Welcome to the Youth Endowment Fund’s Toolkit, a free, evidence-led resource bringing together research on youth violence prevention programmes and approaches to tackling serious youth violence.
The Toolkit helps organisations understand which approaches are most likely to prevent children and young people from becoming involved in violence, based on the best available evidence.
Understanding what works to prevent youth violence
The YEF Toolkit summarises the best available research on youth violence prevention programmes, drawing on real life data to show what has happened when different approaches have been used in practice.
For each approach, it explains:
Description of the approach
How effective it’s likely to be
How confident you can be in the impact
Indicative costs
Links to related resources and programmes.
Learn more background information about our Toolkit here.
Who is the YEF Toolkit for?
The YEF Toolkit has been developed to support professionals working to prevent youth violence, including police forces, local authorities, youth charities, and school leaders make evidence-informed decisions when:
Planning or commissioning 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. While it doesn’t offer fixed answers, it does highlight evidence-informed ‘best bets’ and approaches that have been shown to work well in similar contexts.
Why evidence matters in preventing serious youth violence
At the moment, high-quality evidence about how best to support children at risk of violence is hard to find, access, and understand. This can make it difficult for organisations to judge which approaches are most likely to keep children and young people safe.
The YEF Toolkit aims to bridge that gap by making high-quality evidence easier to find, understand, and use. We hope it will support better decisions about how to help children stay safe from violence and youth crime.
What is the YEF Toolkit based on?
Our Toolkit draws on the best available global research in our Evidence and Gap Map – a database of over 2,000 studies examining the effectiveness of different interventions to prevent serious violence.
The evidence base is updated regularly as new research becomes available, including findings from YEF-funded evaluations and UK-based studies.
You can read more about our approach to developing the Toolkit and the evidence that sits behind it in our Technical Guide. We updated our methodology and published a new technical guide in May 2025.
If you have any questions or suggestions about the Toolkit, please email our Head of Toolkit Laura Knight.
