Social Futures Institute
     

The impact of UK Youth Achievement Awards on young people's perceptions of positive life choices

Professor Tony Chapman, Peter van der Graaf, Emma Bailey, Catherine Iles, Jonathan Roberts.

Sponsor/collaborating institutions

This 12-month project is jointly funded by UK Youth, The Drinkaware Trust and JP Morgan Philanthropy.

Background

UK Youth is a leading national youth work charity supporting over 750,000 young people, helping them to raise their aspirations, realise their potential and have their achievements recognised through non-formal, accredited education programmes and activities.

Youth Achievement Awards were introduced nationally in 1997 and are an activity-based approach to peer education. The awards are designed to help develop more effective participative practice by encouraging young people to progressively take more responsibility in selecting, planning and leading activities that are based on their interests.

The Youth Achievement Awards were initially established in the youth work sector as a means of recognising and accrediting young people's achievements through a peer group approach. More recently, schools, colleges, national charities, youth offender institutions, youth offending teams, Connexions partnerships and training providers are finding them an equally valuable tool in motivating and engaging their young people.

Aims

The research programme aims to:

  • This research aims to evaluate the impact of UK Youth 'Youth Achievement Awards' on young people's ability to make positive life choices.
  • The focus will be on the impact of the intervention on young people's attitudes towards the future.
  • We intend to explore the effectiveness of the intervention focusing particularly on a range of centres which offer the 'Drinkaware Challenge'.
  • We also intend to focus significant attention on issues surrounding young people and debt.

Methods

We will undertake:

  • background literature research to inform our interpretation of the qualitative data.
  • interviews with young people who are currently undertaking the Youth Achievement Awards, the alumni of the achievement award, project workers who use the award and stakeholders in the community.
  • observational techniques to find out how different approaches to delivering the Youth Achievement Awards impacts on the experience of young people by collecting comparable data across centres in different kinds of locations and with varied spatial and other contextual.

Other methods may include group discussions with the young people and visual sociological techniques. Visual sociological techniques may include photographs for description purposes and videos to record young people speaking about their lives and their experiences of intervention for use in presentational material when we report on the research.

Key findings