The importance of early intervention for youth employment

With youth unemployment on the rise and thousands of young people at risk of disengaging from education, it’s vital to explore how targeted support at the right time can improve long-term outcomes and prevent young people becoming NEET. As the Building Futures programme takes its first steps, we spoke to Leanne Cotsford, Senior Programme Officer for Building Futures, to get to the heart of why early intervention is so important.

Why is early intervention so important? 

Research at Youth Futures has identified key factors that increase the risk of a young person becoming NEET (not in education, employment, or training). This includes poor school attendance, low attainment at GCSE and exclusion. 

Addressing these issues at an earlier stage is crucial in reducing this risk and improving education and employment outcomes for young people. It’s all about giving young people the right support at the right time so they can thrive at school and achieve good work later. 

If you are interested in reading about our NEET risk factors research, find out more here!  

Sounds like early intervention really matters—so what is Youth Futures doing about it? 

Early intervention is a key area of focus for Youth Futures. We’ve taken what we’ve learned from the research and built that into Building Futures – a programme delivering and evaluating mentoring support for secondary school students at risk of missing out on further learning or employment.  

We already know that mentoring is something that young people really value – it’s something they connect with. But we also know there is more to learn. We want to dig into the types of approaches that have the most impact, so we’re not just doing what feels good, we’re doing what works.     

Can you tell us about the young people taking part in the programme? 

Right now, the programme is working with young people aged 12 to 14 – so students in Years 8 and 9. The schools we work with help select the young people based on who they think could really benefit from extra support. The criteria for enrolling students is influenced by the risk factors most strongly associated with NEET status among young people and prioritises those with special educational needs, who may have challenging behaviour and are predicted to perform poorly in their exams. At least 60% of young people on the programme are also eligible for pupil premium.

What does the programme look like for young people? 

During the initial phase of Building Futures, we are partnering with Football Beyond Borders to deliver the programme. For the young people involved, it’s not just about them showing up for a kickabout, they’re getting a full package of support that includes one-to-one mentoring, wellbeing support and group sessions that develop key skills and foster positive peer relationships.  

I had the chance to visit a school that’s partnered with the programme, and it gave me a real sense of how it all comes together. I sat in on both a classroom session and a football session. What stood out most was the relationships. You could really see the trust between the young people and the adults leading the sessions, it wasn’t just surface-level. These sessions create space for young people to talk about what’s going on in their lives and get support in real-time. 

And because of the programme’s iterative design, young people are currently experiencing the programme in different ways. Building Futures is being rolled out in ‘waves’, and each wave is adapted to test different elements of the programme model. 

For instance, in wave 1, most young people get 30 minutes of one-to-one mentoring each week, a one-hour classroom session that focuses on social and emotional learning, plus an hour of football.  

Wave 2 looks a bit different, as young people will have longer one-to-one mentoring once a fortnight, as well as fortnightly sessions in small groups. Whilst the structured classroom learning and football sessions are not a component of wave 2, social and emotional learning and interactive activities are still a feature as part of the group work.

You touched on the programme being iterative—can you unpack what that means in practice?  

Absolutely – the iterative design of the Building Futures programme is a core part of how we’re building something that’s both effective and evidence based.  

This means that we’re taking a “test-and-learn” approach throughout the first stage of the programme. Over the course of the first two years, we’re rolling out four distinct waves of delivery. Each wave is a slightly different version of a one-to-one mentoring model, and each is shaped by what we’ve learned from previous waves as well as findings from research we are undertaking at the same time.  

The aim is to develop an evidence-based model of one-to-one support that can be evaluated as part of a robust impact evaluation. Our Evaluation Team will delve further into the evaluation work happening on the programme in our next blog.