A new independent evaluation by Dr Isabel Hanson explores how YPAS combines accessible early help, trusted relationships, safeguarding, youth participation and deep integration across Liverpool’s local system.
Report Summary:
YPAS has published a new independent ethnographic service evaluation examining how its Early Support Hub model works in practice.
The evaluation was undertaken by Dr Isabel Hanson, a GP and health-services researcher at the University of Oxford. It draws on fieldwork completed during 2025, including 77 hours of observation across YPAS hubs, schools, primary care and community settings; interviews with staff and young people; documentary analysis; and anonymised case material.
The report describes YPAS as an exemplary and long-established Early Support Hub embedded across Liverpool’s local system. It highlights the breadth of support provided across therapy, wellbeing, parenting, schools, primary care, community provision and youth participation.
The evaluation identifies several key strengths: trusted relationships, multiple routes into support, strong safeguarding and clinical governance, a professionally qualified workforce, embedded youth participation, and close partnership working with health, education, social care and local authority partners.
It also identifies wider system pressures affecting YPAS and young people, including increasing levels of need, waiting times, commissioning boundaries, uneven information-sharing and gaps between children’s and adult mental health services.
These findings offer important learning for YPAS, local partners, commissioners and others interested in developing accessible, relational and integrated support for children and young people.
Key Findings:
- Accessible early support: Young people can reach YPAS through hubs, schools, primary care, self-referral, walk-in provision and professional referrals.
- Trusted and lasting relationships: Young people can return at different stages of their lives and move between different forms of support.
- Whole-person care: YPAS understands mental health alongside housing, poverty, family life, education, identity, discrimination and safeguarding.
- Safe and professional practice: Strong safeguarding, clinical governance, supervision and senior support underpin relational and community-based work.
- Meaningful youth participation: Young people influence governance, recruitment, research, programme design and service delivery.
- Deep system integration: YPAS works across health, education, social care, local government and community settings, contributing leadership as well as receiving referrals.
Learning and Areas for Development:
The evaluation identifies several pressures and areas for development. They primarily reflect wider structural and system challenges, including increasing levels of need, commissioning arrangements and gaps between services. Addressing them will require shared ownership and coordinated action across commissioners, health, education, social care, local government and the wider children and young people’s system.
- Young people are presenting with increasingly serious and complex needs within services commissioned primarily for early intervention.
- Some pathways experienced waits of three to six months during the fieldwork period.
- Information-sharing and integration remain uneven across different settings and systems.
- Place-based commissioning can affect access to services.
- Young people aged 18–25 can experience gaps between children’s and adult mental health provision.
- Standard outcome measures do not always capture trust, belonging, continuity, identity safety and prevention.
YPAS Young Person from Youth Participation said: “We don’t do things to them. We do things with them.”
