Impact and Evaluation
Creating Change That Lasts
At Lindley Educational Trust, we want our community youth programmes to make a meaningful and lasting difference to young people’s lives.
Our work creates opportunities for young people to build confidence, develop skills, strengthen relationships, broaden their horizons and realise their potential. We also want to understand what changes because of our work – and what helps those changes last.
That’s why evaluation is an important part of our approach.
Understanding Our Impact
Our developing evaluation work combines the experiences of young people with interviews, observation, programme evidence and longer-term stories of progression. Independent evaluation of our work at Ashton Youth Club identified impact at four interconnected levels:
Personal development → Transformation → Community impact → Long-term change
Together, these show that the impact of sustained youth work can extend well beyond participation in an individual activity or programme.
Confidence, Resilience & Independence
One of the clearest outcomes is increased confidence and self-belief.
Through supportive relationships, progressive challenge and new experiences, young people learn to persevere, manage unfamiliar situations and recognise what they are capable of achieving.
Residentials and outdoor adventures can be particularly powerful, providing stepping stones towards greater independence and resilience.
Broadening Horizons
New experiences can change what young people believe is possible. Outdoor adventure, residentials, expeditions, volunteering and leadership give young people opportunities to encounter new places, people and challenges.
The evaluation of our girls and young women’s work found evidence that experiences once considered unimaginable had become normalised, helping challenge expectations about what young women could do and where they belonged.
From Participation to Leadership
One of the most important measures of our impact is progression.
We create opportunities for young people to move from participation towards volunteering, leadership, qualifications and employment.
The Lindley Youth Work Model identifies progression opportunities including sports and outdoor awards, volunteering, youth steering groups, progression projects, employment, higher-level awards and participation in governance. This creates a powerful cycle:
Participant → Volunteer → Young Leader → Qualified Leader → Role Model
Our evaluation has found examples of former participants progressing into professional roles and gaining formal qualifications, creating capacity and leadership from within the communities we serve.
Stronger Communities
The impact doesn’t stop with the individual. Evaluation has identified wider changes including:
Greater parental and family trust
Stronger relationships between young people and adults
Increased interaction between families and cultures
Increased community pride
Young people supporting and inspiring others
Positive role models within communities
There is also evidence of intergenerational impact, with former participants wanting their own children and younger relatives to benefit from similar opportunities.
Young People’s Voices
Young people’s experiences are central to understanding our impact. One young person described an expedition where physical, mental and emotional challenges brought the group closer as they encouraged one another and celebrated their achievements together.
How We Evaluate Our Work
We are continuing to strengthen how we understand and evidence impact.
Our developing approach includes:
The next phase includes developing our Theory of Change, gathering further case studies and training peer evaluators, enabling young people to play a greater role in evaluating the programmes they experience.
Measuring What Matters
Numbers are important. They tell us who we reach, how regularly young people engage and how they progress. But they don’t tell the whole story.
Impact can also be a young person speaking up for the first time. A first residential becoming an expedition. A participant becoming a volunteer. A volunteer becoming a leader. Or someone taking the confidence and skills developed through youth work into their career, family and community.
We measure success not simply by how many young people take part, but by what becomes possible because they did.