Social Prescribing Youth Network (SPYN)

A free network for anyone interested in social prescribing for children and young people.

Join the Social Prescribing Youth Network (SPYN) for free to stay up to date with news, developments, resources, funding and training and receive priority invitations to youth social prescribing events.

About the network

Social Prescribing – the means by which people of all ages can find their way into local, wellbeing-boosting initiatives, with the help of a link worker, or community navigator – is now thriving, and delivering fantastic results for people all over the UK.

Traditionally used to help adults and older adults find non-medical ways of combating loneliness and stress, research has shown that social prescribing has multiple health and social benefits for young people too, with dozens of compelling reasons why this work should begin as early in life as possible.

The Social Prescribing Youth Network (SPYN) was founded by StreetGames in 2018 with the ambition that every Primary Care Network in England should have at least one Link Worker dedicated to working with children and young people. SPYN has since grown to over 1,300 members, including Link Workers, voluntary and community organisations, social prescribing coordinators, commissioners, funders, GPs, youth workers, police officers, teachers and researchers. Its achievements have included winning the ‘Children & Young People Now’ Award 2021, delivering a £900k pilot in Sheffield, Southampton, Luton and Brighton & Hove in 2019-21 and publishing numerous resources (see below) including principles for developing an accessible, all-age social prescribing model.

In December 2024 we were delighted to announce that our team at UCL’s Social Biobehavioural Research Group would be the new hosts of the network. Four key individuals are involved in the day-to-day running of SPYN:

1. Dr Daniel Hayes, an expert in youth social prescribing who will head up the network.
2. Prof Daisy Fancourt who will provide expertise in running large networks, having led the £1.25 million UKRI MARCH network and 70-country COVID-Minds network.
3. Rachel Marshall who manages research communications and impact work for UCL SBB, and
4. Nikita Arslanovski who coordinates communications and finance for the team.

We secured funding for the network to deliver: a series of roundtables, Member Meetups, updated free online training, resources to help develop, implement and scale ‘good’ social prescribing and an end-of-year symposium to connect stakeholders and share learning.

How to get involved

New members can join SPYN here to receive future updates about the expanding world of social prescribing for children and young people. Our newsletter will bring you the latest research, resources, events, training and more – all directly to your inbox.

Membership is free and open to all those interested in bringing social prescribing and its benefits to the younger generations. Whether you are a Link Worker, social prescribing coordinator, voluntary and community worker, commissioner, funder, health professional across primary or secondary care, or a researcher – join SPYN and be a part of the youth social prescribing movement in the UK and beyond.

Join the Social Prescribing Youth Network

Contact us

If you have any SPYN-related queries you can get in touch with the team at spyn@ucl.ac.uk.

We would love to showcase and highlight the work and successes of SPYN members in future newsletters. If you have contributions, articles or news stories that you would like to share, please get in touch by emailing us.

Latest news

In February 2026 we held our Youth Social Prescribing Symposium. As well as discussing research, policy and practice in the field, together with partners the National Academy for Social Prescribing and the Southbank Centre we launched two new free resources:

1. “Best Practice Guidelines: Child & Youth Social Prescribing” setting out what good looks like and providing practical recommendations for commissioners and policymakers, VCFSE organisations, link workers and frontline practitioners, and researchers and evaluators.
2. “Social Prescribing for Children and Young People” a 45 minute online training course freely available to everyone interested in learning how children and young people’s wellbeing can be enhanced through social prescribing.

This work draws on our learning from five national roundtables convened between June and November 2025. These brought together: young people; link workers; Voluntary, Community, Faith and Social Enterprise (VCFSE) organisations; researchers; and commissioners and policymakers to identify what constitutes best practice in child and youth social prescribing. You can find visual summaries of the discussions below.

Resources

Since its launch in 2018, SPYN has developed numerous practical resources for the sector. You can find a collection of these below.

Many of other resources draw on previous work with NHS England & NHS Improvement (NHSE&I), who in 2020 commissioned the Social Prescribing Youth Network to develop a proposal for ‘youth social prescribing’ and help build an all-age model of social prescribing. These resources, authored by Dr Marie Polley, Dr Marcello Bertotti and Paul Jarvis-Beesley were co-produced with: Four pilot delivery sites in Brighton & Hove, Luton, Sheffield and Southampton, over 600 members of the Social Prescribing Youth Network (via an online survey), focus groups of parents, led by Family Action, and Applied Research Collaboration South West Peninsula (PenARC). SPYN would also like to acknowledge and thank the many others who made invaluable contributions, in particular: Dawn Mitchell, Kerryn Husk, Lorna Burns, Kate Allen, Siobhan Mitchell, Vashti Berry, Daniel Hayes, Andrew Boyd, Sirinda Bhindal, Delia Beck, Jo Robins and Jo Ward.

We also share below resources from our cutting-edge research at UCL, which includes Wellbeing While Waiting (‘INSPYRE’), a major new research programme we are leading in partnership with the Anna Freud Centre. This project is trialling offering immediate social prescribing treatments to children and young people referred to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services — many of whom face long waiting lists, often leading to a deterioration in their mental health — with the aim of developing a model for embedding social prescribing that can be scaled nationally, bringing social prescribing to more children and young people who could benefit.