Ongoing Initiative
What Works: testing youth employment interventions
Working in partnership to develop clear and robust evidence on what works to help young people find and keep good work.
The system challenge
There isn’t enough evidence on what truly helps marginalised young people find good jobs. To create a more effective system, we need to invest in proven solutions that work.
Our aim
To build a stronger evidence base by testing employment programmes and improve national understanding of what really makes a difference for young people.
What are we doing?
We are identifying compelling evidence for change by:
- Evaluating delivery partners whose existing programme have been identified as ready for full impact evaluations.
- Testing new programmes that are being specifically designed for evaluation.
Approaches
To generate high-quality, causal evidence about youth employment, education and training outcomes we will be using randomised controlled trials or quasi experimental impact evaluation designs.
Where appropriate, we are also commissioning high-quality qualitative impact evaluation methods for complex or small-scale interventions.
We aim to work with major statutory partners to conduct trials at scale.
Background
Our current activity builds on learnings from previous evaluation work.
Building capacity
We know that organisations vary in their capacity to engage with robust impact evaluations.
To address this gap, we funded the delivery and evaluation of 23 youth employment interventions.
Learn more
Read more about Learn moreOur aim was to support delivery organisations on their evaluation journey, taking a phased approach based on programme maturity and evaluation readiness.
- Development – For promising programmes that require support and development to become ready for an impact evaluation. This may include reviewing a theory of change.
- Impact Pilot – For established or high-quality programmes where evaluators will test through an observational pilot study and feasibility for a future experimental evaluation.
- Impact Efficacy – For programmes ready to undertake a full impact evaluation such as a Randomised Controlled Trial, Quasi-Experimental Design or alternative high-quality method.
Delivery partners could progress through these phases, or start at impact phases, depending on feasibility potential.
