Exploring self-employment for NEET young people

Emma Belton, Head of Evaluation, introduces the outputs from our recent work to generate new evidence on self-employment support as a potential route to securing sustainable work.

With the number of UK young people who are not in education, employment or training remaining stubbornly high, we need to explore ways to make good work accessible.

A viable option?

For young people with caring responsibilities, health conditions or disabilities who struggle to find work, the flexibility of self-employment could offer a more feasible path to earning.

Yet knowledge about how to do this well is limited.

While self-employment support schemes for young people do exist, their effectiveness has not been robustly evaluated, making it difficult to know what works, how and why.

Building the evidence base

As the What Works Centre for Youth Employment, our role is to generate and share high-quality evidence.

The first step to doing this is to map the current landscape.

We partnered with Institute for Employment Studies and University of Westminster to understand young people’s views and intentions, how prevalent this career option is, how self-employed young people get on in the labour market in comparison with employed and unemployed peers, and what the current barriers and enablers are to pursuing self-employment.

The scoping work also included consultations with current providers of self-employment support and helps uncover best practice.

Key insights

There is clear entrepreneurial interest among 16- to 25-year-olds, but that doesn’t always convert into full-blown self-employment, suggesting there are barriers.

While young people view flexibility, autonomy, and personal satisfaction as benefits of being self employed, they also view self-employment as risky and unfeasible due to fear of failure and potential financial loss.

This could be mitigated by filling gaps in knowledge around self-employment.

Both young people and support providers value one-to-one support from a business adviser or mentor as a key ingredient for a self-employment support intervention.

Encouragingly, earnings are higher on average for self-employed people under 25 than their employed peers.

The findings also suggest that young people may benefit from the support and experience of others when starting a business.

Next steps

We’ve used these insights to develop a potential self-employment support intervention for NEET young people. The next steps could be to further develop and deliver the model and evaluate it to understand its impact.

Together, the reports and intervention outline offer learnings that will help decision-makers understand the kinds of impacts that can be achieved.