Our free interactive quality assurance frameworks, First Steps and Safe Spaces provide relevant, up-to-date information and guidance to benchmark your policy and practice. They offer an evidence-based compliance framework, which includes health and safety, focus on young people, leadership and safeguarding to help you operate a safe space.  

The First Steps and Safe Spaces Frameworks aim to set a minimum level of practice consistent with operating a safe organisation and they are written to support a youth organisation’s journey through the frameworks as simply as possible. The frameworks have been designed to be open-access resources for youth organisations to refer to and use as tools for self-assessing and improving practice.   

Download the frameworks below

As organisations work through the frameworks they may choose to gather evidence together that meets the criteria for each section of the Frameworks. This will create a bank of documents and resources which support the operation of a safe organisation and can provide quality assurance to children, young people, staff, volunteers and supporters.  Much of the evidence should generally be found within the organisation’s current working documents, however, where they may not have evidence, the framework is structured to support organisations with templates and sources of online information to enable them to produce missing documents.  

Following a review of the quality mark landscape and need from the youth sector in 2022, UK Youth no longer provides an external assessment of youth organisations’ evidence against the Frameworks. There is therefore no requirement to submit evidence against the Frameworks to UK Youth; the Frameworks are intended as internal self-assessment quality assurance tools for youth organisations, rather than externally assessed quality marks.    

If you wish to continue your quality assurance journey through achieving an externally assessed quality mark, there are a range of relevant quality marks available, through National Youth Agency, Centre for Youth Impact, and Trusted Charity Mark. 

UK Youth will review the First Steps and Safe Spaces Framework documents annually and update them as appropriate. Any organisation implementing guidance from the Frameworks does so at their own risk and it remains their responsibility to ensure it is implemented in line with legal requirements and kept up-to-date. 

Other key resources to support quality safeguarding practice