At The Key, everything we do is about empowering young people to unlock their potential, take ownership of their choices and shape their own futures.
Over the past year, we’ve taken a closer look at the difference KEY+ makes - focusing on the moments that matter most: when young people can try something new, overcome challenges, feel proud of themselves and realise they can achieve, even when things feel hard.
As a learning organisation, we’re always working to improve the experience for both young people and those who support them. A big part of this is making sure we understand and measure impact in a way that is meaningful, consistent and easy to use across all KEY+ groups.
Impact Unpacked
We’ve been reviewing how we measure the impact of KEY+ to ensure we’re focusing on what truly matters. Every visit to a group brings stories of young people stepping outside their comfort zones, working together and tackling real-world challenges. We want to capture these experiences across every group.
To support this, we partnered with Trust Impact to refresh our Theory of Change and develop a set of validated indicators. These focus on the areas KEY+ supports most strongly, including agency, friendships, confidence and helping young people feel more able to shape their world.
So, what does this mean moving forward?
We have five new questions for young people to answer at the start and end of their KEY+ journey.
Each question directly links to how young people have said KEY+ has impacted them and will help us better understand how KEY+ helps young people to:
This simple, consistent approach will make it easier for us, and most importantly, for you and the young people you support, to celebrate the progress young people make and continue strengthening the KEY+ Challenge for the future.
Click the drop downs below to find out more:
What's changing in how we measure impact in KEY+?
We are introducing a new approach to understand the difference KEY+ makes for young people.
Young people will now answer five short impact questions at the start and end of their KEY+ journey. These questions are linked directly to the purpose of the programme and focus on the outcomes we want to see, such as increased confidence, skills and belief in what they can achieve.
This will help us better understand the growth young people experience as they progress through KEY+.
When will young people complete the impact questions?
Young people will complete the questions at key points in their journey.
This updated approach reduces the need for repeated baselines at the start of every stage while still allowing us to understand impact over time.
How will this information be recorded?
The impact responses will be recorded on the system in a similar way to how skills data is currently gathered. This means facilitators can follow a familiar process when supporting young people to complete the questions. And our workbook will display the questions should you want to gather their information here.
Will this increase admin for facilitators?
We recognise the important role facilitators play in supporting young people through KEY+. We have designed this approach to fit within existing steps in the programme, helping to minimise additional administration. The questions are short and will be completed as part of activities that already take place, such as the Think and Review steps.
Why is collecting this impact information important?
Gathering this information will help us better understand where KEY+ has the greatest impact for young people, including where the most growth happens as groups progress through the stages.
It will also help us:
We have support available to help introduce these changes:
We are running Impact Unpacked workshops to explain the updates, explore impact measurement in more detail and support facilitators to feel confident introducing the new questions with their groups.
We kindly ask facilitators supporting KEY+ groups to book onto one of the following Impact Unpacked workshop sessions:
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