Systems Evidence and Gap Map

The Systems Evidence and Gap Map (EGM) is the largest repository of evidence of its kind.

It’s here to help you navigate research on different systems of support that are available to children and families in the UK and Ireland (like education, health, social care or community support), and how they might protect (or expose) children and young people to violence.

The Systems EGM is a free to access, interactive resource. It provides policy makers, policy analysts and researchers with an easy way to find studies about the way different systems of support work.

About our partnership

Our Systems EGM is part of a wider partnership between the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) and the Department for Education (DfE). Together, we’re working on the DfE-YEF Serious Violence Research Programme, which aims to better understand how a person’s journey through different systems of support and the different qualities of the experiences along the way, might protect or expose them to involvement in serious youth violence.

Why we need a Systems EGM

To deliver our mission, to prevent children and young people becoming involved in violence, it is critical that we first map existing research on what works best to prevent children from becoming involved in violence. We’ve already looked at what we know about different interventions in our Programmes EGM. Together with the Department for Education, we’re building on this work to map research on the way different systems work to support young people and prevent their involvement in serious violence.

Tackling serious youth violence is a top priority for Government. Government’s approach to preventing serious violence involves a whole system strategy, with partners from across different sectors coming together in a multi-agency response that is focused on tackling serious violence through early intervention and prevention, supporting communities and local partnerships, and law enforcement and the criminal justice response.

What the Systems EGM tells us

The sample of studies (400 out of 1,160 eligible papers) in our Systems EGM tell us that:

• That our sample of the evidence base is of good quality, though recognition of researcher’s own bias wasn’t consistently acknowledged within studies in the map.
• The majority of papers featured content on the ‘crime and justice system’ (61%), social care system (42%) and multi-sector insights (39%).

The Systems EGM also found some possible gaps in the research evidence:

• In general, we found few literature reviews (just 7% of total papers), suggesting that not much work has been undertaken to summarise the existing literature.
• Only 3% of the total papers in the map were dedicated to co-production. Of these studies only one was a high or medium quality evaluation and none were high or medium quality reviews. This suggests a gap in our knowledge about co-production approaches to reducing young people’s involvement in violence.
• Very few papers discussed Violence Reduction Units (VRUs) (less than 1%), which may suggest a gap in the literature about the role of VRUs. Though this is expected since VRUs were established in 2019 in England and Wales, this does not take away from the suggestion that future research examining VRUs could be useful.
• Studies that broke down their findings by gender or race were very limited.
• Compared to the themes of access to and engagement with systems of support (which both featured in 48% of the papers), few papers included an investigation of the way young people and their families navigated through different systems (22%).

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