Youth Futures’ Engagement Manager, Eleanor Marsea, discusses how the Good Youth Employment Benchmarking Tool – co-funded by our Infrastructure Grant – will help to build understanding of employer practice.
As we celebrate Youth Employment Week, we are thrilled to mark the launch of Youth Employment UK’s Good Youth Employment Benchmark.
This innovative tool builds upon Youth Employment UK’s existing Good Youth Employment Charter. Over our last two years of partnership, we have witnessed first-hand the tremendous amount of effort being invested by the team in this important project, and we are delighted to see a growing number of employers participating in the benchmarking process this summer.
Since launching the Infrastructure Evidence Fund in 2022, Youth Futures Foundation has invested over £1.35 million in a range of infrastructure bodies, in an effort to enable and champion the use of evidence. This funding has enabled Youth Employment UK to commission a report by the Institute of Employment Studies (IES), evaluating their current Good Youth Employment Charter framework; the existence and usage of other frameworks and toolkits aimed at employers; and the existing evidence base around employer practices supporting youth employment.
This report confirmed the need for an accessible and engaging benchmarking tool for employers to evaluate their youth employment practices, whilst rationalising and synthesising existing tools and resources to reduce duplication. The report is now available on our website.
At Youth Futures Foundation, our mission as a What Works Centre is to narrow the employment gap for marginalised young people by identifying what works and why, by investing in evidence generation and innovation, and by igniting a movement for change. We believe that evidence has the power to help more marginalised young people obtain and sustain good work by enabling employers to make more informed decisions and investments, and to implement more inclusive policies and practices.
Significant gaps currently exist in the evidence base around employer practices, and in the understanding of the challenges that employers face in committing to and implementing good practice. The Good Youth Employment Benchmarking Tool offers an exciting opportunity to gather insights directly from employers across a range of industries and of various sizes, thereby equipping the sector with a better understanding of the levers that can drive systemic change.
This data will enable us to design, test, and fund more programmes that enable and empower employers to improve their youth employment practices and will hopefully lead to more marginalised young people being in good work.
In addition to this, we are also delighted to announce our commitment to commissioning a series of robust Employer Trials over the coming years and this new source of employer evidence will be used to inform our decision-making. We will seek to work in partnership with various employers, diligently trialing and testing promising interventions designed to support marginalised young people into employment. Our trials will examine whether popular interventions, such as blind recruitment tools, salary transparency, and sharing interview questions in advance, really do work.
By funding independent evaluations and robustly testing these practices, we hope to gain confidence in what employers can and should do to effectively support those young people who are furthest from the labour market to obtain and sustain good work.
In conclusion, we strongly encourage all employers to participate in the Good Youth Employment Benchmarking Tool, not only to evaluate your current practices and obtain recommendations and support to improve these, but also to help grow the evidence base required to enable the systemic change we all aspire to achieve.
Together, we can make a significant impact on the youth employment landscape, ensuring that young people across the UK have equitable access to good quality employment.
Youth Employment Week is an annual event which aims to connect young people to the jobs, training and insight they need to grow their careers.
