About us

Our Vision is a society where every young person can achieve good work.

Our Mission is to ensure marginalised young people can secure and thrive in good work, by finding out What Works and driving change in policy and practice.

What we do

We find and generate high-quality evidence to better understand England’s youth unemployment and inactivity challenge, and to learn what solutions work to address this.

We put evidence into action with policy makers, employers and funders who have the means to make direct, impactful and transformational systems change for young people.

Learn more Our programmes

The youth employment challenge

Across the UK, the proportion of young people not in education, employment or training remains consistently high.

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What is good work?

To make good work accessible for young people, we must strive for a vision of ‘good work’ that is meaningful and meets their needs.

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Our history

First steps

Established with an initial endowment of £90m from the Reclaim Fund

Meeting immediate needs

Pivoted focus to support frontine youth employment organisations through the pandemic, launching Inspiring Futures grant programme which goes on to reach 15k young people

Global evidence resource

Published Evidence and Gap Map, world’s largest interactive resource for global evidence on what works to improve youth skills, employment and job quality

What Works Centre status

Accredited as the 10th full UK What Works Centre in regonition of robust approach to building evidence

Local systems change

Launched Connected Futures – our £16m place-based programme – and worked with partnerships in an initial seven locations

Youth Employment Toolkit

Published world’s first Youth Employment Toolkit, bringing together evidence for 7 types of interventions so decision makers can more easily access insights