Understanding essential digital support for young people
Image by Rodion Kutsaiev
Promising Trouble is working with Nominet to carry out a new research project to understand how young people access essential support online.
We’re interested in understanding what online support young people need, how services are responding, and what some of the key challenges are to designing and delivering essential support online.
The research findings will help inform strategy for future Nominet programmes.
As we conduct this research, we’re really keen that we do this in the open and invite anyone with an interest in this field to get in touch and contribute to building our understanding of this issue.
In this blog post, the first in a series of three, we talk about the process we’ve been undertaking so far, and outline some of our very early findings and hunches we’d like to test.
What do we mean by essential digital support?
By essential support we simply mean any support that young people can access to meet their basic needs. Essential digital support may include online information and advice, direct help or digital specialist services that enable young people to meet their basic needs such as: health, education, housing, financial security, safety, and equality. We settled on calling this ‘essential support’, rather than where we started with ‘essential services’, because we hope it captures a more active and autonomous role for young people in seeking and engaging with a wide range of support, as opposed to simply being passive recipients of services.
Exploring risks of exclusion from digital services
We started off exploring existing literature on digital exclusion and young people’s use of digital technology. We wanted to understand what barriers might lead to young people not accessing essential digital support and which young people are most at risk being excluded from essential digital support.
We found that the top 10 reasons why young people might not access digital services are:
A lack of affordability of devices and data
A lack of reliable and consistent connectivity
Limited privacy or access to appropriate devices or spaces
Language barriers
Services aren’t where young people are
Previous negative online experiences
A lack of trust in services among marginalised communities
Low levels of accessible design
Inability to access credit or enter into contracts
Lack of basic digital skills and confidence for some groups of young people
We also identified who we think is most at risk of not being able to access essential digital support. Based on the above risks factors and available literature, we think the types of young people most at risk are:
Young people living in poverty
Young people with experience of the care system
Young people with special educational needs or disabilities
Young migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees
Young people with severe multiple disadvantage
Other young people that are more likely to experience one or more of the top ten risk factors include:
Young people who live in rural or remote locations
Young people from Gypsy and Traveller communities
Young people from minority ethnic backgrounds
Young LGBTQ+ people
Young women and girls
Access to support is a crucial part of young people’s digital experience, and can be life changing or life affirming, but also can’t be understood in isolation. It is important that we see it within the context of other cross-cutting issues. For example, digital exclusion maps closely onto other issues of exclusion to the extent that groups of young people that are more at risk of certain vulnerabilities are likely to also be at risk of digital exclusion. Secondly, these overlapping challenges often have a compounding and amplifying effect. And thirdly, digital access isn’t a binary or static phenomenon, with many young people experiencing digital exclusion periodically, and includes multiple considerations beyond just having a phone with an internet connection.
Mapping the service landscape
Next, we conducted a rapid service mapping exercise of the landscape of support for young people to build a picture of which services are offering digital support to young people and who is doing what.
This is, of course, an enormous and potentially never-ending task, so we focused our efforts on six key areas of essential needs for young people:
Health
Education and employment
Money
Housing
Safety
Rights
Across these areas, we looked at 78 different services across these areas ranging from big national organisations providing a wide range of advice, to smaller and local organisations and services working in areas such homelessness support, sexual health and legal rights.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, we found that the level of digital provision varies considerably across the six service areas. Digital mental health provision, for example, was among the most advanced in terms of the range of digital tools in use and the breadth of provision. Nominet has funded innovation and development in digital mental health provision through its RESET programme https://www.nominet.uk/reset/. Most online support that we saw offered was either in the form of static online information and advice, or information about how to get help and signposting to existing support.
We also came across a large number of services that have an integrated approach, where online information and advice is a first point of call, and support by webchat and/or a phone helpline is available, with in-person advice and support available to those who need it.
There are fewer examples of direct support and services delivered online, though this was more common in some sectors, including digital mental health services where e-therapy and integrated online and in-person are more common, as well as online tutoring and mentoring models.
Tell us what you think about our initial hunches
During this first stage, we were particularly keeping an eye out for possible gaps and opportunities in the landscape that we could test during discussions with a wide range of services in our next phase of the research.
Our initial hunches to test are below:
Accessibility gaps for young people with disabilities appear commonplace
There’s little money and debt advice designed specifically for young people
Language is a barrier for some groups but there is little online support in languages other than English
Services often aren’t where young people are
There are significant digital barriers and needs for young care leavers
There are gaps in legal information and advice that are accessible and designed specifically for young people
The quality of online housing advice and support appeared to be variable
There is good practice and potential in peer support or online communities models to counter negative online experiences
The impact of poverty on access is a major barrier but hard to address in digital design.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on these, and any of the above. We’re still in the early stages of the research and are keen to hear from anyone involved in providing digital support to young people. Email us hello@promisingtrouble.net with “Nominet project” as the subject if you’d like to get in touch.
Promising Trouble is a social enterprise, committed to growing awareness of the social impacts of technologies and building alternative systems, technologies and communities of practice.