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 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…

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…

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).  

Combining a survey of 2,025 children and young people with a review of national statistics, the Children, violence and vulnerability report explores the ways in which violence – and fear of violence – is shaping children’s lives.

The Systems Evidence and Gap Map is part of a joint research project, run by the Youth Endowment Fund and Department for Education.

This is the the third Insights Brief from our COVID-19 Learning Project.

This report seeks to understand what key ingredients enable movements to realise significant change – as well as what we can learn from movements associated with partial or little change.

We commissioned our partners at the Early Intervention Foundation to conduct a review of what the evidence already tells us about different types of family support programmes. This briefing is a summary of their findings.

This report sets out how we’ve identified the areas we’ll invest in through the first round of the Neighbourhood Fund.

This is the second Insights Brief from our COVID-19 Learning Project.

The Youth Endowment Fund's Programmes Evidence and Gap Map is the largest map of studies on this topic in the world.

This is the first in a series of Insights Brief from our COVID-19 Learning Project.

This briefing was an interim resource, which has now been replaced by the YEF Toolkit. While we were working on detailed evidence resources, we created the briefing to provide an interim summary of what the evidence says about how effective different approaches are at preventing children from becoming involved in violence. Since it was published, we’ve produced the YEF Toolkit, which provides fully accessible summaries of the best available research based on a comprehensive and systematic approach to the evidence.