Response to Labour’s ‘Building a Statutory Youth Service Consultation 2018’

In order to support its commitment to creating a quality youth service for all young people, the Labour Party have conducted a consultation to gain insights from organisations and people working in the youth sector. We limited our response to the final question, which related to effective evaluation.

 In it we argued that although some progress has been made much current evaluation practice focuses on proving at the expense of improving, is disconnected from practice and hasn’t contributed to a shared evidence base. We stressed the need for evaluation to be appropriate and proportionate to the type and scope of provision, embedded and actionable within reflective practice and shared and collective. We made a series of recommendations for Labour at national and local level around evaluation including; utilising existing tools and evidence before commissioning new work, and supporting a national data infrastructure to underpin the collection and analysis of evidence. You can read our response here.