The youth sector can play a role in supporting young people’s mental health

Young people in need of mental health care face long waiting lists due to health services being stretched to the limit. Alternative routes to early intervention support could help alleviate these burdens, hence why there is an urgent need to explore these provisions. 

Earlier in 2024, we set out to assess how one of such interventions – youth sector provision – impacts young people’s mental health (12 – 24 years old), as part of a project funded by the NCS Trust.

NCS recently published our systematic review of the evidence on the impact of youth sector provision on mental health outcomes. Our insights aim to inform research, policy, and practice, contributing to an early intervention and preventative approach to mental health support for young people.

Below you can find a summary of our key findings and recommendations.

Implications for Research

• The overall evidence base is underdeveloped, which makes it difficult to draw robust conclusions about the impact of activities and programmes.
• There needs to be better investment, particularly in the UK when it comes to investigating youth sector provision activities, drawing on robust scientific methods.
• Studies should aim to look at programmes over a longer term follow up period to see if initial effects are sustained, or if a delayed impact occurs once young people have embedded the skills and opportunities the programmes provided them.

Implications for Policy

• To effectively increase the evidence base, there should be a commitment from those investing in youth sector provision that there should be high quality, robust scientific evaluations of such services, drawing on a randomised controlled trial (RCT) or quasi-experimental (QED) design.
• There is evidence of promise in social prescribing for youth mental health, which is gaining traction nationally and internationally, so policy makers should consider how best to include youth sector provision within social prescribing services.

Implications for Practice

• When it comes to practitioners and those involved with service design, a solid understanding of the activity or programme is needed. This would help address issues such as a lack of underlying theory or theory of change, as well as help researchers understand and record data on fidelity and dosage.