Annual Review – 2024 highlights

Our year in numbers

Highlights: what we delivered

We injected renewed energy, investment and focus into our core mission of understanding what works in youth employment, while also launching new programmes, influencing at scale, and developing a new four-year strategy to guide our transition from start-up to a mature, high-impact organisation delivering for marginalised young people.

Influencing systemic change

We published a first-of-its-kind national Youth Employment Outlook report, bringing together the latest data and evidence on the youth employment landscape to highlight both the challenges and opportunities, and to inform effective action. The report helped amplify the issue at scale, with national and regional media coverage, including a feature on BBC Breakfast. This report will now continue as an annual release for national consumption.

We responded swiftly to the change in government, reaffirming our role as an independent evidence expert and thought leader on youth employment. Our long-term recommendation (alongside our partners in the Youth Employment Group) for a Youth Guarantee was adopted by the new Government. Our insights and research were cited seven times in the Government’s flagship Get Britain Working White Paper, and we were appointed as co-leads for the Youth Guarantee Youth Advisory Panel.

We partnered with the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) to launch a joint policy report uncovering why young people are being held back from taking up apprenticeships, and making a bold case for more flexible, inclusive apprenticeship pathways.

We commenced development of groundbreaking Randomised controlled trial programmes with three employers (construction, transport and utility companies).

We accelerated efforts to engage employers including a partnership with Business in the Community (BITC) to support young people from minoritised ethnic backgrounds to enter and progress in work.

We successfully secured large and SME employer partners to support our work with employers to increase the supply of Level 2 and 3 apprenticeship opportunities.

We delivered guidance to employers translating our strongest toolkit evidence relating to apprenticeships and mentoring in a new Toolkit Unwrapped series.

Future Voices Group members collaborated with the British Council to discuss Next Generation UK and the challenges they face.

Leading the way to understand what works

We published findings from the largest ever survey of young people (3,250) from minoritised ethnic backgrounds carried out in the UK to date, examining their experiences of discrimination and work.

We commissioned a new national research project looking at the causes of the decline in young people’s mental health (as a key driver of increasing inactivity rates) and appointed Baroness Berger as Chair of its independent Mental Health Advisory Group.

We launched a flagship £15m Building Futures programme, evaluating a mentoring intervention for secondary school students at risk of missing out on further education, training, or employment.

We published a series of high-quality evaluations such as Drive Forward Foundation, Amber Foundation, and the North East Youth Employment Service.

We invested in an exciting set of new evidence generation projects developing randomised controlled trials (RCTs): Jobs Plus – in partnership with Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Summer Jobs with the Youth Endowment Fund, Step Up programme with PLIAS Resettlement, and Forging Futures with Cumbria Youth Alliance. We also funded a Quasi-Experimental Design (QED) study with DFN Project Search.

We expanded commitment to place-based youth employment change through our Connected Futures Fund with an additional £2.3m invested into Blackpool, £1.7m to West Yorkshire and £1m into the West Midlands, with Future Voices Group members involved in assessing applications.

We rolled out a new Evidence into Action programme to further understand what works by embedding learning from our Toolkit into frontline delivery.

Developing our Youth Inclusion approach

We developed a new Youth Inclusion strategy with an underpinning Vision, Mission and Theory of Change.

We recruited 15 new members of our Future Voices Group – now into its third cohort – and launched a new Youth Advisory Group for our Building Futures Programme.

We revised and revitalised an Alumni network of young people who have gone through our Youth Inclusion programmes.

Looking ahead

2025 marks the first year of our second corporate strategy – a new chapter characterised by sharper focus, bold ambition, and deeper systemic impact.

It represents a pivotal evolution from our start-up phase to a period of consolidation and purposeful growth, positioning us as a confident, mature organisation equipped to address the complex challenge of youth unemployment and inactivity. We remain driven by our vision: that every young person can achieve good work.

The strategy will solidify our dual role as an evidence generator and catalyst for systemic change, enabling us to focus on three key audiences: policymakers, employers, and funders.

Our focus will be on:

Advancing evidence generation of the highest quality: We will build on the trials and feasibility studies already underway and launch a new wave of robust trials with employers, on Summer Jobs and on our second What Works programme. Our employer trials will seek to generate actionable insights into what works to create inclusive workplaces and improve employment outcomes for young people.

Delivering impactful programmes: Our Connected Futures programme will continue to support innovative solutions in local systems, while Building Futures will complete its first full academic year of test delivery, and aims to provide invaluable learnings for scaling impactful interventions.

Driving employer and policy change: We will deepen our employer partnerships to promote workplace behaviour change, harnessing evidence to drive inclusive hiring and retention practices. Simultaneously, we will engage closely with policymakers, influencing the development of the new government’s policy agenda to best solve the youth unemployment and inactivity challenge.

Strengthening operational foundations: 2025 will also see us fully establish the operational infrastructure necessary to support the ambitions in our new strategy. From refining our internal processes to investing in our diverse and talented team, we are building the capacity and capability to sustain long-term impact.