National Youth Homelessness Scheme

Accommodation

Supported accommodation, and support to help young people find and maintain independent accommodation are key elements in preventing and tackling youth homelessness.

Local housing authorities and their partners (Supporting People, Children's Services, Youth Offending Teams, RSLs and voluntary sector providers) should work together to commission accommodation based services and floating support to meet the needs of young people at risk of homelessness in their areas.

A pathways approach is recommended. The aim of an accommodation pathway is to enable young people to move through services in a structured way, moving from more intensively supported accommodation to more independent accommodation as they develop life skills and confidence.

A pathway should include four basic components:

  1. Assessment services (with emergency access so that B&B is not used)
  2. Progression services  (where young people can develop the skills they need to live independently, including support with education, training and employment )
  3. Specialist services (which can cater for young people high and complex needs)
  4. Move on units with resettlement and floating support services (these can be in the private rented sector, and may include flat shares as well as social housing)

Services should be tailored to the needs of young people who present for advice and assistance with housing in the authority's area. Information from Children's Services, Connexions, the YOT and the youth service should also be used to inform service development.

The modules for this work stream provide details of good practice, guidance and tools to assist local authorities commission and develop key elements of such an accommodation pathway.

In this section

Related downloads

Do you need help viewing file formats?

You may also be interested in …

On this site

On other sites

My favourites