Teenage Pregnancy

A guide for Practitioners

This section offers information for practitioners working around the issue of teenage pregnancy, sexual health and relationships.

Useful Links

Find out about lots of useful websites and organisations that can support work around teenage pregnancy.

Downloads and resources

Download information about the teenage pregnancy strategy, guidance, research and details of upcoming training.

Teenage Pregnancy Strategy

The City of York Teenage Pregnancy Strategy was launched in 2001 with the aim of reducing teenage conception rates by 50% by 2010 with a 15% reduction by 2004. You can download a copy of the latest York Teenage Pregnancy Strategy from this website.

Teenage pregnancy rates are currently 25% higher at 42.4 per thousand than the 1998 baseline of 34.0. This equates to 37 more conceptions. If the current trend continues, it is unlikely that the 2010 target will be met. In order to meet the 2010 target, there will need to be eighty seven fewer conceptions in women under the age of 18.

Although the numbers of teenage pregnancies in York have consistently stayed below the national average, under the Teenage Pregnancy Units (TPU) performance management tool for assessing progress towards the 2010 target, the City of York has been given a red light. Some local strategies are achieving better results than others. In order to try to understand better the significant variation in performance on reducing conception rates between similar local authority areas, TPU officials carried out in-depth (Deep Dive) reviews in three high performing areas and three ‘statistical neighbours’ with static or increasing rates.

The aim was to identify strategy-related initiatives that were evident in successful areas, but absent or delivered less intensely in the comparison areas, and which were judged by local stakeholders as the initiatives which had contributed most to the area’s declining rates.

These are:

• The availability of discrete , visible, young people friendly sexual health services, with a focus on health promotion as well as reactive services.
• Strong delivery of SRE/PSHE in schools
• Targeted work with at risk groups of young people, in particular Looked After Children.
• Training on SRE for staff within key partner agencies
• A well resourced Youth Service, with a focus on addressing important social issues.

In York we were asked to review our work against the ‘Deep Dive’ findings and take action accordingly. There is a need to accelerate activity if we are to meet the 2010 therefore we need to intensify the delivery and broaden the strategy to effectively address the wider determinants of early sex and conception.

We now need to focus on the following priorities:

• Targeted prevention in ‘hot spot’ areas
• Targeted prevention work amongst ‘at risk groups’
• Earlier intervention—working with younger age groups
• Allocating more of the budget to prevention and less to support for teenage parents
• Work around delaying first sex
• Self-esteem and raising aspirations work
• Preventing 2nd unplanned pregnancies
• Linking the supporting teenage parents agenda into the Children’s Centre delivery plans

In addition to strengthening the delivery of the strategy to the Deep Dive findings, local areas are expected to work with programmes that address the underlying causes of teenage pregnancy such as social deprivation, health inequalities, low educational attainment, poor school attendance and low rates of post participation in education, training and employment.

For more information on the strategy visit www.teenagepregnancyunit.gov.uk or www.everychildmatters.gov.uk.

Information on support for teenage parents is available in the ‘Help and Information’ section.