This study by the Youth Endowment Fund and NatCen, aimed to ascertain how LNK Educate is implemented and explore participants’ experiences and views of the intervention. The report presents the findings of a feasibility study and pilot study of LNK Educate.
Lives Not Knives (LNK) is a youth-led charity with a mission to prevent knife crime, serious youth violence and school exclusions. The charity aims to engage, educate and empower disadvantaged young people and support them to enjoy their lives and improve their future prospects.
LNK Educate is a school-based programme for nine- to 14-year-olds that aims to reduce involvement with crime and violence. The programme aims to encourage and support young people to adopt strategies for dealing with conflict and negative emotions and to remain in mainstream school so that they are less likely to get drawn into crime and violent behaviour.
LNK Educate combines a series of universal workshops for all children, with targeted one-to-one mentoring for children identified as being at high risk of exclusion and future involvement in crime and violence.
Key Findings:
- The training provided to deliver both the universal and targeted components of LNK Educate was deemed to be helpful by teachers and mentors in the feasibility study. Teachers noted some gaps in training content. While core elements were delivered in line with the intended model, implementation of both the universal and targeted elements in the feasibility study was variable.
- In the feasibility study, teachers reflected positively on the workshop session content and typically described young people as engaged during lessons. They also perceived young people to have a good relationship with mentors.
- COVID-19, and subsequent school closures, was a significant barrier to delivery; other barriers included teachers lacking knowledge in specific areas and a lack of resources for some lessons. Facilitators to delivery included the support provided by LNK Educate and the extended length of mentoring.
- Young people in the feasibility study reported that their mentors were relatable and trustworthy; they also described their mentors as caring, honest and non-judgemental as well as having a sense of humour. LNK staff, teachers and mentors perceived that the programme resulted in a range of positive outcomes for pupils.
- The pilot study found that it was feasible to use the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and the Student Resilience Survey (SRS) as outcome measures for LNK Educate. The measures align with the intervention’s logic model for young people receiving targeted mentoring; however, they are less well aligned with the universal workshop component.
- Recruitment of schools to the pilot study was generally satisfactory. However, two of the six originally sampled schools declined to participate due to the data archiving requirement. To evaluate LNK Educate via a randomised controlled trial, LNK Educate would need to more consistently select young people for the targeted mentoring component and apply a compliance measure for the targeted mentoring group to better understand the extent to which this component is delivered and scale up to a considerably larger number of schools.