Research reports

This is YEF’s third annual Children, violence and vulnerability report. This year, YEF surveyed over 10,000 teenage children aged 13-17 in England and Wales about their experiences of violence. Amid the everyday pressures of adolescence — school, friendships and self-discovery — many teenagers are also having to navigate a more troubling issue: violence. This year’s…

Understanding violence is key to keeping children safe                                      If we want to prevent violence, we need to understand it. The more we know about violence, the better we can focus our efforts to keep children safe. This means asking questions like: Thankfully, there is a substantial evidence base that can help us answer these questions.…

We asked OC&C Strategy Consultants to conduct a scoping exercise to help us understand which force areas are delivering focused deterrence and, importantly, how they’re delivering it. The insights collected as part of this project will be used to inform the development of practice guidance on focused deterrence. Research suggests that the average impact of…

Purpose and background In this report, we aim to simplify the complexity surrounding violence affecting children and young people in England and Wales. Our goal is to provide a clear account of whether the situation is improving or worsening, and to evaluate the performance of key sectors supporting these children and young people. To achieve…

This report summarises the YEF’s Effect Size Database (ESDB), a free repository that reports effect sizes (ES) associated with each study included in the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) Evidence and Gap map (EGM). It enables users to determine the direction and magnitude of impact reported in a particular study for a specific outcome, intervention, population…

Our Education, Children and Violence guidance provides school, college and alternative provision (AP) leaders across England and Wales with fiveevidence-based recommendations on how to help prevent children’s involvement in violence. Recommendations The recommendations in this report provide guidance on the ‘best bets’ from the underpinning evidence. School, college and AP leaders’ professional judgement on how…

In October 2022, we published our race equity goals and objectives. These provide us with clear and actionable targets to work towards and mean that we can be held accountable for our actions, internally and externally.  Our Race Equity Progress Report outlines our advancement towards these published goals over the past year. It describes what…

The Youth Endowment Fund exists to prevent children from becoming involved in violence. One of the ways we seek to achieve this mission is improving support for children when they are arrested. This includes diverting them from formal youth justice processes like appearing at court. This is a critical moment where effective support can change…

This is the YEF’s second annual Children, Violence and Vulnerability report (see the 2022 version). It includes survey responses from over 7,500 teenage children aged 13-17 in England and Wales about their experiences in the past 12-months. This builds on last year’s survey of 2,000 children. We’ve used the same online panel provider (Walr) that…

This report sets out the findings of a series of linked studies drawing together evidence about place-based approaches to reduce youth violence.

The research aimed to create a system map: a visual representation of the structure and relationships within the system of support for children and young people around serious violence. The map is accompanied by commentary on how the system is perceived to interact, where it works well and less well, and what this means for…

‘Leading research, driving change‘ summaries the insights gathered by 120 PAC peer researchers, aged 16 to 25, and involved 4,600 participants (aged 10-20).