Minding the gaps

As the dust settled on last summer’s riots, attention shifted from the young people who had been rioting to the ‘troubled families’ they grew up in. David Cameron pledged that his government should be judged on its success at transforming the lives of 120,000 such families by 2015. But in an area where government has claimed it will fix the problem, what is the role for independent funders and charities? Where are the gaps?Troubled families, according to the UK government, are those where parents are out of work, children are not in school, and family members are involved in anti-social behaviour and crime. These problems are often long-standing and inter-generational—children whose parents have multiple problems are eight times more likely to be suspended or excluded from school than other children, and ten times more likely to be in trouble with the police. The 120,000 most troubled families in the UK cost society an estimated £9bn every year.

Troubled families are a UK government priority—last month it committed an extra £448m to target the most difficult families, and has pledged to expand early years services to try to prevent problems emerging. These efforts are encouraging, but they will not reach all families in trouble, and financial pressures threaten the success of work in this area.

Independent funders do have a role to play in supporting these troubled families, but it is not a straightforward one. However, there are gaps where more support is needed and where charitable funding could have  real impact.

• Support for vulnerable families in the earliest years can prevent problems later in life. The government have talked a lot about early intervention, but there are still a lot of gaps to fill—for example the commitment to doubling the Family Nurse Partnerships programme by 2015 will still only cover 40% of estimated need.
• Ensuring the quality of support for the most challenging families. With recent cuts in public funding, projects supporting troubled families face larger case loads, and are having to shorten their interventions and are provide fewer outreach services—which undermines their effectiveness.
• Providing support for mental health problems. There is a need for staff who are trained to recognise mental health problems, make timely referrals and provide families with practical support.

This is a challenging and complex area, but that is not a reason for funders to shy away from it. Charities can make a crucial difference in this area—charities like Family Action, whose Building Bridges project helps families with multiple and complex problems. Helping these families to tackle problems early can prevent a generation of children growing up to face the same problems their parents have. The potential for a positive impact is huge.

A version of this blog first appeared on Latest from Alliance.

From research to reality

The knowledge-sharing website: best thing since sliced bread?

When you publish research, it’s interesting (and occasionally unsettling) to look back a year on and ask what it has really achieved. Who has read the report? What impact has it had? Has anyone actually changed what they do as a result?

Often it can be very difficult to capture the impact of research or to attribute the change to what you did. So, it is always encouraging when there is something tangible to point to.

Last March, NPC published a report about knowledge sharing among funders. Our research found that funders were not sharing knowledge as well as they might and argued that there was a case for developing a specialist website to encourage a freer flow of ideas and information. In response to this, and despite some scepticism from funders, NPC, the Association of Charitable Foundations (ACF), and the City Bridge Trust decided to run a six-month pilot website. The website, www.fundernetwork.org.uk, was established in June 2011 with support from a group of foundations.

A year on from the research report, the website has over 300 members from 150 trusts and foundations, who are using the site to search for information, learn from peers, and share what they know. An evaluation of the site, published today, suggests that it has been a great success:

• 88% of those surveyed say that the site has given them a better understanding of what others are doing, and two-thirds say that it has helped them to learn about an issue.
• Nine in ten say that it is valuable resource that they would like to see continue, and that the website provides a ‘safe space’ for learning and sharing.
• A third say that it has helped them to save time in their work, and acts as a valuable support network. One funder says that it is ‘the best thing since sliced bread’.

The knowledge-sharing website is a great example of action being taken as a result of research—getting the findings of a report off the shelf and bringing them to life. It will now continue in 2012, with plans to build membership and improve the site. Although the site is aimed at funders, the report and website evaluation have relevance to other organisations that are concerned with learning from peers and sharing what they know, and for infrastructure organisations in particular. At a time when infrastructure is most under threat, and struggling to prove its value, this may be a small piece of evidence that it is worth taking risks and supporting efforts to encourage learning and knowledge sharing throughout the sector.

Misspent youth?

Entering employment is one of the most significant transitions to adulthood. Young men who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) between the ages of 16 and 18 are four times more likely to be unemployed later in life and five times more likely to have a criminal record.

This is expensive. Research by the University of York suggests that a young person who is NEET will cost £56,000 in public services and  £104,000 in opportunity costs by retirement age. The costs of the current 16 to 18-year-old NEET cohort will run to tens of billions of pounds by the time they reach retirement.

