New funding from the Department of Children, Schools and Families (DCSF), the Department of Health (DH) and the Big Lottery Fund (BLF) is supporting Youth Access to embark on another three year programme. The focus of our work is to support our members and enable young people to have access to high quality services wherever they live. We will focus our activities in five main areas:

Quality and Standards
We plan to revise Youth Access Quality Standards for Youth Information, Advice, Counselling and Support Services to ensure they meet the challenges of the new national policy agenda. We will also support members to look at how they can use YA’s standards, enabling them to become ready for local commissioning under the DCSF’s new Information Advice and Guidance Standards. We will also be working in partnership with the adult advice sector to develop a new rights-based advice standard to replace the Legal Services Commission’s Quality Mark for general advice providers.

Workforce and Training
YA will continue to look at how it can develop and expand its role in workforce and training as this becomes an increasingly prominent area of youth policy. This will include identifying how current and future training meets National Occupational Standards. We are interested in examining how we can support staff to accredit their learning and will be investigating the possibility of developing a new NVQ in youth advice. Work is currently underway to gather better evidence of the youth counselling workforce’s needs, leading to the development of a workforce strategy. We will continue to build on our successful range of courses and events to meet the needs and interests of practitioners and managers working in information, advice counseling and support services for young people.

Developing the Evidence Base
We will be consulting young people and members on a new outcome tool for youth advice based on our previous work. The new tool will be subjected to testing and piloting with agencies. We hope to collate data from the pilots to offer further national evidence of the impact of advice on better outcomes for young people. YA will also work with colleagues in Child and Adolescence Mental Health Services (CAMHS) to develop better tools for measuring the outcomes of counselling. We intend to further develop our plans for strengthening the national evidence base for counselling in YIACS through a new research project. Throughout the next three years, YA will bring evidence of the impact of advice and counselling to the attention of policymakers, commissioners and providers.

Policy and Communications
Throughout the next three years we will bring relevant updates and analyses of national policy and practice resources to help members stay ahead in the fast changing world in which services for young people operate. We will also respond to consultations on issues of relevance to our membership. The new funding will help us to improve the ways in which members have opportunities to comment and share their experiences with Youth Access and its wider network of members.

Signposting to YIACS
By continuing to improve and expand our database of YIACS we will ensure young people and their carers are signposted via the telephone and online to local information, advice and counselling services.