Young Futures Hubs – first sites launching in March 2026
Transforming Care
23 December 2025
By Jen
Young Futures Hubs will bring together services to improve access to opportunities and support for young people at community level, promoting positive outcomes and enabling them to thrive.
What will the Young Futures Hubs look like?
The government has recognised that local authorities and their partners are best placed to understand their own areas of care. This includes the needs of young people. The planned delivery approach focuses on working with and supporting local authorities in a way that works for them.
Young Futures Hubs will offer inclusive, welcoming spaces, both physically and digitally, to provide coordinated support for young people. This includes wellbeing and mental health support.
Activities will be designed to be youth-led where possible and will offer enriching opportunities such as arts, sports, volunteering, and skills-based projects, all aimed at fostering confidence, resilience, and a sense of belonging.
Community is at the heart of transformation
What else?
Young Futures Hubs and Young Futures Prevention Partnerships together form the ‘Young Futures programme’. Young Futures Prevention Partnerships will identify young people vulnerable to being drawn into crime at local authority level and provide them support at the right time (including via Young Futures Hubs).
When, how many and where?
The Prime Minister set out plans to open 50 hubs over the next four years.
8 areas have been chosen as Early Adopters. Early Adopter locations have been selected in areas where there are high volumes of anti-social behaviour and knife crime, maximising impact of the Young Futures Hubs by placing them where it will benefit the most at-risk young people.
These are: Nottingham, Tower Hamlets, County Durham, Manchester, Birmingham, Brighton and Hove, Bristol and Leeds.
What are the drivers behind this programme?
The government stated that they are committed to ensuring that life success is not determined by background. Some young people face considerable challenges, including poverty, discrimination, and a lack of social and educational support. This can impede their progress and make them vulnerable to negative outcomes.
Data spanning the last 25 years, collected and analysed by the Social Mobility Commission, lays bare a stark reality – modern day Britain is plagued by regional inequalities. The findings are set out in the Commission’s new State of the Nation report, the most comprehensive annual analysis of social mobility in the UK.
These entrenched disadvantages have blocked progress on social mobility for young people across the UK, and Alun Francis, Chair of the Social Mobility Commission said “change needs to be quicker” in tackling “deep-rooted disadvantages” as the evidence shows little sign of the regional gap closing in the first two decades of the 21st century.
Funding
Each Early Adopter local authority received an initial £100,000 to undertake preparatory work to ensure readiness to deliver a Young Futures Hub by March 2026. £2 million is being made available to the eight Early Adopter local authorities this financial year to design and implement the Young Futures Hubs.
A budget of £3.4 million (inclusive of capital funding) will be available to support Early Adopter local authorities from February 2026 until March 2027. An additional £4 million is being made available through the Local Youth Transformation Fund for Early Adopters to apply to help ensure Young Futures Hubs are built on a strong foundation of capability and leadership to deliver youth services.
Young Futures Hubs form part of a £70 million transformation programme to local authorities until March 2029 to enhance and improve local youth service offers.
Who will set up the Young Futures Hubs?
The National Youth Agency (NYA), with UK Youth, Regional Youth Work Units, YPF Trust, Centre for Young Lives, Streetgames, Local Government Association, Youth Access and Solve, are working as delivery partners supporting the 8 Early Adopters.
These Early Adopters will act as a pilot for the Young Futures Hubs Programme, working with statutory partners, service providers, young people and local communities to develop a core model for the design and delivery of further hubs.
How will success be measured?
RSM UK Consulting LLP will be evaluating the role of Local Youth Transformation in supporting establishment of Early Adopter Young Futures Hubs. The government will be procuring an independent evaluation partner to evaluate the Young Futures Hubs delivery.
Anything else to add?
Young Futures Hubs are establishing links with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Youth Hubs, facilitating smooth, warm handovers for 16 to 18 year olds who require career support. DWP Youth Hubs is an established initiative that brings together employment support for 16 to 24 year olds from a Jobcentre work coach and place-based support from local partnerships to help young people into work.
How can Mayden support?
Our secure software products iaptus and theseus are trusted by local authorities, NHS Trusts, national and local charities and other VCSEs to record health and care data of millions of people in the UK. We can help health and care workers involved in delivering these new services to prove the return on Young Futures Hubs, being able to track their impact and spot any patterns and health inequalities.
- Capture data for all the different areas – one-to-one sessions, group work, signposting.
- Keep a secure record of the individual so they can be best supported, and their history collated.
- Support both physical sessions and online activities through trusted partnerships with online therapy providers. The data is passed back through into the individual’s record within our software.
- Reporting is built into the software – proving the return and tracking the impact of activities. Further bespoke reporting can be commissioned.
- Each person working as part of the delivery of the Young Futures Hubs is given their own unique login, to access via a tablet or computer. Mayden’s software is cloud based, with real-time records and reports.
An existing initiative – early support hubs – often based upon Youth Information Advice and Counselling Services (YIACS) principles are already run by a range of local services across the country. They offer mental health support and advice to young people aged 11-25. These hubs are open access meaning that young people can access free support on a self-referral basis with no thresholds. YPAS in Liverpool has been using Mayden’s software product iaptus to support their work, and demonstrate the impact their early support service has on local children and young people.
Mayden’s software helps services to assess needs, manage cases and referrals on to local services for health, wellbeing and addiction support. Please book a demo to speak to us to see whether iaptus or theseus is the right fit for your Young Futures Hub. Our experts are here to help you work smarter, connect better, improve outcomes and deliver impact that matters.