Yesterday, Nick Clegg announced a ‘payment by results’ scheme where charities and businesses will get £2,200 for each 16 to 17-year-old NEET young person they help back into work or education—with payment staggered so that the full amount is given only if the young person is still in work or education a year later.

Given the huge costs involved, and the current challenges facing young people, this funding seems like good news, albeit a little late. But as ever, the devil will be in the detail…

Working it out

Being NEET for short periods of time is actually quite normal; it is the 10% who are NEET for six months or more that need help most. Although the scheme is focusing on those with below C grades at GCSE, it is not clear whether funding will prioritise the longer-term NEET and provide incentives for working with those who are most vulnerable. Unless this is factored into the targeting and reward structure of the fund, there is a risk that paying by results will simply encourage charities and businesses to ‘cherry pick’ the easiest cases and ‘park’ the more difficult ones.

It is also important to ask whether there will be payments for progress, as well as final outcomes. Building the confidence and skills of a very vulnerable young person, and taking them 90% of the way towards being job-ready, may be much more of a ‘result’ than getting a more able young person into a job. But unless the scheme recognises such improvements in soft skills, it is a result that is unlikely to generate payment.

Finally, tracking hard outcomes is not always as easy as is implied. I do not know of any organisation that can reliably say what happens to all its young people one year after they leave its services. It will be interesting to hear whether the burden of proof around employment outcomes will lie at the door of charities, funders or intermediate agencies. It would be great if the onus is on statutory agencies to capture and release the outcomes data, but I suspect it will be charities that have to carry the costs.

In March NPC is due to publish a report looking at measurement issues facing charities working with young people who are NEET or at risk. You can read Getting back on track, our 2009 report on young people who are NEET, on our website.

I predict a riot (followed by a targeted family intervention strategy)

According to the Prime Minister, one of the root causes of last week’s riots are 120,000 or so families with complex and multiple problems. In a speech yesterday he said his government should be judged on its success at transforming the lives of these families. What should we make of this focus—sensible strategy or reactive gimmick?

After a week of public anger at the young people involved, a focus on family background is certainly welcome. The relationship between parental disadvantages and children’s difficulties is clear: children with parents experiencing five or more problems (eg, mental health problems, poor housing, unemployment) are eight times as likely to be suspended or excluded from school and ten times as likely to be in trouble with the police.

But any government initiative needs careful consideration, and then commitment—changing the lives of the most troubled families is not straightforward and quick fixes won’t work. Parents are often resistant to the very services designed to help them, and the most vulnerable families are least likely to access and benefit from support—often because they think that their children might be taken away or because they have been turned away from services in the past.

Long-term support is effective

Experts say that the key to working with the most difficult families is having one assertive key worker that can get to the bottom of the problems and co-ordinate support from different services. Small caseloads and long-term, intensive support are essential. Although such support looks expensive—up to £20,000 per family on one programme—the average savings can be double this, and up to £130,000 for addressing the most chaotic families. Spending money in this area makes sense.

Charities play a vital role in working with these families. First, they are not seen as a statutory authority so it is often easier for them to gain the trust of resistant parents. Second, they are effective at drawing in volunteers from the local community to support families in trouble. This is particularly valuable both in providing essential practical help (e.g., with budgeting or mealtimes) and in providing ongoing support after a statutory intervention ends.

It’s good to see that government is pledging support for the most disadvantaged families. But it must recognise and expand effective projects that already exist, rather than re-inventing the wheel; long-term investment in projects that can demonstrate their outcomes will be money well spent.

Standing out from the crowd

First used by cattle farmers, made popular by Labour politicians, ringfences are now out of favour. Where once a dozen different ‘ringfenced’ (ie, protected) funding streams supported young people, soon there will be a single ‘Early Intervention Grant’ to be spent at the local authority’s discretion. It will cover everything form children’s centres and short breaks to services for teen pregnancy and youth unemployment.

Take away the ringfences and you suddenly have a very crowded market where it’s difficult to separate sheep from goats. Charities will now need to make the case for their area of work (not just for their intervention) among a much wider range of competing needs. So far, the main victim seems to be youth services, which as the Children’s Minister admitted last week, are ‘bearing the brunt of the cuts’.

Is there anything that charities working with young people can do to make their case in this environment?

