The Centre for Youth Impact Practitioner Panel

As part of the legacy of the Youth Investment Fund, and particularly the importance of collaboration with practitioners through the evaluation design process, the Centre for Youth Impact is establishing a new Practitioner Panel. We’d like to work with a small group of youth practitioners to design, refine and test our new resources, and specifically the suite of measurement tools we’re working on right now. 

All our tools and resources are focused on social and emotional learning, so panel members will also need to be working with young people in a context that intends (that is, it’s designed) to support young people this way. Within the suite of tools are an observation framework focussing on the quality of staff practices, a feedback survey for young people to reflect on their engagement and experiences at your provision, an observation framework to measure changes in young people’s behaviour with peers and in groups, and a self-report survey for young people focused on social and emotional skills. These tools have been designed with the intention that they go with the grain of provision, generate insight that is both interesting and actionable, and are considered a ‘good use of time’. As a member of the Practitioner Panel, your role will be to support and challenge us to stay true to those intentions. 
 
We envisage the panel meeting online three times a year, and we’ll pay for your time to attend meetings. The meetings will be a space for us to work together on getting tools and resources ready to share more widely with youth organisations, researchers and the funder community. We will also work together to explore approaches to gathering, storing and analysing the data generated by the tools. In between meetings, we’d like you to use and test these tools and resources so that you can bring this experience to panel meetings.
 
Panel members will need to be working in a context where they can try out tools and resources directly with young people, and preferably the same group of young people over time. This will be important because some measures are designed to be used at more than one time point. 
 
The Practitioner Panel will bring vital insight to the work of the Centre, alongside our Network Leads, who convene peer to peer meetings in their regions throughout the year. We hope that learning will always be two way - we will also be able to share some useful insights into our work with Panel members, and support the development of evaluation practice within their organisations. 
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We would like the Practitioner Panel to represent the diversity of practice, practitioners, organisations and approaches that makes up ‘the youth sector’. As such, we’re now inviting expressions of interest to be part of the Practitioner Panel, and we’ll draw all these expressions together to invite the most representative group that we can. 
 
Interested? If you’d like to have a chat to find out more, please drop us a line at hello@youthimpact.uk and we’ll get back in touch. For more information about our approach and suite of tools, please read A Framework of Outcomes for Young People 2.0 and the Asking Good Questions Guide and Workbook.
 
If you’d like to submit an expression of interest, please click here.