Young people with lived experience of age assessments have been working with GMIAU and Refugee Council on a new Age Disputes Toolkit. It includes an updated Young People's Guide to Age Assessments and a Practitioners Toolkit.

Guide for young people

In 2020, young people in the All4One youth group, supported by GMIAU, worked together to create a Guide to Age Assessments. This guide was written by young people, for young people, based on their lived experience of having their ages assessed. Through supporting each other as All4One members, they knew the support and information other young people might need, and the importance of knowing you are not alone in the process. Since then, thousands of people have downloaded the guide, and social workers and young people have told us it helped them understand the process.

Now, in 2025, the guide has been updated in a collaboration between GMIAU, Refugee Council, and the Youth Support Collective, a group of young people with lived experience of age assessments by the Home Office. It has been updated to reflect changes in the law and policy around age assessments, and is available in 9 languages: English, Arabic, Tigrinya, Amharic, Pashto, Kurdish Sorani, Dari, Vietnamese, and Oromo.

You can access the new guide for young people and all translations here.

It explains what an age assessment is and why it matters, what to expect during the process, the rights of young people, and how to get support. It also shares the experiences of young people who have had age assessments, and how the process made them feel.

In the Guide, young people say: “It can feel awful at the time and sometimes like you are being treated like a criminal, but other people have been through this, felt like this and survived it.”

We are deeply grateful to the young people who worked on this guide and continue to bravely share their experiences in the hope of helping others.

Practitioners Toolkit

The guide is one part of a new Age Disputes toolkit: two connected resources to help professionals, volunteers and young people understand and navigate the age assessment process. The second part is a Practitioners Toolkit, which can be found here. It contains detailed advice for professionals supporting young people at every stage of the process.

Please share these resources with anyone who may find them useful, so we can support as many young people and practitioners as possible.

For more about young people’s experiences of the age assessment process, please see our report, “This system destroys you”: Children trapped in adult asylum hotels by the Home Office, and our Age Assessments campaign page below.