Detached Youth Work

What does this project involve?

Detached youth work aims to engage with young people ‘where they are at’, providing youth work in non-institutional settings. These settings are usually places that young people have chosen to be, such as on the street, in parks, shopping centres, fast food outlets or other community spaces. Rather than serving children in a youth club, school, or college, detached youth work meets children out in the community.

The frequency and duration of detached youth work can vary, and activities may include building relationships with young people, providing guidance and information, arranging sport and cultural activities and signposting to other support. It is a flexible and youth-centred approach, adapting to the needs of specific children.

Detached youth work is delivered by youth organisations of many types, such as local authority youth services, charities and social enterprises, faith groups, health agencies and youth justice services. It also has a variety of different aims, including building the relationship between young people and their local communities, safeguarding vulnerable children from abuse and exploitation, supporting young people’s wellbeing and helping them to make positive choices. Detached youth work is also often commissioned in response to concerns about anti-social behaviour or perceptions of criminal activity.

Why did YEF fund this project?

The flexible and youth-centred nature of detached youth work may present significant challenges for robust quantitative evaluation. For instance, the approach often aims to target disengaged and vulnerable children and works hard to build relationships with them. Attempts to engage these young people in additional evaluation activities could jeopardise relationship building. Detached youth work also rarely has fixed eligibility criteria for involvement; the resulting variation in context and background of children involved may make it challenging to establish a baseline from which to measure impact. Detached youth work is also non-programmatic, and is unlikely to consist of a clear, common journey for children. This variation in practice is usually challenging for evaluations, making it difficult to assess whether everyone has received the same type of support and to assess the dosage and intensity of activities.

Therefore, although several studies have illuminated the nature of detached youth work and explored children’s experiences and perspectives of it, we do not yet have robust quantitative evidence regarding impact, and we need further exploration of whether robust impact evaluation is feasible.

Consequently, YEF funded a feasibility study to explore the nature of detached youth work, what models of detached youth work exist and how widely they are used, whether it is distinct enough from other activities for evaluation, and to establish the research questions that a robust evaluation of detached youth work could answer. The feasibility study also aimed to ascertain what methods could be used to robustly evaluate the impact of detached youth work, and the risks (and mitigations) to such an evaluation. The study used semi-structured qualitative interviews with 21 representatives of organisations that deliver, fund or commission detached youth work; an online survey which was completed by 93 professionals engaged in detached youth work; and four online workshops with professionals to develop a shared model of practice and a theory of change and discuss the proposed evaluation approach. The study ran from April 2023 to January 2024.

Key conclusions

What will YEF do next?

Given the promising findings in this feasibility study, YEF is intending to proceed with a pilot trial of detached youth work.

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