Impact Framework
Dallaglio RugbyWorks was established with a focus on developing life skills, increasing employer interactions and opportunities, and preparing young people for positive futures. We believe that all young people deserve the same opportunities in life, independent of their circumstances or backgrounds.
As such, we work on the front line with secondary school-aged young people who have been excluded or are at risk of being permanently excluded from mainstream education. The majority of them have been placed in Alternative Provision (AP) and we aim to close the post-education opportunity gap. This need is clearly demonstrated by the fact that just 62% of young people in AP progress into sustained EET compared to 94% from mainstream schools. We aim to bridge this gap through our flagship programme, RugbyWorks Term-Time, which focuses on our four cornerstones which are developing life skills, raising aspirations, improving physical well-being and enhancing mental well-being.
We engage with our young people differently; using the values of rugby, and sport in general, alongside bespoke learning sessions and individualised mentoring to move them towards sustained education, employment and training. Our young people are empowered to take steps for their futures beyond education through improved employability skills and positive encounters with workplaces and prospective employers as part of our curriculum.
At the heart of our delivery is our team of dedicated and passionate individuals from a variety of backgrounds ranging from behavioural psychology to youth workers to teachers that deliver regular sessions to our young people.
Most of our young people come from disadvantaged backgrounds and are often disillusioned by the perceived lack of support from schools, teachers and other agencies and authorities.
We believe that working with our young people every week and encouraging them to be honest and open to communicating with us enables us to build stable and trusted relationships with them. This trust, respect for and comfort in our coaches allows us to continuously provide them with new opportunities even when they are no longer in the programme and be lifelong support partners to them whenever they want or need us.
We are driven by our approach to working with young people which is covered in detail in our curriculum but consists of:
Being Young Person Centred
Following a Youth Work Approach
Using an Asset-Based Approach
Following Trauma Informed Practice (all of our staff including non-delivery staff are trained in Trauma Informed Practice)
Our Ethical Conduct and Commitment
Our simple ‘North Star’ is to increase the statistical chance of a young person, who has experienced exclusion, being in further Education, Employment and Training (EET) post-16 to >80%
Theory of Change
Our Theory of Change is based on research that highlights effective interventions that are likely to increase employment for young, deprived people. It has been structured into four cornerstones with intermediate outcomes that we believe will lead towards our young people achieving the ultimate end goal outcome of increased chances of being EET post-16. Those cornerstones are:
1. Developing Life Skills
2. Raising Aspirations
3. Improving Physical Wellbeing
4. Improving Mental Wellbeing
Delivery Methodology
We work in Mainstream Schools, Alternate Provisions, SEND Schools, Community Sports Locations and Youth Offender Institutes with over 60% of our young people being in receipt of Free School Meals. Our programmes, whilst featuring many aspects that contribute to all cornerstones in our Theory of Change, are designed to tackle specific areas of need for our young people and society. All of them contribute to Dallaglio RugbyWorks delivering social value and a reduction in the fiscal cost to society in these areas because the estimated lifetime cost of an excluded young person to the state is £370,000.
Our Programmes
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RugbyWorks Term-Time is an academic year long programme designed to build long-term impactful relationships with participants. This allows them to fully explore the four cornerstones of the RugbyWorks Theory of Change. It is done in Mainstream Schools, Alternate Provisions and SEND Schools across all of our regions.
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Dallaglio RugbyWorks, unlike other youth support agencies, works to build relationships with young people who have been excluded from or are at risk of being excluded from mainstream education within the school gates through our Term-Time programme and then further supports them to be able to attend our Evening programme. This can be either at their school or at a location within their community like a sports club, is free for them to attend and they come because they already know us and trust us. Evidence also shows that the young people that we work with are far more likely to become the victims of or the perpetrators of violent crime in the hours of 15:00 – 19:00 when they finish school and before they get home. Hotspots for these crime areas are closely linked to the patches or routes home these young people take. This is further rationale for the creation of our Evening programme and we also encourage them to bring their friends along so that we can extend our reach and provide a safe and trusted space during this high risk after school time.
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We strongly believe that our young people require support and guidance all year round. Dallaglio RugbyWorks works in conjunction with programmes such as the English Holiday Activities and Food programme, and the Welsh counterpart Fit and Fed to provide holiday engagements to young people in the local areas. Our non-term time delivery includes holiday camps featuring a wide array of physical activities and aimed to raise awareness about the importance of good health and nutrition. These camps are solely for the purpose that vulnerable and disadvantaged students have access to fun and exciting group activities as well as a hot and nutritious meal during the school holidays.
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Research has suggested that girls and women are less likely to take up physical activity and sports. The gender divide starts early with girls as young as 7 being less active than their male peers. The gap widens with adolescent girls experiencing more barriers to accessing sports and physical activity, and a declining level of confidence in their bodies. Sports and physical activity deliver lifelong benefits, and it is critical for young people to spend 60 minutes daily in some form of physical activity. Only 16% of adolescent girls meet this requirement. The issues in female participation spread wider than just activity levels, it includes body image, obesity and mental health issues. Many girls are dropping out of sport and physical activity during their teenage years and are developing deep-rooted negative attitudes towards it, which act as barriers throughout life.
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We deliver targeted interventions within secure centres to young people that have been given a custodial sentence. We work with Commissioners and young people to develop bespoke interventions based around our four cornerstones to meet specific needs where appropriate.
Monitoring & Evaluation
Why do we monitor and evaluate our delivery?
First and foremost, we collect data so that we can understand directly from our young people what they want and need and whether they believe that our programmes are benefitting them and helping them to have positive and productive futures post-16. We also use it as an opportunity to support our young people to have their voices heard whether that is through the publication of their art on our website or through their publishing their ideas on our regional Instagram channels. We learn from this data and iterate and improve our interventions where necessary as we are a youth-led organisation.
We also perform monitoring and evaluation (M&E) on the programmes for a broad variety of secondary reasons, including transparently publishing our progress against our KPIs, providing our generous funders with this progress data, sharing data with sector partners to facilitate learning across the organisations and interventions in the Youth Support area and influence policy, having a robust and credible evidence base for raising funds and including in applications
What do we monitor and evaluate?
The data we collect and subsequently analyse from young people, schools, teachers, academic research and nationally available data sets covers a number of areas:
Personal E.g. Name, Gender, Age etc
Demographic E.g. Free School Meals, In Care etc
School Attendance
Session Attendance
Behaviour
Exclusion rates
Attainment
Sports Leaders Qualification
Physical Wellbeing and Skills
Mental Wellbeing
Employer Interactions
Life skills including; Problem Solving, Teamwork, Communication, Self-Belief, Self-Management and Digital Skills
Personal Development Journeys
Young person education, employment and training status
Alumni activities