What Works
Self-employment impact evaluation
Exploring what works to support young people at risk of violence into employment, education or training.
The system challenge
For young people who are NEET, the flexibility of self-employment could be a viable alternative route to move into sustainable and secure work.
Yet few of the existing self-employment support schemes for young people have robust evidence of their effectiveness.
Our aim
To understand the feasibility of developing and evaluating an intervention to support young people who are NEET move into self-employment.
What did we do?
We partnered with the University of Westminster and Institute for Employment Studies to conduct three strands of scoping work:
- A Targeted Rapid Evidence Assessment (TREA) based on UK and international literature
- Secondary data analysis
- Consultations with young people and employers
Explore the outputs below.
What it tells us
Together, the research offers insights on:
- Young people’s views and intentions about becoming self-employed
- The characteristics of young people who opt for self-employment, and how prevalent this career option is
- How self-employed young people get on in the labour market
- The barriers and enablers to young people becoming self-employed
- The current support available to young people who are self-employed and its effectiveness, including best practice
- How to identify and reach young people who may benefit from self-employment
How we used the learnings
From the insights, we developed:
- An outline for a new intervention for young people, based on key components of an ideal support journey into self-employment
- Understanding of how the model would need to be delivered in practice
A trial protocol has been developed to outline how the intervention could be tested.
Meet the partners
Institute for Employment Studies (IES)
What Works: testing youth employment interventions ·
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Background
The number of UK young people who are not in education, employment or training remains stubbornly high at close to a million. For those who do have jobs, they can be insecure and low-paid.
For young people who struggle to find work, such as those with caring responsibilities, health conditions or disabilities, the flexibility of self-employment could be a viable alternative route, yet knowledge about how to do this well is limited.