In his speech a couple of weeks ago, the Children’s Minister set out his vision for the future of the sector. It was a little short on detail, but reading between the lines, I think there are three main things that charities working with young people will need to do:

• Target the most vulnerable young people. In a world with less money, there is unlikely to be funding for universal youth services. Charities will need to be provide strong evidence of how they target and support the most vulnerable young people and be pro-active in educating commissioners about why they should address a particular need.
• Show willingness to collaborate. This includes involving young people in the design of services; drawing in support from volunteers and businesses in the community; and proving that you are pooling resources to reduce costs. Small charities with niche expertise and low costs may need to team up with larger organisations that can deal with commissioning processes.
• Focus on outcomes. Funding looks like it will be directed to interventions that can secure clear results, particularly where this involves a saving to government. Early indications (eg, ‘reinvestment grants’ in the youth offending sector) suggest that government is looking to commission consortia to test ‘payment by results’. As the name suggests, the Early Intervention Grant is likely to favour approaches that can demonstrate that they prevent bigger problems downstream.

Adjusting to changes in funding structures is tough, and it is difficult to separate rhetoric from reality in ministerial speeches. But charities that can adapt to new priorities will be best placed to stand out from the crowd.

This is the third in a series of blogs looking at changes affecting charities in the youth sector. Previous blogs were on the need for evidence and the value of long-term support.

A sporting chance

Sport is a national obsession. For many, it is source of inspiration and an integral part of life.

Anecdotally, we also know that sport can be a powerful tool for tackling youth crime—it can get young people off the streets, out of trouble, engaged in education, and back on track. However, hard evidence is lacking, and without more detailed analysis, it is difficult to make a convincing case for investment.

NPC’s new report, Teenage kicks, shows that when sport is used as part of a wider programme of education and support, it can be highly effective at tackling youth crime, and provide excellent value for money. Given that youth crime costs society around £11bn every year, there is a compelling case for government and other funders to support such projects.

Boxing clever

For example, one of the projects featured in the report is the Boxing Academy in north London. It works with young people who have struggled in mainstream schools, many of whom are known offenders and have been excluded from school. The Academy combines boxing training with other sports and regular lessons, such as English and maths.

The results are impressive: young people who attend the Academy are more likely to achieve qualifications than their peers in Pupil Referral Units, and are less likely to re-offend. This means that the Academy is highly cost-effective: for every £1 invested, it creates £3 of value for the young people it works with and for society.

Numbers up

Economic analysis only tells part of the story—the report also includes case studies of young people whose lives have been transformed by sports projects, and a review of the evidence around effective sports interventions. But economic analysis is a powerful way of valuing and articulating social impact.

Measuring outcomes and comparing the costs of problems and solutions can provide valuable insights into what is effective, and speaks in a language that funders understand. But for analysis to be meaningful, charities need to measure their results, funders need to dedicate more money to research, and government needs to open its data sources. Only then can we really understand the full benefits of sport in tackling a range of problems.

Getting the word out

You’ve done your painstaking research and written your report—a heavy thing about the size and weight of telephone directory. You’re exhausted. Then someone in the communications department comes up to you and says something about ‘dissemination’. It’s enough to make you splutter: ‘What, you mean I actually have to make sure people read this thing?’

Of course, I exaggerate and simplify. I’m sure that this almost never happens. But during my recent research, a charitable funder did indeed confess to something similar. A programme was funded, a report was written and dutifully mailed out. Unfortunately, it was all a bit last-minute and the funder was privately sceptical about whether anyone read it or if it had any impact (despite costing £12 per copy to produce). Dissemination is too often an afterthought or a formality, tacked on at the end of projects.

In the current environment, knowledge-sharing probably does not feature highly among most people’s priorities. But making the most of your knowledge is vital, especially when financial resources are stretched. Charitable funders know a great deal about the areas they fund, about supporting charities, and about how to fund effectively. By sharing what they know, they can ensure that the best approaches are adopted, efforts are not duplicated and mistakes are not repeated.

As our new report Foundations for knowledge shows, there is a mood for change and there are many good examples of what funders are doing in the UK and abroad. As I have argued here and here, we could all be doing more to share mistakes and to make knowledge-sharing a ‘demand-focused discipline’.

Supported by City Bridge Trust and other funders, the Association of Charitable Foundations (ACF) and NPC are running a simple pilot website to share knowledge between funders. It will contain funder-specific search tools, a Q&A space, and a forum for topical issues. We are convening a group of funders to be part of this pilot—whether contributing resources, ideas or signing up to use the website. Please contact me if you would like to be involved.

