The number of young people who take part in youth clubs each week has increased over time and its good for their physical health and wellbeing, behaviour and education.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport used five datasets, including Understanding Society, to explore the effects of weekly participation in youth clubs on outcomes later in life.
Four of the five datasets were longitudinal studies; the fifth is a rolling annual survey. The research covered different generations of young people from the 1970s to 2000s.
The proportion of young people who participate in youth clubs weekly has increased over time, from around 20% (the 1970 British Cohort Study) to around 35% (the 2010s Millennium Cohort Study and Understanding Society).
What are the benefits?
In the short-term, teens who attended youth clubs regularly were less likely to truant from school, less likely to drink alcohol, more likely to have good health, and more likely to want to go to university.
There was also evidence that these positive changes persist over time – when they reached aged 20, young adults who had attended a youth club were more likely to be in education and more likely to be a volunteer in their free time.
Changes in who goes to a youth club
The profile of young people who participated in youth club activities differs between earlier and later datasets. In the 1970s and 1980s youth clubs were more heavily used by teenage boys from poorer backgrounds, but in late 2010s attendees tended to be from better-off families.
Changes in the funding landscape and types of activities offered through youth services may have an important role in explaining the differences in results across the studies. For example, young people in the devolved nations had higher participation rates, possibly linked to differences in youth provision funding across the UK and funding decisions made in devolved nations.
ISER Senior Research Fellow and MiSoC Research Associate, Dr Cara Booker, said: ‘We were delighted to be academic partners on this important project and to bring ISER’s expertise to the investigation. We used data from Understanding Society to explore some of the immediate and short-term impacts of youth activities. The findings show clear cohort differences in the characteristics of participants and highlights the short-term benefits of youth activities.’
The findings from this new research add to a growing body of robust evidence about the positive impact the youth sector has on young people.
Read the report Youth Provisions and Life Outcomes: A study of longitudinal research.
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