At the end of the first year of the Universal Youth Work Strategic Partnership, it is too early to determine the full extent of impact on the partnership. Plans are in place to focus on this area in year three of the evaluation. In the meantime, consultants have identified the key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that have emerged from the field work.
STRENGTHS
- Investment has brought 5 partners together to work more strategically.
- New services are opening, bringing more coverage across localities and wider engagement with young people.
- More youth workers and volunteers have been recruited to support existing and new universal youth work.
- Additional investment was secured jointly (e.g. CashBack for Communities) and seperately (e.g. Emergency Fund awarded to AYP).
- Partners have worked together in responding to continuing youth services through the lockdown phases.
WEAKNESSES
- Care is needed to make provision non-discriminatory, in particular avoiding UYW from being perceived as Christian outreach/recruitment.
- EPYA needs to strengthen quantitative and qualitative reporting to reflect both joint achievements and separate actions.
- Differentiation is needed between universal and other forms of youth work in reporting frameworks to prioritise universal youth work with this funding.
- Perth City has limited reach to a low proportion of the secondary school population.*1
OPPORTUNITIES
- To create a strategic model for growing new youth work.
- To conduct profiling of young people across Perth & Kinross in order to respond to wider needs and aspirations.
- To develop a progressive model of youth work training for local workers and volunteers.
- To use existing funds to leverage wider partnership investment.
- To raise the quality of local youth work provision and its capacity deliver shared strategic outcomes that benefit young people.
- To have reliable monitoring of UYW.
THREATS
- In partnership with partner organisations, procedures are needed to raise transparency of internal trading and to manage potential conflicts of interest within the partnership.
- The Covid-19 lockdown has halted face to face provision and support is needed to revive existing provision after lockdown and continue with ongoing developments.
- Funders need to clarify how new providers are introduced to the strategic partnership, so that the investment continues to build cohesive and collaborative approaches to UYW and new providers are counted towards successes for the whole partnership.
1* An internal paper has been given to funders relating to potential risks identified through the evaluation process. Further information will be made available in future reports or when it is appropriate to do so.
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