In the summer of 2018, the Local Government Association (LGA) in England commissioned the Centre for Youth Impact to produce an outcomes framework to help partners across the English youth sector to develop and agree on mutual aims to support young people in their local areas. The work was in response to LGA’s consultations that led to its vision statement described in the report, Bright Futures: our vision for youth services, published at the end of 2017. In that report, the authors noted:
“A clear outcomes framework can help to effectively monitor the impact of a service at key milestones to spot where things aren’t working and provide opportunities to make changes where needed. It can also support evidence of collective impact across the system.”
The proposed framework was intended to support partners’ efforts to track and understand the short-, medium-, and longer-term impacts of their work on the lives of young people. The framework needed to be simple and adaptable to provision for different groups of young people and for diverse approaches.
This document is an update on the framework and is the result of two phases of work: an initial phase including desk research and widespread consultation with practitioners, commissioners and elected members, and a second phase to test the proposed framework in action. The work was undertaken by the Centre’s network of regional impact leads and its central team.
