Research reports

This report – which was co-authored by the Centre for Justice Innovation – focuses on what happens to children at the early stages of the youth justice system when they first encounter the police. This includes both informal diversion schemes that divert children from all formal outcomes and formal out-of-court disposals, which can involve a…

This is an update to the statistics published in our Beyond the Headlines report. This update includes latest data on core indicators for knife crime, policing, health, children’s services and the youth sector in England and Wales.  Core Indicators Dashboard For more details, see the full briefing or our core indicators dashboard.

Our core indicator dashboard provides a clear account of whether children’s involvement in violence is improving or worsening, by evaluating the performance of key sectors supporting these children and young people.

This report offers practical guidance to help organisations deliver effective and equitable focused deterrence (FD) in England and Wales. This guidance is aimed at the delivery of FD programmes to reduce serious violence that involves children and young people. It also acknowledges the role of influential older associates, including adults, who may be contributing to…

The current state of disproportionality Violence has devastating impacts on children and families. While children from all backgrounds can face violence, children from certain ethnic backgrounds are less safe. The majority of children in the youth justice system, and involved in violence, are White. However, relative to their share of the population, some minority ethnic…

This is an update to the statistics published in our Beyond the Headlines report. This update includes latest data on core indicators for knife crime, policing, health, children’s services and the youth sector in England and Wales.  Core Indicators Dashboard For more details, see the full briefing or our core indicators dashboard.

Background  This project is part of the wider Serious Violence Research Programme jointly led by the Youth Endowment Fund and the Department for Education. The Serious Violence Research Programme aims to establish the evidence base to inform strategies to tackle serious youth violence. The project commissioned the Systems Evidence and Gap Map (2022; Systems Evidence…

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…