What are the effects of youth club closures in the UK?

The widespread closing of youth clubs during the 2010s, driven by government austerity measures, led to falling educational performance and increasing rates of youth offending. The long-term financial implications – through reduced lifetime earnings and higher crime-related costs – are also stark.

Youth clubs provide teenagers with a safe space to play sport, develop new hobbies and meet new friends. These community-based programmes also offer the chance to engage with youth workers, who often act as mentors and confidants.

They are especially important in underprivileged areas, offering structured after-school activities to prevent idle time and foster positive development. Similar initiatives exist across countries – from Boys and Girls Clubs of America to Jugendzentren in Germany and Maisons des jeunes in France.

Understanding the true impact of youth clubs on individuals and their communities has historically proven challenging. This is due to a lack of data and methodological difficulties – in particular, the fact that young people attending youth clubs often come from more deprived backgrounds (Feinstein et al, 2006). It is not as simple as comparing young people who attend and those who do not.

One recent study overcomes these challenges by creating new data sources and examining the impact of youth club closures in the UK during the austerity period of 2010 to 2019. The youth sector was particularly vulnerable to public spending cuts because the statutory duty governing these services lacks binding funding requirements (Davies, 2019).

The study focuses on London and compares individuals who lost access to nearby youth clubs with similar young people who retained access.

What does the research tell us?

After closures, young people became less likely to attend structured after-school activities. This indicates that in the absence of youth clubs, many young people do not have available alternatives for after-school leisure and homework support. Teenagers instead became more likely to spend time engaging with social media, playing videogames and/or watching TV.

The closure of youth clubs also affected young people’s educational outcomes. Those teenagers affected by closures performed worse in their GCSE (national standardised high stakes) exams, by 4% in standard deviations. This translates to about half a grade in one subject.

The effects were much larger for individuals who were eligible for free school meals – a proxy for lower-income families. The test scores of these pupils fell by 12%, corresponding to 1.5 grades in a single subject.

Minors in areas affected by closures also became more likely to commit crimes, specifically acquisitive (including theft, robbery, burglary and shoplifting), drug-related and violent offences. Prior to the closures, 14 youths per 1,000 were accused of a crime per year. But after the closures, two additional youths per 1,000 were accused of a crime per year in areas affected (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Youth offending rates before and after closures

Source: Data on youth clubs created from Freedom of Information (FOI) data, crime records from the London Metropolitan Police.

Note: Event study of youth offending rates, defined as the proportion of minors aged 10-18 who commit crimes over total resident minors in years before and after youth club closures (from Villa, 2024). The bars show confidence intervals at the 95% confidence level from MSOA-level clustered standard errors.

What are the policy implications?

The effects of youth club closures are large in magnitude in comparison with other policies. For example, the 4% decline in GCSE performance is comparable with gains observed from early childhood programmes like Sure Start (an initiative to support the development of early relationships between parents and children), which improved test scores at later stages by around 3% of a standard deviation, or slightly less than half a grade (Carneiro et al, 2024).

Similarly, the increase in criminal offences (of 14%) due to youth club closures exceeds the estimated 9% reduction in arrest rates associated with extending compulsory schooling ages in the United States (Bell et al, 2022).

These findings underscore the potential of interventions implemented during adolescence. While early childhood policies are often emphasised for their large returns (Heckman, 2006), this work indicates that supporting adolescents can also have a positive impact (Guryan et al, 2023).

In fact, this research also shows that youth club closures might not have led to the cost savings the policy intended. It indicates that the closures may have led to higher costs for society.

Youth clubs could therefore be valuable investments. Indeed, for every £1 saved in yearly running costs, individuals forgo £1.90 in future returns to education and incur costs of 95p due to additional offending. In other words, for every £1 saved, society bears £2.85 through reduced lifetime earnings and increased crime-associated costs.

These calculations only account for forgone returns to education, increased criminal justice expenses due to additional youth offending and the direct costs of crime on victims, but they are within the same ballpark of other work in this area (UK Youth and Frontier Economics, 2022).

The results are particularly important as several local authorities plan future youth club closures. This research suggests that policy efforts should reconsider the provision of youth clubs and locate them in areas where after-school alternatives are lacking. More broadly, this work informs the importance of after-school activities helping young people to develop their skills (human capital formation).