Evidence is the best argument you can make

What would happen if you weren’t here? This, the measurement geeks at NPC will tell you, is called the ‘counterfactual’.

One way of thinking about a charity’s impact is to consider the counterfactual argument, to ask: what would the world look like if a given charity was not here? What would happen to the people it supports? Where would they go? How would the local area be different?

Let’s say that we get rid of a charity supporting vulnerable young people. Will we see an increase in youth crime in the local area? A rise in truancy, a rise in teen pregnancy, an unhappier, less motivated group of teenagers? Or will nothing change? Perhaps they will sort out their own challenges.

For large parts of the youth sector, we’re about to find out. Recent reports suggest that the sector is facing 28% cuts over the next year with 3,000 youth workers set to lose their jobs. The current generation of 13–25 year olds—the ones with few job prospects, the loss of EMA, and a rise in tuition fees—are an unfortunate control group in assessing the value of the youth sector. But maybe they will ‘grow out’ of their problems, as Graham Stuart MP, devil’s advocate and chair of the Education Select Committee has suggested.

Why is the youth sector facing such severe cuts? It’s hard to tell why cuts are falling where they are. But a possible explanation is that the youth sector has struggled to provide evidence of its impact. Graham Stuart was damning of the sector, stating: ‘It is an extraordinary failure that you can’t make a better fist of explaining what difference you make.’ But, given that many charities with good evidence are also facing cuts, perhaps evidence is just an excuse.

Evidence is not a guarantee of funding, but it is the best argument that you can make. It is clear that if you don’t start to make your own argument for your impact, the local authorities will do it for you by seeing how things look in your absence. For charities that can’t prove their value, we are going to find out the hard way what their impact really was.

This is the second in a series of three blogs about charities in the youth sector. Next time: negotiating changes to funding structures.

Beware the quick fix

As NPC wrote last week, the charity Fairbridge is notable for its long-term support. Most young people attending its centres receive support for over six months. Some relationships last years. But as costs are cut, it is exactly this type of long-term support that is threatened. Why does this matter?

What is the value of long-term support?

The most troubled young people have spent their lives being let down—by their parents, by the care and education systems. They need time to build trust, a sustained relationship and a chance to develop a routine. The best projects are those—like Fairbridge—that they can rely on for long-term support, where they know that they do not just have one chance.

Many youth workers know this intuitively: you cannot simply put a vulnerable young person on a two week course and hope to turn his or her life around. It takes time, effort and (for the charity) funding. Support for young people does not work on a ‘law of diminishing returns’, with big improvements happening quickly, and then impact tailing off.

Yet there is a risk that short-term approaches will be sought as costs are driven down. It takes evaluation to show that the story is more complex—that short-term improvements can be misleading, and that ‘returns’ for young people increase over time rather than diminish.

What can evaluation show us?

Last year, Fairbridge discovered something troubling. Its evaluation, Back from the brink found that the good results from its early engagement with young people did not last. Its monitoring showed that young people’s personal and social skills improved after one week, but suffered a dip after that to a score lower than when they had started, despite ongoing support from the charity (see diagram).

However, scores gradually picked up again so that after ten months they exceeded the score at the beginning and continued to rise. Remarkably, this finding was consistent across hundreds of young people, and across teams in different parts of the country. Nor is it unique to Fairbridge—research into therapeutic programmes elsewhere has shown similar results.

What does this mean?

Young people do not develop in a simple, linear trajectory. They experience  ‘ups and downs’; they make progress and suffer setbacks. There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that there is a critical point in development in which disruption, and hence discomfort, is a necessary feature of progress.

Reviewing a range of research, the evaluation concludes: ‘It seems that this dip is an essential part of the development process, and that young people need to experience something of a crisis in themselves before they can make progress.’ The conclusion? ‘It appears to take more than a year for the full benefits of Fairbridge to show through.’

What happens to that young person if you stop working with them after one or two weeks, or even two months? Support may be lost at exactly the time when it is needed most. It takes time (and a willingness to evaluate your impact) to see this type of development.

What does this mean for youth services?

It will be a disaster if Fairbridge’s fate is an indication of the broader direction of travel across youth services. Projects that look expensive up-front will suffer regardless of their long-term impact and the savings they generate. As costs are driven down, it is ‘social returns’ that are likely to diminish.

This is the first in a series of three blogs looking at issues arising for charities in the youth sector. Next week: what evidence for youth services?

