs and those educated in Alternative Provision are more likely to experience violence, either as victims or perpetrators.  

The overrepresentation of children with these characteristics provides a clear indication of where support and interventions should be targeted. 

The importance of understanding local context when implementing interventions 

At the Youth Endowment Fund, we’re committed to working towards a future where no child becomes a victim of violence. To contribute to this, we’ve built and continue to develop the YEF Toolkit which summarises the best available research evidence about different approaches and interventions to preventing serious youth violence.  

While the Toolkit can’t provide definitive answers, it suggests ‘best bets’. For example, our research shows that social skills training and mentoring are effective in reducing violence. Best bets are approaches that are likely to make a positive difference to the children you work with, because they have worked well in the past. 

We encourage education leaders to be strategic about reducing violence, be clear on why you are taking particular actions and identify how you will evaluate impact or any changes that occur as a result of your efforts.  

As we collectively seek to learn more about violence, its impact and how to prevent it, a range of different types of data can support our understanding and decision-making.  

We’ve collaborated with ImpactED on this blog so that they can share some of their insights on evaluating the impact of projects and interventions in schools.   

An introduction to ImpactED  

Over the past three years, ImpactEd has partnered with schools, multi-academy trusts, local authorities, and charities to address children’s involvement in violence. Our work includes leading commissioning, convening place-based stakeholders, and delivering evaluations, notably with local Taskforces through the DfE’s SAFE and Alternative Provision Specialist Taskforces (APST) programmes. In evaluating services designed to keep young people safe from violence, we’ve encountered common challenges alongside best practices to overcome them. 

Inclusive evaluations for engaging young people 

Engaging young people, especially those identified as at-risk of violence, presents challenges. This demographic often includes young people who are not in school and face complex systemic and personal issues in their home, family and community environments. As we have come across in our partnership with the SAFE taskforce, there is an inherent challenge in the effort to engage with young people for evaluation in a service that is designed to improve attendance. We have found these approaches to be effective: 

• Consider inclusive and creative evaluation designs that use qualitative and participatory approaches.  
• Explore ways to make evaluation more accessible. This might include developing widgit-based surveys for pupils with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) or considering more one-to-one data collection methods when working with young people facing emotional and behavioural difficulties. 

Being rigorous but pragmatic 

Implementing complex evaluations will often be challenging due to the gap between what is theoretically appropriate and practically feasible. This means the evaluation design itself has to be set up for success.  

• Consider a combination of methods to answer evaluation questions. Could participant observation, scrapbooks, or feedback postcards help capture the desired outcomes instead of surveys or interviews? This approach can ensure that the diverse needs of your young people are met. 
• Establish a shared understanding of the “why” behind the evaluation. This will not only secure buy-in from teachers, parents, and pupils but also help determine the most feasible evaluation design for your context.  

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Build on existing knowledge and practices 

The full evaluation cycle of an intervention, which includes steps from evaluation design to report writing, can be time- and resource-intensive for schools. This can make executing projects tricky, especially when the roles and responsibilities are not clearly defined. Some ways we try to address these challenges include: 

• Minimising the need to reinvent the wheel and use available and familiar options for both evaluators and schools. For example, use existing validated surveys that are appropriate to measure identified outcomes. 
• Providing detailed, easy-to-understand survey guidance alongside links to online pupil surveys. These guidelines not only explain how to administer the surveys but also contextualise them, outlining the purpose and rationale behind data collection in simple, child-friendly language.  

Managing evaluation this way has twin benefits: it maintains evaluation quality by building on best practices while also making sure teachers and children have a positive experience of the evaluation process.   

Moving forward 

While we recognise these existing challenges, it is essential to acknowledge that robust evaluations of services supporting our most vulnerable young people in schools are entirely achievable. Through collaboration, the combined efforts of schools and evaluators can yield knowledge that benefits the sector.  

Further reading 

• Creative methods – https://researchmethodscommunity.sagepub.com/blog/studying-youth 
• Agile evaluation – https://ieg.worldbankgroup.org/blog/agile-evaluation  
• Monitoring and Evaluation – https://embed.kumu.