Million Hours Fund: how to work out the numbers we need

The aim of the Million Hours Fund is to help organisations provide extra hours of youth work. We’ll ask you for evidence of this if you apply, and if you get funding.

In your application we’ll ask for:

• the total number of extra hours of youth work you’ll provide
• how many young people you expect to attend per hour

We understand these will just be estimates for now, and that they may change over time.

To work this out, add up all of the extra hours of youth work that you’ll run using this money. Your total should cover the whole time period of our funding.

Do not:

• include time before or after sessions where young people are not involved (for example, setting up or tidying up)
• multiply the number of hours by how many staff or young people take part (we’ll work that part out later)

Example: total extra hours

An organisation currently runs a 2 hour youth club on Tuesdays.

They want to extend the Tuesday club by 1 hour, and run it again for 3 hours on Thursdays. This is 4 extra hours of youth work each week. They want funding to do this for 50 weeks. This means the total would be 4 hours multiplied by 50 weeks.

They should tell us they’ll deliver 200 total extra hours of youth work.

We need the approximate number of young people you think you’ll work with per hour for the extra hours we’re funding.

We need the number per hour, not the total number of young people you’ll work with.

You could give us an average of how many young people you expect to attend per hour across all of your extra hours. Or you could give us a more detailed breakdown if you need to.

Example: numbers of young people per hour

An organisation will run an extra 2 hour drop-in youth club each week.

Young people can come and go at different times. But they expect there to be about 25 young people taking part at any one time.

They should tell us they expect 25 young people per hour for the extra hours we’re funding.

It’s fine if this means some of the same young people are counted twice (for example, if some might stay for the whole 2 hours).

We understand that some types of youth work will involve fewer young people

Generally, we’ll want to see you support as many young people as possible. But we also understand that some organisations may work in smaller groups than is typical for open access youth work. For example, if you're working with young people at the highest risk of taking part in anti-social behaviour.

We'll take that into account when we make a decision about your application.

In the application we’ll also ask for an approximate schedule of how you plan to deliver these extra hours.

We know that this will just be an initial plan, and it’s fine if you need to change things when you start running the activities.

We’ll ask you to report back to us at least every 6 months until your funding ends. We’ll give you more details about what we need if we fund you.

We’ll ask for the number of:

• hours of youth work you’ve run
• young people who attended the youth work (including how many are new to your service)

You can ask us to fund the cost of monitoring your work and reporting back to us in your budget.

Helping us evaluate this funding

We’ll also work with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to appoint an independent contractor to evaluate the Million Hours Fund. If you get funding we’ll expect your organisation to take part in this evaluation. It will include things like:

• surveys
• interviews
• focus groups

These may be with staff and volunteers from your organisation and young people if they are willing to take part.

You’ll need to help the organisation that does the evaluation gather information from the young people taking part in activities we fund. This could include things like distributing research material and getting consent from parents for young people to take part in surveys.