In Autumn 2022, the Ministry of Justice made new funding available to invest in sports programmes across England and Wales. £5 million was allocated to the Youth Justice Sport Fund (YJSF), which aimed to support youth and community sports organisations to deliver targeted work with vulnerable young people who were at risk of entering the criminal justice system or becoming involved in anti-social behaviour.

StreetGames, one of the UK’s foremost ‘Sport for Development’ charities, acted as the accountable body for the YJSF. Following the grant application process, 220 organisations were awarded funding in December 2022.

The programme required a robust process for monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL). All funded organisations would need to securely collect data for the people they worked with, including demographic and referral information, as well as documenting the sessions, activities and attendances that were delivered and the engagement levels of participants.

Timescales for rolling out the programme would be short, with delivery and data collection beginning within weeks of the grants being awarded. The MEL tools would need to be made available quickly and be straightforward for practitioners to understand.

VIEWS Software

StreetGames have employed the Views system for many of their projects, and we were delighted that Views was chosen as the primary data collection tool for YJSF. Our consultants first worked with the YJSF programme management team to understand their data needs, and then began designing a structure of fields, value lists and reports.

This included contact forms, session registers and report templates:

This structure was employed to create accounts and logins for all organisations that would be using Views for YJSF. StreetGames were provided with access to a programme dashboard, where they could monitor their funded organisations’ data in real time.

Conclusion

Of the 220 organisations involved in the programme, over 90% chose to use Views to collect their YJSF data. Despite the short timescales and large number of organisations involved, Views was rolled out on schedule in December 2022. Use of the system was excellent, with the following data having been collected by the end of March 2023:

• 6989 unique Participants
• 7951 sessions
• 63,240 attendances
• 38,576 session hours

In the user survey conducted at the end of the programme, Views was consistently voted as ‘Easy’ or ‘Ok’ for collecting data:

This was particularly pleasing, as most organisations were new to the system and had to learn to use it quickly. One user put it this way:

“I want to say something on Views too – the fact that StreetGames strongly recommended we use it as a monitoring tool has been a real help to us – we now collate all the information there, but going forward it is really good for us to record the information on all our sessions and the young people on it as a secure central platform – so thanks for encouraging us to do that….”: