As part of the Working Together For Advice[i] project, Youth Access is developing our work on outcomes monitoring in the youth advice sector. Our aim is to provide our members with a variety of tools and resources that will meet the outcome monitoring needs of a variety of youth advice services.

The next stage of our work is to consult you, our members, on what you need from an advice outcomes monitoring system.

We are asking you, therefore, to take a few minutes to respond to a short consultation questionnaire. It should only take about 5 minutes to complete.

The deadline for consultation responses to reach us is August 29th 2008.

Following the consultation with our members, we will consult with young people to get their views on some of the survey forms in our current Youth Advice Outcomes Toolkit, looking particularly at things like the format and language used. We will then hold further discussions about the toolkit with selected agencies, before revising the toolkit to take account of the feedback we receive from members and young people.

Starting in autumn 2008 we will pilot different elements of the Youth Advice Outcomes Toolkit with 10 youth advice agencies. The pilots will be supported by a development worker to help embed outcomes monitoring in their agencies and will be subject to a thorough independent evaluation. It is intended that each pilot agency will receive an individualised analysis of their outcomes data, which they can use to demonstrate the impact of their advice service. We will then revise the toolkit further and provide training on its use to the wider youth advice sector.

If you wish to express interest in your agency becoming one of the 10 pilots of the revised Youth Advice Outcomes Toolkit, or in becoming involved in this work in another way, please contact:

James Kenrick, Advice Services Development Manager (email: james@youthaccess.org.uk; Tel: 020 8772 9900)
or
Steve Lee, Advice Services Development Officer – Policy (email: steve@youthaccess.org.uk; Tel: 020 8772 9900)

Complete the short consultation questionnaire

Note: [i] The Working Together for Advice (WTFA) project is funded by the Big Lottery Fund to develop a range of support services to independent advice centres in England. It is a consortium of Advice Services Alliance, Advice UK, Age Concern England, Citizens Advice, Law Centres Federation and Youth Access. Youth Access’ outcomes project is part of the Advice Outcomes workstream, which is one of a total of eight workstreams in the WTFA project. The overall aim of the Advice Outcomes workstream is to enable the advice sector to better demonstrate the value of advice work and its beneficial impact on the lives of advice agency users.