Youth club cuts impact school performance, report finds

A report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies suggested that youth club closures in the 2010s resulted in lower GCSE results and increased offending among young people.

In 2009, 40 per cent of Londoners aged between 11 and 16 reported attending these spaces at least weekly.

Youth clubs offer a safe environment for young people to spend time with friends outside of school hours, access the support of youth workers, and participate in workshops and activities, often including music or sports. 

These services are typically funded by local councils, which experienced large funding cuts during the 2010s. 

These cuts in turn led to many youth club closures. In London, for example, around 30 per cent of youth clubs closed between 2010 and 2019. New research, published today as an IFS working paper, examines the impact of these closures on teen offending rates and educational outcomes.

The IFS' research found that teenagers whose nearest youth club was closed did worse in school. 

Specifically, London youths who lost access to a nearby youth club performed nearly four per cent of a standard deviation worse in their GCSE exams. 

This is roughly equivalent to a decline of half a grade in one subject. The effects were even more severe for pupils from lower socio-economic backgrounds whose test scores fell by almost 12 per cent of a standard deviation (which corresponds roughly to doing more than a grade worse in one subject). 

Additionally, youth club closures led to an increase in offending. 

Young people who lost access to a youth club were 14 per cent more likely to engage in criminal activity in the six years following closure: the offending rate went from 14 per 1,000 to 16 per 1,000. 

There were particularly large increases in acquisitive crimes (e.g. theft, robbery and shoplifting), drug offences and violent crimes. 

These results point to the important direct role of youth clubs in supporting teenagers outside of school hours. The research found, for example, that after a youth club closed, local teenagers reported spending less time doing homework and more time playing video games and on social media. 

Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “Youth clubs can play an important role in supporting development and providing a safe space outside of school, and the major cuts to local authority funding over the last decade have been hugely damaging for children and young people. Funding cuts have led to the closure of community centres and Sure Start Children’s Centres, as well as youth clubs, and reduced the capacity of local services to support attendance, mental health and children with special educational needs.

“The most frustrating thing, as this report points out, is that the savings made as a result of these cuts are typically outstripped by the additional problems created down the line. These short-sighted decisions often leave school and college leaders to pick up the pieces. The new government has got to learn the lessons of what happens when local authorities and public services do not have the funding they need to function properly.”