Training Youth Workers to Coach Young People

At Worth-it, we’re specialists in positive education – we support the wellbeing of children and young people, and those who work with them. As well as tons of support within our DfE- approved Wellbeing Club, we offer training courses for individuals, such as our coach training course. We also offer bespoke training to groups from different organisations who work with young people, whether these be schools, colleges, charitable organisations, youth work or health and local authority commissioners.

Coach Training for Early Intervention

One fantastic group of people Worth-it worked with last year were from the mental health and social change charity, Platfform. Platfform commissioned us to deliver coach training to a group of 16 team members who had a youth work background. The team were delivering direct support to young people in the community through an early intervention coaching programme, with the aim support the prevention of mental health problems for vulnerable and disadvantaged young people in south Wales. Platfform were looking for training to improve their team's knowledge, confidence and skills you coach the young people they were supporting.

We’ve recently had the pleasure of interviewing Sarah Hamilton, Young Person’s Project Manager at Platfform, who organised this coach training for her team of youth coaches and participated in the training herself. Sarah comments

“I realised we needed to train people we were employing so they could offer more support to young people. We were asking our staff to give one-to-one support in a trauma-informed way, and they needed specialised training. I discovered that Worth-it offered coaching training for young people’s wellbeing and mental health...it just seemed perfect for Platfform.”

Worth-it’s founder, Liz Robson-Kelly, delivered the coach training over Zoom with weekly sessions over 8 weeks.

We set up a tailored webpage inside our online learning platform our Wellbeing Academy for Platfform, that only they could see: each team member had their own user account within the academy so they could work through the training. This is standard practice for our work with organisations and helps people keep track of their progress and manage their time effectively. The team at Platfform were lovely to work with and engaged well with the training.

Sarah shared with us that, since the training, her team are ‘much more confident in the way that they work with young people’, with one of her team members adding, ‘I feel more confident when planning and delivering sessions.’ There’s been a noticeable impact on the young people they support too, even in the short time since the training.

One Platfform team member comments: 

“I’ve noticed the young people I work with are developing more positive behaviours in tackling their difficulties.”

Why use coaching with young people?
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Coaching is an effective way of providing support for young people to help them feel more in control of their lives, develop resilience and a greater sense of wellbeing. It is a way of reducing risk of mental illness now and later in life. Coaching helps people identify their strengths and the skills young people learn from being coached can be applied to all aspects of their lives while they’re young and in adulthood. Coaching supports young people to think about what matters to them, what success means to them, to identify where they are already successful – boosting self-esteem and motivation – and work out how to move forward, towards their goals. 

Find out More and Next steps

Learn more about coaching and how it can help young people you work with by accessing our Free Introduction to Coaching Young People Course

If you want to find out more about coaching young people  for yourself or your team, check out our accredited Worth-it coach training course.

Read the full interview with Sarah Hamilton here to find out more about real-life impacts of coach training for youth workers and those who work with young people.