Keeping up appearances

‘Working in partnership’ is one of those things that everyone wants to hear. But is it always a good thing? During my recent research on young offenders, a charity CEO took me aside and told me in a conspiratorial whisper that ‘Partnership working is the suppression of mutual loathing in pursuit of government money’.

What did he mean? I had always assumed that ‘partnership working’ was about different organisations working together. Surely that’s positive? Instead of everyone doing their own thing, in their own way and duplicating effort, you coordinate activities, pool risks and resources, and get better results. Policymakers and commissioners are keen on this, and charities are dancing to the tune.

But as that CEO revealed, many charities are privately sceptical about this brave new world. In the youth justice sector, charities describe aggressive competition for funding, a crowded and ‘cut-throat’ market for services, and an extremely uncertain commissioning environment.

At the same time as pulling together, charities are being pushed apart—by competing for the same contracts, guarding knowledge for competitive advantage and driving down one another’s costs. One charity described the appearance of new funding opportunities as akin to a ‘feeding frenzy at the zoo’; elsewhere, a large charity and major public body are squabbling over who gets the publicity for their shared intervention.

There is an assumption that partnership working is always good, but individual examples suggest that the experience can be frustrating, time-consuming and costly to get right. However, these tensions rarely come to light because appearances have to be kept up, a game has to be played: ‘mutual loathing’ is suppressed in pursuit of money.

What are your stories of partnership working? When does it work? What makes it fail? NPC is interested to hear your thoughts.

Off the shelf, on the agenda

In my darker moments, I sometimes think: what is the point of research? All these reports that sit on shelves gathering dust…who reads them? What happens to them? What difference do they actually make?

At such times of crisis it is important to have articles of faith. For me, one of these is NPC’s research on disabled children, Ordinary lives. This report highlighted the need for short break services for disabled children and led to concrete change and additional funding for the sector. It prompted one foundation, The True Colours Trust, to fund a campaign that put the issue on the agenda and resulted in an extra £430m from government for services for disabled children and their families.

There is currently an appetite for change in the youth justice sector. Charities and funders can use research to ensure that they are focussing on areas where they can have the biggest impact. In our recent report on young offenders, Trial and error, we highlight a number of gaps where voluntary funding can help to tackle youth crime, including:

• work to support the children of prisoners (two thirds of whom go on to offend themselves);
• mentoring and advocacy for children at risk of offending; and
• research to build the evidence base into what works (eg, a cost-benefit analysis of alternatives to custody).

We want to talk to funders interested in filling these gaps. If you would like to discuss our research, and what we can do to help funders, please email me here.

‘Flog young offenders, put them in stocks and pelt them with oranges.’

‘Flog young offenders, put them in stocks and pelt them with oranges.’ This is a response from a member of the public to a recent government consultation on how to punish young offenders.

Although responses like this do not seem to be very constructive, the consultation itself is a good idea. At present the public has a limited understanding of the youth justice system, and efforts to engage people in what happens to young offenders is positive. The public tend to assume that sentences are ‘softer’ than they really are. Research shows that when they know more about how the system works, what different sentences involve and the lives of individual offenders, they favour more constructive and less punitive approaches.

But if government is looking for new ideas on how to address youth crime in local areas, as well as asking the public, it could also take a closer look at what charities are doing.

NPC’s forthcoming research on charities working with young offenders (out Wednesday)highlights a number of innovative schemes that deserve proper attention. It shows that projects involving dance, boxing and vehicle maintenance are effective at engaging young people and diverting them from crime. When we spoke to 16-year-old Michael (on a community sentence for drug offences), he pointed out that the conventional punishments that he had received actually made him worse—they simply helped him mix with other offenders and return to a life of crime. To his surprise, what worked was an intensive dance course run by the charity Dance United—it provided discipline, support and a route out of offending. He is now married and in full-time employment.

Our report Trial and error shows that the things we tend to think of as ‘tough’ generally do not work well. Three in four young people leaving prison re-offend within a year of release; ‘Scared straight’ programmes—taking delinquent young people into prisons to ‘scare them straight’—actually increase offending; military-style boot camps do nothing to reduce criminality. What works are schemes that set firm boundaries but also provide support and alternatives to offending. But given the ‘stock’ opinions and risk-averse culture towards offenders, without stronger evidence it will be difficult to convince policymakers, magistrates and orange pelters of the effective alternatives provided by charities. Our report Trial and error urges charities to evaluate their schemes and funders to support them to do this.