YoungMinds survey We can all take a good guess that young people are struggling with mental health more than ever in the COVID-19 pandemic. Usefully, in March and again in June-July, YoungMinds carried out a survey on young people who had particular mental health needs. Both surveys captured over 2,000 responses of young people. The second survey in June-July was answered by young people aged 13-25. We created an area chart to show their responses in the two periods. The infographic Mental health impacts and changes in COVID-19, March & June-JulyThe take away The overall message is clear a ..read more

Lockdown So, things happened very quickly with the lockdown. Only a week before, we spent quite a bit of time talking about contingency and ‘worst case’ scenarios with how to go about running youth with a reduced capacity in being able to meet and potential reduction in leaders. Realistically, all of that was completely pointless in the end because things moved much faster than we had imagined. Complete lockdown of non-essential gatherings, quickly followed by instruction to ‘stay at home’. So, here we are and have been for many weeks. New concerns All of a sudden, some of our usual hot topic ..read more

External causes of death External causes of death account for more than half of all deaths in young people aged 15-24 in England and Wales (2017 data). External causes include things like accidents and self-harm (amongst others). So, a large chunk of these deaths are likely to have been preventable. Thankfully, the proportion of actual deaths in the population is relatively low. At 2,199 over all in 2017, this represents a death rate ranging from around 0.01% in young people aged 10-14, up to 0.03% aged 20-24. Doughnut chart showing young people aged 15-24 mainly die from external causes (2017 ..read more

We don’t want helpers in our youth ministry It might sound counterintuitive, but we don’t want helpers in our youth ministry. Now, don’t get me wrong, we (desperately!) need help in the youth ministry that we’re running. We NEED people to meet and greet our kids. We NEED people to register them. We NEED people to challenge the young people at table tennis. We NEED people to kick the kids’ butts on the Xbox. We NEED people to listen and chat to them. We NEED people to share their story with them. We NEED people to speak life into their situations. We NEED people to take an interest in th ..read more

The dwindling support network School pressure, loneliness and the support network seem to get worse as young people progress through high school. According to a recent comprehensive survey by the School Health Research Network, the percentage of young people answering positively to a range of questions around resilience and emotional support dwindles with each year of high school. The pressure builds for year 11s Year 7s are generally the most upbeat when asked about whether they felt that adults listened. They were also the most likely to say they found it easy to talk to Mum or Dad ..read more

One simple way to make sure young people don’t feel alienated at youth group It’s week one of the new academic term and you see bright, smiling and hyper faces bounding in the front door. Some familiar from last year’s programme or your recent summer residential, and some unfamiliar – newbies. In the spirit of starting new things i.e. new schools, they decide to try out youth club for the first time. Yay! First impressions After a few weeks, you might decide to check-in with your volunteer youth leaders and get their perspective on how they think the newbies are settling in. You migh ..read more

Last week, the article A future for the world’s children? A WHO–UNICEF–Lancet Commission was published in the Lancet with an assessment of environments conducive to childhood flourishing in 180 countries of the world. Children’s rights were broadly grouped as: The right to be educated The right to be heard The right to be healthy The right to be protected The right to be treated fairly How did the UK rank? The UK ranked 10 out of 180 for providing an environment where children are able to flourish – not too bad. However, there’s a bleak outlook when looking at sustainability and the env ..read more

Recently, on a random youth we asked our young people to vote on a selection of topics that they were interested to hear more about at youth. We set out big sheets of paper across the room, gave them three wooden game tower blocks (you know the ones!) to use to cast their votes. We gave them ten minutes to browse the topics that we thought up (in the space of about five minutes before the session!) and choose their top three topics. It was a random week and so a random snapshot which may have gleaned different results from one week to the next. In some ways, this was still quite a good way ..read more

We plotted two sets of data from the School Health Research Network survey 2017/18. The first looked at the percentage of children who said that their usual bedtime was after 11pm. The second asked about whether the pupils last looked at a screen after 11pm. You might assume that the percentage of those looking at a screen after 11pm would be less than the percentage who said their bedtime was after 11pm. In fact, the reverse was true in all year groups – 7 through 11. Perhaps ‘bedtime’ is being interpreted in very different ways by parents and their young people. Or, perhaps young people ..read more

The ComRes survey Back in 2016, ComRes conducted an online survey with 1,013 participants across England, Scotland and Wales to find out more about how parents are engaging with their kids about their faith. We thought to ourselves, ‘This gives us a great opportunity to map some data across some UK nations’! And so we did. It turns out that the picture across Great Britain varies a bit when talking about being more intentional about discussing faith with kids – with the purpose of passing on faith. Overall, in England, Scotland and Wales, four in 10 parents said that they had alre ..read more