Your Choice

Your Choice is a therapeutic and violence reduction programme operating in London and the North West. It is currently delivered by local authorities through their adolescent safeguarding teams. The programme empowers young people through a public health approach to help break the cycle of violence and harm. Through a child-first lens Your Choice supports positive and pro-social identity development by working towards goals and aspirations that are uniquely meaningful to the young person. Your Choice encourages delivery within the systemic work that local authorities and others are already doing.

The Your Choice-trained practitioners, based in a range of services work with young people at risk of harm outside the home (ROTH), use psychologically informed, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) tools and techniques. These include techniques drawn from dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and compassion focused therapy (CFT).

[Practitioners] will manage extremely high-risk cases, children with multiple complex needs. But because they have got their skills upskilled, they are better able to engage with families for providing resources at an early age and at an early stage before they escalate to needing, probably, a [highly] intensive, high-cost placement.
YEF Efficacy Report, January 2026

‘In Conversation’ with a London Your Choice practitioner and his Clinical Lead, describing what it is like to deliver Your Choice.

Image of Your Choice coach with young person on a bench — Extract from the ‘What is Your Choice’ video © LIIA (London Councils) 2024. All rights reserved.

Programme Goals

The Your Choice Programme aims to help young people focus on what matters to them and provide them with resources to achieve their goals.
Together, we seek to fill a practice gap through Your Choice – by moving beyond understanding why a child may behave in a certain way to providing tools and techniques that practitioners can employ to help the child keep themselves safe.
Through engagement in the London Young People Study (LYPS), we aim to contribute to the evidence-base and make the case for further investment in this field of work.

A violence reduction programme supporting cultural sensitivity and responsiveness

Your Choice has been designed to support and enable accessibility, explicitly addressing cultural barriers and placing the individual and their cultural needs, aspirations and interests at the centre of the programme. Find out more here.

An ambitious evaluation – the London Young People Study

We have heard multiple anecdotal stories about the positive impact of the Your Choice programme from young people and their practitioners, such as this one:

Working with [my practitioner] really opened my eyes. I see now that who you surround yourself with, makes an image of who you are.

This ambitious programme, with its influence on national and international practice a therefore requires a robust evaluation methodology to measure impact and outcomes of the approach. The chosen methodology was a Cluster Randomised Control Trial. The evaluation recruited until December 2024 with the full Efficacy report published January 30 2026.

The evaluation methodology was monitored along the way to ensure the Randomised Control Trial (RCT) does not distort practice or deny access to services.

Read more about the evaluation of the Your Choice programme (the London Young People Study) by clicking this button

The London Young People Study