What is the Toolkit?

At the Youth Endowment Fund our mission is to prevent children and young people becoming involved in violence. We do this by finding out what works and building a movement to put this knowledge into practice – our Toolkit is one way we’ll do this.

The Toolkit summarises the best available research evidence about different approaches to preventing serious youth violence. It is based on real life data about what has happened when these approaches have been used before.

It provides insight on 17 different approaches, with more to be added in the future. For each approach it explains what it is, how effective it’s likely to be, how confident you can be in the evidence of its impact, as well as indicative costs and links to related resources and programmes.

More background information about the Toolkit is available here.

Who is it for?

Our Toolkit has been developed to help police forces, local authorities, youth charities, school leaders and others use evidence when making decisions about how best to keep children safe from violence.

For example, you could be…

• Planning a new service
• Improving an existing programme
• Commissioning research
• Applying for funding

The Toolkit presents research in a way that’s easy to access and easy to understand. It’s there to complement your own expertise and local knowledge, rather than replace it. So while it can’t provide you with definitive answers, it  suggests ‘best bets’ – approaches that are likely to make a positive difference to the children you work with, because they have worked well in the past.

Why is the Toolkit needed?

At the moment, finding out what really works is difficult. Research evidence about how best to support children is hard to find, hard to access and hard to understand. That means it’s hard to make judgements about how best to support and serve children and young people.

The YEF Toolkit aims to change that. It’ll make evidence accessible and easy to understand. And we hope it will support people to routinely use evidence when they’re making decisions about how to help children stay safe from violence.

What is the Toolkit based on?

Our Toolkit draws on the best available research in our Evidence and Gap Map – a database of over 2,000 studies from across the world, on the effectiveness of different interventions to preventing serious violence.

As we learn more about what works and what information you need, we’ll update the Toolkit and add new approach areas to it.

If you have any ideas on what new approach areas you’d like to see in the future, please complete our poll here. Or if you have any questions about the Toolkit, please email our Head of Toolkit, Pete Henderson.

Find out more

You can read more about our approach to developing the Toolkit and the evidence that sits behind it in our Technical Guide.