Bringing Youth Work Practice and Research Together

The National Youth Agency (NYA) Launches a new Hub to help youth work practice and research better inform each other.

Across the country youth work is engaged in vital services and support across all aspects of young people’s lives, for example in the face of mounting challenges from knife crime, mental health and future employment.

Youth work and associated services are having to do this whilst adapting to new environments, contexts and demands; and further research and development is needed to help understand this.

The NYA Research Hub (The Hub) is being launched to bring together the voices of young people, youth workers, academic researchers and other stakeholders to ensure that youth work practice ‘on the ground’ feeds in to research and vice versa, with the results helping to better inform practice, policy and sector development through a clear evidence-based approach, initially in the following areas:

  • Determining the cost benefit of investing in preventative services and open access youth work.
  • Investigating how youth work and associated services adapt to new environments.
  • Exploring particular aspects of youth work and young people’s lives.
  • Facilitating research findings to be incorporated into training, development and policy.

The NYA Research team will provide a practice informing paper by collating evidence and case-studies from across the country to share knowledge and best practice to benefit all youth work and ultimately young people.

Submissions for evidence are now open and NYA are also opening invitations for interested parties to join the Research Hub Steering Group to help shape a national programme of Youth Work research, and to encourage more funding into areas of youth work research.

For further information visit the Research Hub page here

Or contact research@nya.org.uk

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