The Youth Star^TM

The Outcomes Star for youth work

The Youth Star is designed to be used in services that are providing universal, community-based youth work.

The Youth Star was first developed in 2012 in collaboration with Groundwork UK in response to new UK statutory guidance encouraging local authorities to focus efforts on vulnerable young people.

The Youth Star helps young people to open up

The Youth Star helps service users to open up and clearly communicate with keyworkers
It helps keyworkers to visually capture the journey and developments with their service users.
It supports keyworkers in navigating difficult conversations and building relationships by opening up conversations around previously difficult areas, and provides keyworkers with a structure to support and generate a concrete action plan to support their service users.

The Youth Star measures outcomes by making the non-explicit – explicit

The Star makes complex amorphous change tangible and visual. It supports organisations in capturing, assessing and evidencing their services and provides data which can improve outcomes and measure the impact of youth work.

Better conversations can mean better outcomes

The Youth Star captures where young people are and their progress in six key areas of their lives:

Interests and activities
Hopes and dreams
Health and well-being
Education and work
Communicating
Choices and behaviour

It starts a reflection process - they can see that where they are isn’t good and that they need to change.

We have arranged all sorts of groupwork topics in response to what’s come out from doing the Star.

72% of the youth workers said that completing the Youth Star helped them have a useful discussion with young people

Responding to feedback and sector challenges

One area of feedback from services delivering youth work is that they are increasingly under pressure to evidence the difference they are making, but that this can be difficult because of the informal service model. The Youth Star is designed to help organisations to rise to this challenge and make their impact more visible by clearly and consistently capturing the difference their work makes to the young people engaging with their service.

Effectively empowering keyworkers

The Youth Star helps keyworkers to identify young people who need more support, and empowers them to use their time and interventions more effectively.

Listening to and providing more support for service users

In 2021, Triangle concluded a review of the Youth Star which included feedback from current users, revisions and a pilot with a range of organisations. Triangle worked with a range of services and service users to tweak the Star and changed language to be more accessible, sensitive, trauma-informed and responsive and to develop additional resources and Scales to open up and have difficult conversations around a range of areas which can impact their service users, and which can affect their relationships and effectiveness of their support.

The Youth Star was developed with close collaboration with local authorities, centers and youth organisations

The first edition was developed in close collaboration with Groundwork UK and several organisations have been involved in the development of the second edition including Young Solutions, and young people and youth workers from Woodrush Youth & Community Centre, Pershore Riverside Centre, Street Games, Redditch Youth & Community Enterprise, with additional input from the Lancashire Youth Service (Preston) for developing the second edition changes.